[Locked] MCC Development & Flighting Updates

Hello Friends,

Welcome back to another weekly update here on all thing’s development and flighting! This week the team has been hard at work squashing bugs for our upcoming flight for Halo 3: ODST and Halo 3. Let’s dive on into how flighting is shaping up.

August Flighting
As discussed in the MCC Development Blog for July, the flight for August is going to be on both the Xbox One and PC platforms. This is being done since Halo 3: ODST Firefight is coming to both platforms. Having this flight will help us gather feedback from players and make any necessary adjustments to improve the overall experience ahead of launch. As of right now, we are not ready to bring take flighting to Ring 3 as Ring 1 has identified critical networking issues that we are working to improve at this time. As soon as those get squashed though, we will be ready to go!

We are hopeful to start the flight as early as next week. But as a reminder, sometimes these things can take time, so stay tuned for more news.

While the flight’s content will be primarily focused on Halo 3: ODST’s Firefight, we will be including Halo 3 content at some point during the flight. We’re looking to patch it in about halfway through, but as with all things, the timing of this is subject to change. Folks can look forward to some Halo 3 quality of life updates and an early look at Season 3’s content.

Halo Support Reminder
I’ve been talking with some folks from the Halo Support team and Producers on the Publishing Team about a series of crashes some players have been encountering. They wanted to have me let you know that we are aware of a crash on sign in for some Xbox One players. In really good news, a fix for this has been integrated into the patches slated for our next update. For everyone, if you do encounter technical issues, please take some time to head over to the Halo Support site and let us know about it by submitting a ticket.

By doing this, you help alert us to issues you are encountering. The members on the Halo Support team work directly with those developing the games and fixing issues. In many cases for issues reported by the community, we have been able to work directly with players to troubleshoot or raise awareness for bugs like this to get fixed in future patches. So please make sure if you encounter problems to let us know!

Short and sweet this week friends. Thank you for stopping on by and we will see y’all online.

Cheers,
Postums

Hello Friends,

Welcome back for another weekly update on everything development and flighting. As many have noticed we began August’s flight for Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST. This week has been busier than most as we have had multiple rounds of invitations roll out, updates to our Known Issues for the flight, and a patch. Let us start with that shall we?

Patch Day
Earlier today, the flight received a patch to address various bugs found by our internal QA and participating Halo Insiders. Though this does not account for all of them, here is a list of the big fixes across Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST:

Halo 3: ODST

• Grenades thrown by clients do not travel as far in Firefight.
• When users are playing with the centered crosshair option, their crosshairs and zoom reticule appear more oblong when compared to lowered/legacy.
• (Both Armor and UI) - The emblem on the armor is chosen randomly in ODST firefight.
• Improved an issue that caused ragdolls to “bounce” during ODST FF sessions.

Halo 3

• Season 3 weapon skins and visor colors for Halo 3 revert to default upon death.
• Season 3 weapon skins for Halo 3 revert to default weapon skins while in active camouflage.

Issue Resolved in the UI

• UI - Improved transitions between models in the UI that caused some T-Posing.

Feedback Loops
Thank you to everyone that has been submitting tickets during this flight. We are continuously monitoring your reports and regularly update our Known Issues for this flight. Each issue that is submitted helps us see what folks are finding to be problematic and helps us more accurately stack rank for assessment. Although not all issues are fixed in this latest patch, we will continue to make improvements. Thank you for helping make the games we’re working on even better!

Thank you everyone for stopping in for this week’s update, we will see you back here next week to talk more about how we are wrapping up August!

Cheers,
Postums

Hey Friends,

Welcome back to another Weekly MCC Development & Flighting Update! This week the team has been heads down on locking down Halo 3: ODST bugs from flighting, working on building new features for future releases, and marching along full steam.

Upon the completion of each flight the team goes through the feedback that players leave in our forum feedback thread, the support tickets submitted to the Insider Halo Support site, and through post flight surveys that we send out to a selection of participants. The team goes over these pieces and based on trends we see, work to prioritize work items we agree with ahead of future game updates and releases. A big thank you to all who come to us and let us know what areas you are having issues with and have feedback on. All of it helps us make better games!

