Hi Halo community - My name is Jon / Falloutt and I work as the Gaming/Esports Community Manager here at Microsoft Store. I've worked alongside Diviyan and the HCS team to help put together the Microsoft Store / Halo Community Series tournaments these past 4 months. We have had an absolute blast organizing and executing these events, and I know our store associates and everyone here with the MS Store team share that sentiment as they have loved seeing the Halo community come together at 50+ Microsoft Stores. We certainly look forward to continuing (and growing) this program in 2018!



As excited as we have been, I unfortunately have some bad news around our December events that were announced in the October content live stream by 343. Given the craziness of Holiday timing in retail, we have decided to cancel our upcoming Sunday, 12/3 Halo 5 Community event*, with re-focused efforts around prepping for January events and beyond. This decision was made by the MS Store team so as to not sacrifice the event experience for Halo players, as we feel that the heavily increased traffic from Holiday and post-Black Friday 12 Days of Deals at Microsoft Store will seriously conflict with the positive experience of the event. While our stores have proven to be a great event space, the reality is that they are still retail stores and the increased demands during Holiday shopping have caused slight conflict with our Winter gaming events as we are all hands on deck to support our customers in-store. (*note: Very few stores may still be hosting for fun, check local store calendar).



We have also postponed our League of Legends, Gears of War, and Madden event programming during this time (we originally hoped that Halo could be the exception to the rule!).



As someone whose roots are in Halo (I competed in H2 and Reach, subpar placements in both 😊), thank you to all Halo community members who have showed up to compete and celebrate at these events. This has been a passion project of mine and many others, and it has been great to see the Halo community come together in a major way! You have myÂ and the entire Microsoft Store teamâ€™s commitment to delivering an amazing, local and grassroots program in 2018 to offer more opportunities to compete, broadcast, meet others, and enjoy all that competitive Halo has to offer.



While dates for 2018 events are still on the way (and some exciting surprises!), I'm happy to say that the January tournament will reward double the REQs for participants and winners. And as a reminder, the January tournament will also be the first tournament where you can get the exclusive Microsoft Store Battle Rifle skin which we're stoked to finally launch (first in-game item attached to our Store program ever! Shoutout to 343).

Please let me know if you have any feedback at all about this program either in this thread or on Twitter (@Falloutt). I would love to hear of any comments or opportunities to improve in any of our stores.



Thanks so much,

Jon/Falloutt