So, I've been hearing rumors of a fileshare blackout at the end of this month, and I'm sure others have heard too. Does anyone have any info they care to share about this? What will happen to all our map threads?
This is what 343 said about it.. and this is what Bungie said... Which makes it sound like old stuff might still be accessible. New stuff just won't show up.
343 have said that they will end up getting Reach fileshares working on at the waypoint forums they way Bungie had it, but it'll prolly be sometime towards the end of April.
They say it will be gone for a "shot period of time" but they also say they will bring it back in "the summer". Summer can mean a long time from now.
They're leaving it open so people can't say they lied if it takes much longer than expected. I've heard of people saving maps on flash drives. I know it will make stuff more difficult but it might be possible to send the actual map files even though it's more difficult.
Great, so they're removing accessibility to one of the main aspects of their game that's keeping it going, even if only for a couple weeks? Lovely.
Very lovely. I don't play MM anymore, and the fore community and maps is the only thing that keeps me interested. We'll still be able to share maps in game. Hopefully the blackout won't last too long. Bungie and 343i have been very vague about this, and it seems very hushed. Upgrading the 5 slots to 24 slots is gonna be awesome, but not being able to access fileshares online is gonna seriously hurt every forge community out there.
The way I understand it, any content uploaded prior to the blackout date should be eternally preserved on Bungie.net, and presumably also downloadable from there.
Pretty sure all the stats acquired previous to the cut-off date will be preserved. Just like with Halo 2. Not the files.
Could set up some sort of map sharing friend hub accounts, so you post whatever in your fileshare, and then list a few 'friend hubs' that you're friends with. Then people can add the hub to get access to your fileshare through it's friends list. I'm pretty sure there are a few of those kicking around for running customs and stuff like that if you dig around here. Probably not active much though.
That would be a good way to keep contests and the testers guild going but the general community is too big for that to work as a complete rcement for the online fileshare
Oh yeah - it wouldn't work on a large scale. Or long term. Just as an intermediary measure until 343 gets their side of things up and running. It would only be feasible if you wanted to run a contest or accept submissions for MM or whatnot. It wouldn't work for a massive community database. Way too complex. Hopefully the wait won't be too long.
I doubt 343i will be taking on any community maps after the Team Slayer/Arena and Invasion tasks. They've updated most playlist and a few of them twice. Other forge communities have already started using community gamertags to organize custom lobbies, though they don't work that well since an account can only have 100 friends. A FH tag will be pretty useless. Using a community tag to access fileshares is pretty stone-age. Where the floppy disks at? I doubt a map will fit on a floppy disk now that I think about it. Zip drive maybe?
IIRC you don't need to friend someone to see their Share; just go to the File Browser, do a File Share search, and enter the user's gamertag. Could cause some difficulty if the person used lookalike letters (i.e. "I" vs "l"), though.