Earlier this week I was a part of a couple different spec review meetings and I can say that there’s a LOT of goodness coming to MCC. There may only be 3 months left in 2020, but there’s a whole lot of content and features left to close out this year! Next week I’m going to try to get together some info for you on some of these features and if all goes well, show off some cool new screenshots.

Happy Friday everyone, and thank you for stopping in for another weekly update! We will catch you back here next week.

Cheers,
Postums

Hey Friends,

Welcome back to another weekly MCC Development and Flighting Update! This week we have some information to share ahead of Halo 3: ODST coming to PC, including reminders and some talking points around a recent server configuration change for matchmaking. Let’s jump right in!

PC Server Configuration Update
Let’s briefly recap how server regions currently work in MCC. Right now each player has a list of available data center regions for matchmaking. You can see this full list of regions on the networking settings page. Availability is determined by ping to each region. Regions which fall under a ping threshold relative to the lowest-ping (closest) region are available for a player. Additionally, a number of regions are tagged as “fallback regions”. These are high population regions where matches can easily be found. If no fallback region inherently falls into a player’s available server list, the nearest one is added. This is to ensure that every player always has at least one region available to them that matches can easily be found on.

When a match is formed, the best server is selected based on all present players’ available servers. If eight players from a given region match together, the server nearest that region will be selected. However, if one player in that match is from a different region, that server which is optimal for the other players may not be available for everyone.
When we launched MCC on PC, we set Southeast Asia as a fallback region due to the number of preorders we saw from players in that part of the world. However, after monitoring the current population in that region, we identified that it no longer fulfills our goals for a fallback region. It was significantly less populated than any other fallback region. So, a few weeks ago, we removed this region from our fallback list.

This means that players in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia will now have West US added to their available server list as it is the nearest fallback region. Again, this is a fallback and a match formed entirely from players in Oceania will be hosted on a more local server. But, if such a match is not found, players will fall back to West US.
Once our server region selection feature comes online, players will have the choice between faster matches or a better connection. This feature will be flighting fairly soon. Until then, it’s important that our fallback regions are ones where players can reliably and quickly find matches.

Register for Halo Insider
Although flighting isn’t going on right now, now is a perfect time to sign-up. For those looking to try out features like the Custom Game Browser and other goodness discussed in our monthly blogs, click the link to register for the Halo Insider program and get yourself entered to participate in future flights. Please make sure to only register once as we’ve seen some folks have issues when using multiple accounts/emails. And as always, please make sure you update your profile from time to time. It helps us ensure we are selecting a variety of players with different specifications. This helps shows us you are still active and are wanting to participate. Also, playing Halo games helps show us you are still interested in participating in future flights too as we know you are active.

MCC Legacy UGC Support
We brought this up in last month’s MCC Development Update, but we wanted to reiterate it here so players can spread the word to others. We’re approaching the one-year mark of MCC being on PC. Our first update, which added PC support, included many other changes for all platforms. One of those changes included a new UGC (User Generated Content) File Share cloud storage which wasn’t tied to Xbox. This is also where we migrated your old Xbox 360 UGC to behind the scenes last year!

To support this new File Share storage, we had to implement a migration plan specific to the Xbox One version of the game. Before the update last year, your “private” and “public” File Share items in MCC were stored in storage specific to the Xbox platform. Our MCC migration plan was to migrate this Xbox One-specific UGC the first time the user signed into the Xbox One version of the game. On sign-in, we would move “private” files to the local Xbox One device, and “public” files would be moved to our new cloud storage.

However, this means if you have *only* ever played MCC on PC since that update (December 2019) you have not had your old Xbox One UGC, if any, migrated. If you think you have UGC content you made on the Xbox One version of the game before the December 2019 update last year, we are encouraging you to login once on an Xbox One version of the game soon, as we will be deprecating this one-time migration process in November of this year.

Game Films and Mid Mission Progress
With Halo 3: ODST coming to PC and the next game patch we want to remind players that films for some games will become corrupt or unwatchable after September 22nd. You will still be able to play and create new ones though! If you have missions to complete or gameplay you want to make sure you have for later, the time is now to capture that theater film or complete those missions prior to the update next week.

