• FC Update 10.1


    Update 10.1

    Happy Holidays And All That Jazz




    The Beta War is over, it's a time of relaxation and spending time with friends and family. Hope you all had a great Christmas or equivalent holiday (lookin' at you, SpartanBH). The new year is just around the corner along with everything that brings.

    Alongside everything else, the First War of Halo 5 will be starting as well. The First Resurgence War. Res1.



    Concluding the Beta War

    For those newer to FC, Beta Wars aren't considered actual wars. When we have a Beta War at the after the release of a new Halo game, it's meant to test a bunch of things and figure out how we want FC's gametypes and maps to function, while also letting us experiment with some things.

    The real wars are designed to be of a larger scale and feature a bunch of additional things. I'll be introducing the differences between them in the next section. This section is about discussing what we learned from the H5 Beta War.

    The most important thing is something we've known for awhile. Army balance is something very important to improving FC in the long term. Refer to Update 10.0, not going to be discussing it at length. Whether this gets solved or not will greatly affect FC's future.


    As you can tell, only Week 4 had good army balance.

    For all things, people have differing opinions. We received a lot of feedback from members throughout the Beta War. Often we ended up receiving feedback on both sides of the same thing, some requesting a change and others favoring the opposite. Throughout the five weeks of the Beta War, we received feedback survey submissions 56 times. In order to help the WC make decisions, I'll be going back through all of the surveys and tallying the perspectives to try to paint a better picture of the community.

    Haven't done that yet, though, but expect some of the nice juicy graphs and charts within the next FC Update, which should be next week. I still got plenty of charts for this Update too, though, so don't worry about that.



    What Makes a Real War

    Sometime within the next 6 weeks, we'll be starting the First Resurgence War. The exact date hasn't been decided completely, but the graph below is going to be influencing our decision so you can draw your conclusions from that.


    The official start date will be announced next week. Alongside that will be the release of the new and improved Rules of Engagement. For those who were here during Reach or Halo 4, you'll recognize numerous similarities to things. However, this new system has been cooking in the oven for about 14 months now. Originally, it was on the table for use in MCC, but a whole slew of things happened and we decided not to introduce it.

    For those who weren't here back in Reach or Halo 4, the Rules of Engagement of a major war are meant to help strengthen the War Simulation aspect of the community, to expand the war beyond just Sundays and introduce tactics and strategy which the army leadership uses to fight for victory.

    Basically, we make it into something like a board game. The Rules of Engagement (RoE) is the rule-book for this board game. It even comes with a Warmap which the game is played on.

    Of course, Battles on Sunday are still the main attraction and have huge impacts on how the board game plays out, and these wars take multiple months to complete, usually around 4 months. If we can properly deal with army balance before the war starts, this will be looking to be a fantastic war to kick off Halo 5 right.




    Strike the Anvil

    Forge came out a few weeks ago and a large group of people have been slaving away working on crafting some amazing creations. Myself and several other members are doing so as well, trying to put together some maps which could be used in the war that starts in about a month. These maps come in all shapes and sizes, vehicle-focused or infantry-based, indoor and outdoor, etc., etc.

    Whether they are any good or not is still to be decided, of course. Us in the Forge Department are going to be hosting weekly Testing Sessions between now and the start of the main war, using the time to get people together and see how the maps play out, and hopefully get some feedback on things that need to be fixed, adjusted, removed, or added so that the map can be further improved.

    Also, we'll be using the time to test a few additional gametype changes which may or may not make it into the main war. It'll depend on the feedback we receive. (Also, if anyone has suggestions for things we should try out, definitely let me know!)


    At the moment, these Testing Sessions are at the usual battle time, Sundays at 6:00 PM EST. We've discussed potentially doing two of them every week so we can get further testing in, but at the moment it's just once a week. Will update you guys later if that changes, though.

    If you've got a map you've made and want to get tested, or found some cool forge map someone else made, or just want to get on and play a few games of Halo, join us tonight at 6:00 and the following Sundays as well!



    It's Been A Long Year

    2015 is coming to a close. Looking back over this year, the majority of it was stuck in the dredge of MCC's issues, and then coming out of that into Halo 5 and our Beta War which had some issues of its own. There are a few high points to discuss, though, which should brighten the mood a bit.

    1. Despite all of the Peacetimes and other breaks this year, we've had a total of 29 Battles, making an average of 1 Battle every 12.6 days.

    2. We've played a total of 468 games (weighted according to map size), for an average of 16.13 games per Battle.

    3. Week 4 of the Beta War was the most successful Battle for this entire year, both in terms of games played and army balance! It is comparable to the battles during Rec2, which was the most successful war we've ever had. Notice the spike near the end of the graph:


    4. Throughout this year, 78 people have enlisted in BLUE and 84 have enlisted in REDD.

    5. We've had 6661 posts made on the forums this year. I hope only 5 people respond to this update so we end up with 6666 by year's end.

    6. Our anti-spambot thing has flagged exactly 2700 potential spambots this year. (will be higher by year's end, but atm it's exactly that)

    Those are a few random tidbits of information I thought might be somewhat interesting to know.



    Remember, Testing Session tonight at 6:00 PM EST, and subsequent Sundays as well. Want to get a sneak peak on maps that might be used in the main war? Come by and check it out with us.

    This was a rather short and insubstantial update, but I needed something to include with the obligatory "Merry Christmas" update which is effectively a requirement to do. Next week is when the interesting stuff arrives. New RoE. New Warmap. Start date for the war. Awesomesauce.

    Hope you all have had a good 2015!

    ~Mythonian
    This article was originally published in forum thread: FC Update 10.1 started by Mythonian View original post
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