Gamertag: I IZ CAB0OSE

14 November 2014

Microsoft Xbox Division

343 Industries (343i)
Microsoft and 343i,
The launch of the Master Chief Collection (MCC) product was accompanied by an unacceptable set of
problems, which were both numerous and significantly impaired the functionality of the game. Most of
the major problems specific to the MCC have been identified in the forums, and I will discuss just a few
of them here. Rather than dwell on the things we already know, I would like to take this opportunity to
preview the criticism you will receive over the coming months and comment on the disappointing
decisions both companies have made over the past few years.
MCC LAUNCH
While the customer always prefers a flawless rollout, I understand that this is often impractical. I am
fully aware from my professional life that software testing under controlled conditions prior to release is
generally incapable of testing every possible way in which a user may operate the system. With respect
to simultaneously networking hundreds of thousands of individual users over the internet, laboratory
testing is similarly inadequate. However, the end result should be were the software development
and testing performed adequately that the errors occur during infrequently encountered conditions,
not during normal conditions. The MCC, unfortunately, is plagued by both in campaign and in
multiplayer.
Rather than list those issues (since you are certainly aware of the most critical ones), I would rather
provide feedback on how the launch was handled, followed by feedback on some of the fundamental
choices made by Microsoft and 343i that from a customers perspective contributed to the failure of
the launch.
Handling the Launch

If there are signs of problems in pre-launch tests such as disconnections / difficulty connecting
during alpha testing that were passed off as early problems . . . but then recurred during the
pre-launch tournaments and were again passed off (incorrectly) as early problems poor
launch performance is assured. From the players perspectives, the above sequence means the
root cause was still poorly understood. It does not matter if the alpha testing and tournament
difficulties are entirely related to the present problem. Because your communication has been
poor (see below), the most logical assumption is that they are related and that you rushed past
them in your zeal to meet a launch date.

Communication to players remains poor. This is an industry-wide problem. While your public
statements to this point have appropriately included acceptance of responsibility and excluded
excuses, this alone is not sufficient to allay the players concerns. Players want to know what

you think the problems are and what you think the causes are . . . because they might disagree
and want the opportunity to redirect your efforts. Without that information, they have zero
confidence that the issues that matter to them will be resolved. With respect to your currently
vague statements, the players have seen that communication tactic before both in cases
where the problems were resolved and in cases where they were not. Vague statements do not
provide players with the ability to distinguish between the two. Instead, players would be much
more willing to give you the benefit of the doubt were you to provide them with details:
o The problems (in a list not buried in a paragraph of apologetic regret)
o The causes (in a list not buried in a paragraph of apologetic regret)
o Potential fixes (in a list not buried in a paragraph of apologetic regret)
o Even if the above sometimes contain nomenclature that will be incomprehensible to
most players, they should still be provided. Players are more than capable of translating
for each other.
o Timeframes should be given only when a real timeframe is known. An ongoing failure to
meet expectations causes far more damage than either the initial problem or
overestimating the time-to-resolution.

Post-correction followup communication is a must. Players will want to know that the lessons
learned from this failure will be applied to subsequent titles. As above, this communication
needs to be specific and detailed. Functional failures are not the same as gameplay decisions.
While it is appropriate not to specifically list how 343i intends to address in Halo 5 the
competitive multiplayer concerns from Halo 4, different rules apply to game functionality. No
player will argue that matchmaking should take longer, or that disconnections should be more
frequent.
Fundamental Bad Choices

While most players expect digital distribution of software to become more common, many
dread that inevitability. Digitally downloading and installing games as large as the MCC takes an
extremely long time and is beset by a host of problems not associated with physical media
distribution many of which are due to poor implementation of the downloading and
installation software. These particular items are within your control. In addition, the failure of
both PS4 and the Xbox One to provide any semblance of a usable progress report without
navigating several layers deep exacerbates the problem. The result is that players are frustrated
before they even load the game. The design decisions made during the development of the
digital distribution system have fundamentally undermined the patience of users with respect to
glitches and bugs. By the time they get to playing the game, the you have already emptied their
goodwill bank account.