Games with Affected Films:

• Halo 2: Anniversary (Xbox, Microsoft Store, Steam)
• Halo 3 (Xbox, Microsoft Store, Steam)
• Halo 3: ODST (Microsoft Store, Steam)

Games with Films NOT Affected:

• Halo: Reach (Xbox, Microsoft Store, Steam)
• Halo 4 (Xbox)

Additionally, as with our previous updates, mid-mission progress for campaign and playlists may also be affected.
We will see you on the other side of Halo 3: ODST’s launch - just a few short days left before we’re live! As always, thank you for stopping by and we will see y’all online.

Cheers,
Postums

Happy Friday Halo Insiders!
Ske7ch here again (been a while!) with our Friday Halo Insider Forum post. This week’s update is pretty light on news given we just dropped a massive September Development Update blog a few days ago. Please be sure to check that out for info on new features and content coming soon to MCC, initial Halo 4 flighting specs, the latest status of community feedback work items, and more. And in case you missed it, a certain long-lost helmet is indeed making its way into Halo: Reach with Season 4. Check it out.

Flight Check
As noted in the blog, Halo 4 is currently in flight to our Ring 1 and Ring 2 groups. Things are going well and an updated build addressing a few discovered issues is headed back to Ring 1 and 2 imminently. As that process continues, the team is working on finalizing the specific Halo 4 flight content which we expect to be able to share next week. We’re still targeting mid-October to kick off Halo Insider flighting assuming everything keeps progressing smoothly and no new blockers arise.

Prepare to Flight
As we get ready for Ring 3, we’re asking that all Halo Insiders please take a moment to ensure your profile and settings are up to date – particularly if you’ve acquired new PC hardware since signing up or have changed your email address. Our current plan is to send flight invitations to everyone who is eligible – we’re calling on all of our Halo Insiders to jump in and lend a hand. In addition to Halo 4, the team has been hard at work on a number of broader MCC features and improvements, some of which will be coming alongside Halo 4. We’re counting on strong participation and feedback to help us make sure these features and Halo 4 are the best they can be come launch time.

If you aren’t a Halo Insider yet, there’s no better time to opt-in than right now! You can still get in on the next Halo 4 flight and we still have plenty more planned beyond the next game launch. Head HERE to learn more and sign up now.

Halo Support
Lastly, we’d like to welcome all the new folks who dropped into New Mombasa last week with the launch of Halo 3: ODST! Please be sure to visit the Support Site to read up on the official patch notes for everything included in our most recent update. If you encounter any issues, please first check our “Known Issues” to see if it’s something the team is already aware of and working on. If it’s not already accounted for, please file a support ticket so our development team can get the necessary info to look into it further. For more info on the Halo Support site and filing a ticket, please check out this article.

As a small token of thanks for reading this far, here's a little treat courtesy of our friends on the publishing team. Behold, an early glorious look at Halo 4 on PC (at 120 FOV!). I absolutely can't wait to jump into this.



Thank you for your continued support and we wish you a fun, Firefight-filled weekend and look forward to sharing more about the upcoming flight next week.

Hard to believe it’s already been a whole week but here we are again! Happy Friday, Halo Insiders!

Today’s update is going to be short and sweet: As you know the team has been working hard on our upcoming Halo 4 flight and as we stated last week, we were targeting kicking off Ring 3 activity this week. Unfortunately, we’re not quite ready yet. As of this writing, the team has one remaining blocker to address before we can progress the build to Ring 3 and send out Halo Insider invites. We’re close and, assuming this blocker can get resolved quickly without any further issues, we’re hoping to kick things off next week. Remember, this is why we flight! By nature it’s a bit fluid and unpredictable as we prepare builds, do passes, validate, find and address issues, and repeat until we have a build candidate the team feels offers a worthwhile experience that can meet the needs of the flight.

By now I really hope you’ve updated your Halo Insider profile and are opted-in, verified, and standing by. You are, right? Heads up that we have already run the query to start building out the Insider Halo 4 flight audience in anticipation of Ring 3 starting soon. All eligible Insiders who were in position as of Thursday, at 3:20 PT, should be included and accounted for. If you signed up after that – we can’t guarantee you’ll get into this next flight but rest assured you’re in the system and on deck for future activations. Also, as an additional heads up – players who are banned from MCC (or incurred enforcement actions in prior flights) will not get an invite to H4 or future flights.

