So in case you haven't read it, you can find the BWU by clicking here. One of the big things that was discussed in the Forgetacular Winner's thread was how they choose the winners. There were several different theories and ideas as to what happened in the internal playtesting and how maps made it through the process. How did they choose which maps would be in the majority that were thrown away without so much as a second of playtime? Was it based on framerate? Object density? Z-fighting? Spawn placement? I could come up with more, but you get the point. They made a few ambiguous statements about it in the previous BWU were they revealed the winners, but without prior knowledge of the playtesting, nobody could really make heads or tails of it. Which leads me to this weeks BWU. It seems as if our prayers would be answered. The first sentence read: Woohoo! We finally get to learn about the selection process. Thank you Bungie for answering all of our unresolved questions. But after a paragraph or two of unnecessary and rambling prose that tells us nothing, he gives us this gem: Why? You just told us that you were going to explain it to us. Are you substituting your surgery metaphor for the actual facts we want to know? Awesome. And so goes another BWU where they fail to shed light on the questions the players are actually asking.
I find this interesting. I hope it has something to do with bro spawning in Invasion. Like more spawn bros
Well seeing as you're being picky over what Urk said, I think I'll be picky too. Urk didn't say that he would go in to detail about the playtests. He said Michael Williams thought it would be good timing to going to those details and that he was probably right. He never actually said he would. I mean, what do you expect they did? They played a bunch of Halo! That's pretty much it! They built the game, they've been making Halo games for 10 years, I think they know what to look for as far as gameplay is concerned and features which can be exploited in user created maps. Its not like everything came down to mathematical calculations. Play testing is exactly what is sounds like. They played Halo, they tested the maps. They tested the maps playability by playing them...
Lot of anger with that response. We all know what it means to play test and Bungie has been making maps for a long time, no one was questioning that and it was an odd thing to bring up. What people wanted was a little more specifics in the way of what actually qualified some maps over others. We get it, if it lagged in splitscreen it wasn't going to be kept. But in all honesty that could not have dq'ed like 99% of maps, and the maps that did not lag had to be judged in other ways. Ways that Bungie did not make explicitly clear and it would help to know what kind of things they were looking for in case they run a competition in the future. So while those other ways might seem obvious such as z-fighting, spawn system, weapon placement, balance, etc the maps that Bungie seemed to like all had problems with those areas so it is not clear what gets in. Anyway good job to grim whose prophet forge art was featured at the bottom of the update.
To all the people who said and are going to say something along the lines of: "they playtested the maps. What else would they do." There many things you can use to throw out a map from a playtest. They obviously didn't go for aesthetics or breakibility, or even fun for that matter considering the custom playlist (although in the final contest they did seem to look at aesthetics) so that's what people want to know about. We just want to know what bungie's looking for so we can make the kind of maps they want.
Have you played the BTB winner? There is at least fifteen different ways to WALK out of the map, excluding using jetpacks. You can get under BOTH bases and inside the geometry of the map, its waaaay to big to support even a full 16 person party, and its got a poor design. If you have loaded it up a single time you would see that it isn't fit for competitive play in any regard. So, i have no idea what they were doing EDIT: By at least fifteen, I mean I found literally fifteen... while playing a game with the entire other team shooting at me.
Have y [br][/br]Edited by merge: Have you tried getting out of hemmorage? I have climbed to places where no one will ever find me and I could wreck them with the sniper if I didn't suck with it. A jetpack makes it easier and opens up a ton of new places but it's still not necessary. Youre really making me wan to try this btb map and try to find more ways out.
personally id like it more if the BWU fetured some kind of future update info, like the next title update, map pack in progress, etc. just to kno what's going on inside bungie