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September 13, 2004 Link to this post
The State of Halo CE
Last night was the first attempt of a weeklong push to get over 1000 people playing Halo CE simultaneously. It was a failure; total players never climbed above 400. Captain Spark suggested that the problem might be that there aren't enough non-passworded servers to even SUPPORT 1000 players... but I don't think that's the case. (Even this morning, when some servers that were up last night are offline, there are over 90 freely-joinable servers online... more than enough to support the needed number of players.) The problem, it seems, is much deeper; a year after the game has been released, it's still FULL of bugs that make it unplayable for the casual visitor. (I jumped on last night for 3 hours or so. I sit on a T1 here, and during my playing time there was never less than 1200 kbit/sec bandwidth available. I played the entire night on a single server, a relatively fast server sitting on a 10 Mbit line in a pretty fast datacenter. And I was lagging all night long.) Gearbox says they're willing to put the effort in to fix some of these problems - but only if they can be shown that there's interest in the game. And at this point, a year after release, folks aren't interested in even trying. It's a shame, really, because CE has HUGE potential. Some of the mods I've tried are mind-boggling. The community contains enough core creative people that if the game were playable by newcomers, it WOULD be self-sustaining... but the developer says 'we can't justify fixing it because there aren't enough customers' and the customers say 'we can't justify playing it because there are too many bugs.' If you have any hope for Halo CE at all, jump on and play tonight, at 7 pm EST (4 pm PST, midnight GMT)... this might be the last gasp. Update: for those who don't even HAVE Halo CE yet, you can download it from one of the links on our Halo Custom Edition Mirrors page. (I doubt they all work any more, but many do.) (Louis Wu 17:43:20 UTC)