That’s all we’ve got today – be sure to catch up on the last few posts if you missed them for more insights into what you can expect with the Halo 4 flight once it’s ready for action. Until then, have a great weekend and we hope to see everyone online enjoying the Halo 4 flight on Xbox and PC very soon!

Happy Friday!
Today's update is relatively short since we just dropped our monthly MCC Development Update blog. Check it out RIGHT HERE. Lots of goodness including a flighting status update, more info on upcoming content and features with the Halo 4 release, and more.

Flight Patch
Earlier today a patch was released for the flight on both PC and Xbox. This update includes a number of fixes and adds Halo: Reach for additional testing and feedback on video settings and crossplay. Halo: Reach now also includes improved interpolation work and PC that you can take for a test drive and we're excited about the addition of a long-requested community ask: players emblems on armor! Your in-game Spartan should now represent the correct emblem of your choice.

Halo Insiders who are active in this current flight can check out the following links for updated details:

• Flight Overview
• Flight Known Issues

Reminder that flighting content on the Halo Support site is only visible using the account that is registered and active in the flight. We need to do this and keep things separate so flight participants are filing bugs against flight builds separately from retail players. But, please do check out the blog linked at the top for more insights into our current flight!

Flight Extension
We couldn't just drop a big patch and add Halo: Reach without also extending the flight to make sure you have ample time to take these things for a test drive. The current MCC flight will now end on Friday, November 6. A new play schedule can be found HERE and we hope you're able to jump into a few sessions and help us put more MCC crossplay matchmaking through the paces.

Thank you to everyone who has been playing and participating and filing tickets! With your help we're getting close to launching Halo 4 and bringing these new features to the masses.

We hope to see you online this weekend!

Hey Friends,

Welcome back for another MCC Development & Flighting Update for a very action-packed week in the world of Halo and Xbox! Just in case you missed the news, the Xbox Series S and Series X have released AND we announced that Halo 4 is coming to PC on the 17th! Many new features, new options, a new season, and overall goodness are coming to y’all very soon! With Halo 4 being on the horizon, we are going to talk about some features we’ve seen pop up in community questions, squash a rumor around ranks resetting, and talk a little bit about what sort of new seasonal content players can expect next week. Let us jump right in!

Halo 4 Launch Info
On Tuesday, November 17 at 10AM PT, Halo 4 will officially be released on PC. This launch will include new features such as interpolation for Halo 4 at 60+ FPS, Season 4 and all new unlocks, Text Chat Filtering, FOV sliders for the Xbox Series S & X, Crossplay for multiplayer, Server Region Selection for matchmaking, updated video settings per title, new multiplayer offerings, and numerous fixes and quality of life improvements across all of MCC.

The full breakdown of features and updates will be coming next week with our launch blog, but we wanted to take some time today to call out a few specific bits for extra details.

Text Chat Filtering
This new feature was one that was present during Halo 4’s flight, but we did not see a lot of feedback around it. For those who wish to limit who they can receive messages from we have added a filtration by channel option. Meaning you can still see text chat from all players if you want to, or, you can limit it to just your teammates or even to your squad of players that you are actively searching with. This is a feature that many players have requested, and we are happy to get this in with the game update!

Crossplay for Multiplayer
Crossplay will be available for multiplayer games when the update rolls out with Halo 4’s launch. This means players will be able to invite friends from PC to play in Xbox parties and vice versa. As well, when playing multiplayer, you will be able to play with a mix of players on any platform that supports MCC.

This means that Crossplay is supported in multiplayer (including social matchmaking, competitive matchmaking, and custom games), Firefight (including matchmaking and custom games), and Forge. Crossplay is not supported in Campaign (including Campaign Playlists) and Spartan Ops. These areas where it is not supported are due to the complexities required of updating netcode and issues our test teams found which we would need to resolve in order to get it up to par with what players would expect.
We have seen a lot of questions around what is supported and wanted to be as clear as possible around where Crossplay will be available in MCC.

