About a month ago, Year 3 of HCS came to a thrilling conclusion, where we saw Spacestation Gaming continue their dominance to take home the 2024 Halo World Championship. Congratulations again to SSG, and to all the teams that qualified for HaloWC 2024 for putting on an amazing show!

Now that the dust has settled, let's talk about some changes that are coming to both Ranked Arena and the HCS map pool for offseason tournaments, which we'll have more specific details on later. As mentioned in the patch notes [link], here are the changes coming to Ranked Arena and the HCS offseason map pool:

We are very excited to have 2 new maps entering the Ranked Arena playlist! Fortress, created by MikRips and Ethan Hibbs is an original design. Inquisitor, which was created by UneeQ, is based on the iconic Halo 2 map Midship. These fast-paced maps are available now in all Ranked playlists, and you can compete on them in the HCS offseason tournaments. HCS offseason tournament dates and times will be announced later. We will be keeping a close eye on how Inquisitor and Fortress perform both in Ranked Arena and in the HCS offseason tournaments to help determine which gametypes are best suited for the HCS Year 4 map pool.

We also have a couple of maps exiting the Ranked Arena map pool, Argyle and Interference. Based on player feedback and date that showed the gametypes were not performing up to the quality bar we'd like, we've decided to remove these 4 gametypes and reevaluate each map to see what can be improved for potential future use. This also means that Argyle CTF and Interference Strongholds will no longer be a part of the HCS map pool. A huge thank you to Astro CSF, the creator of Interference for working with us to get the first community made Forge map into HCS!

These playlist updates are landing in tandem with the rank reset for all Ranked playlists. As part of this rotation, Ranked Snipers will be making its return while also featuring both new maps - Fortress and Inquisitor.

Now, it's time to jump into matchmaking and test out the new maps! Good luck have fun, Spartans!