wwm0nkey said: Okay and the recent HWC hosted by MLG was amazing. Blame ESL on that pile of balloons. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

This is the side entrance to the ESL studio, and the balloons are from a kid’s birthday party a block away. But it’s a great illustration of how balanced these conversations are. It;’s tough for us to refute things like this. It looks defensive, for one thing, and often we’re tilting at windmills. That event was packed, energetic, fun and enjoyable. As someone else pointed out, those balloons are close to the overflow tent, which was required because we couldn’t fit everyone in the main studio. Ask someone who went.BTW, we’re not “shutting down the mod” or going after the Eldewrito crew - we’re enacting action to remove the Halo Online code and packages from places it’s being hosted. The distinction may seem like semantics to a lot of folks, and I don’t blame them for assuming that, but to be clear, this is a legally necessary step to protect code, product, IP, trademarks and copyrights, and is not optional. We’re a publicly traded company, and we have a fiduciary and legal responsibility to our shareholders, and further, if we don’t take steps to protect it, then we actually run the legal risk of losing it - and there’s code and content in there that is still very much in use.As a company, we spend a lot of time, effort and resources to support, amplify and enable our community creators - we have a simple set of rules that are generous and fair, that as long as they are abided by, we’re happy to help with and in some cases, promote.Halo Online code and content is not within those rules.I hope nobody on this site thinks anyone is happy about this - at one end of the spectrum, it’s sad to see folks’ hard work and effort be sunsetted, and on the other, all the people who do this stuff are human. Nobody takes joy in this kind of work or responsibility. It’s simply a necessary part of being a publicly traded company in the US.If anyone wishes to send death threats, please direct those and Scholarly Legal Opinions to @franklez.I won’t be responding to this thread, because effectively I’ve said everything I can say here, but my one ask - a favor - is that folks try to contextualize this within real world circumstances, and not apply intent or evil where none exists.