Ranks and Crossplay
There has been a lot of speculation and theories around ranks resetting when Halo 4 introduces crossplay as the PC playlists have separate ranks than the Xbox playlists. Next Monday, November 16th at 12pm, we will be taking ranked playlists offline for a maintenance window to unify the ranks. If players have played on both PC and Xbox, we will take the highest current rank for a playlist and that will be your rank in a specific playlist. When travelling back and forth from Xbox to PC, your ranked level will be the same going forward as well.
To be clear, we are not resetting ranks. We are streamlining the playlists so players can play on whichever platform they want and maintain the same rank using the highest one you have at the time of this maintenance window on Monday ahead of Halo 4’s launch.

Season 4 Content
When Halo 4 rolls out, a new season will become available. This includes a variety of content including skins for Halo 3, Halo 4, and lots of new nameplates for players to unlock. There is also some content that will be unlocked via challenges.

One of which being for reaching rank 20 in the “Recon Slayer” playlist for Halo 3. If you are already a rank 20, you will simply need to enter the search queue in the Recon Slayer playlist and the challenge will complete, you will be awarded the skin. Recon Slayer and the associated challenge are only available for a short time, so make sure to hurry up and get to rank 20 if you want your skins!

We can’t wait for players to dive into the new content next week and try out all the features the team has been working on. As always, if there are questions, please make sure to reach out and we will try to get them answered.

As always, we will see y’all online!

Cheers,
Postums

Hey Friends,

This week we are bringing the Friday update out on Wednesday due to the American holiday Thanksgiving. With this being a short week, we will keep the update short for everyone for some light reading.

Push to Talk for Controllers
With the update last week, a new feature was added for both Xbox One and PC for those who play while using a controller to play; push to talk. This feature is now turned on by default for all players using a controller and requires you to press down on the d-pad to talk. If you want to change this setting, you can do so to make your communications open by following these steps:

1. Open “Options & Career”
2. Select “Settings”
3. Select “Audio”
4. Change the “Push to Talk Voice Chat” to “Off”

This will now make it so you do not need to push down on the d-pad to voice chat with your teammates when you are in game.

December Patch
Since last week’s launch all eyes have been on Halo Support and social media where players have been talking about their experience with the latest update and Halo 4’s release. A lot of people have spoken, and we have been listening and working hard to round up some of the pesky bugs that are impacting players across the game. This week the team has been working to finalize the scope of the patch for mid-December as we approach the holidays. My goal is that by next Friday we will be able to do an outline of what is planned to be in this patch.

Thank you for stopping in to check out this week’s development and flighting update, and as always, we will see you online!

Cheers,
Postums

Hey Friends,

Welcome back to yet again another MCC Development & Flighting Update! We’ve got a few cool things coming your way next week that we can talk about today!

Game Update – 12/16
Next week on the 16th a new update will begin rolling out around 10am PT and will include bug fixes, new features, and an accompanying playlist update including many recent Forge maps for social matchmaking.

There are numerous bugs being addressed and a handful of player requested features coming online, but our patch notes and known issues are still being defined at this time. We will share the exact locations and details next week, so keep an eye out here and on Halo Support for the latest details.

Below is a high level of what players can expect for new features and content when this update goes live:

• Players can disable the text filter for incoming text chats (outgoing messages will continue to appear filtered).
• Season 5 content has been staged for the next season in build.
• Tech suits for Halo 3 Spartans will be available in the customization menu.
• Various bug fixes with patch notes on Halo Support leading up to the update.

Halo Insider Nameplate
For everyone that has participated in flighting over the past year we have a fun surprise. A couple weeks ago we teased out a new Halo Insider nameplate, but now we have all the details to share for folks. This one will be coming online with this next update. Expect that for those who have actively participated in our flights, meaning played the game, that you will receive this nameplate after the update goes live and we have granted it out to players. Timing on this should be within the first 48 hours after the update goes live.
This is just one way we are saying thank you to everyone who has helped us out on the journey we have been on in 2020 together!

Alright everyone, happy Friday, happy Halodays and as always, we will see y’all online!

Cheers,
Postums