The decision to spend resources attempting to make Kinect usable for navigating menus (an
attempt that failed) rather than ensuring that the traditional control system works properly was
ill-advised. Many players have expressed frustration with numerous controller / console
interface faults requiring hard reboots of the console to fix and (unfortunately) have assigned
the source of the problem to the MCC making an already bad launch worse. The controller
problem is endemic and inexcusable more so because the alternative (Kinect) is inconvenient
to the point of unusability.

The Xbox One tile-based user interface is a giant leap backward for usability. This is not because
the tile concept itself is inherently flawed; it is because your implementation of the interface is
atrocious.
o The paucity of information on the individual menu screens due to the size of the tiles is
unacceptable. This results in commonly used features being buried many layers deep,
sometimes requiring access in non-obvious ways (i.e., download / installation progress,
achievements, etc.). If this decision for overly-large tiles was driven by the difficulty of
the Kinect navigation method to accurately select smaller tiles (just as phone tiles were
driven by the accuracy of touch-selecting smaller objects), then it is not the menus that
should have been questioned; it is the maturity of the Kinect navigation method that
should have been questioned.
o Lack of ability to perform basic maintenance functions such as managing storage is
an incomprehensible decision. Given that the hard drive capacity is only 500 GB and an
individual game can occupy 50+ GB, being able to manage storage is a necessity.
Moreover, even the MCC itself pays homage to this terrible choice by refusing to allow
users to permanently save items previously allowed by the Xbox 360.
o The decision to include a window occupying almost of the total available pixels that
amounts to nothing more than a smaller display of where you just were is baffling. How
can that possibly be better than simply providing a BACK selection or increasing the
number of tiles on the screen to flatten the depth of the menus? Moreover, the overuse of menu space for advertising and non-menu items was one of the few remaining
problems with the Xbox 360 interface. It is hard to fathom why the least useful
characteristic of the 360 interface was retained, but the easiest to use characteristics
were discarded.
o The way Xbox One handles friends and parties (not to mention the clunky, over-styled
Friends list that is devoid of any usable information) is laughably poor and has a
significant impact on the ease with which players can play games such as the MCC with
friends.
o It should be a sign to the user interface design team that the only truly user-friendly
aspect of the interface is the settings menu . . . which is text-based, Xbox 360-esque,
and provides a much greater density of information on the screen than the remainder of
the interface.

In short, though the MCC launch was bad enough, the subsequent communication (or lack thereof) has
served only to compound the problem, and the inexcusably poor decisions made by the Xbox software
design team amplified the players frustration with what was already a frustrating situation. Moreover,
the Xbox decisions particularly with Kinect contributed to both an excessive development cost and
purchase price, reducing the margins on a division that already has outsiders speculating is a potential
spin-off.
PREVIEW OF FUTURE CRITICISM
Once the immediate issues with the MCC launch are resolved and you at Microsoft / 343i have breathed
a sigh of relief, the less-obvious, latent issues will begin to surface. Many of these are the direct result
of decisions made to give players what you want to give them rather than giving them what they will
want to have a refrain sung in concert by both the MCC and the Xbox One interface. This does not
give your customers confidence that Halo 5 will be worth the hype. After the disappointing
performance by Halo 4, the series badly needs an adrenaline shot. It does not need a bullet in the foot.

Consumers in general are notoriously bad at deciding what they want before products are released.
Often, what they say they want is based solely on the currently available options and premade
misconceptions about future options rather than the actual future options themselves. This uncertainty
should not be used as an excuse to provide consumers what you want to provide them in cases where
the option you want to provide already has been rejected by consumers. Unfortunately, both the Xbox
One (above) and the MCC (below) do exactly that.

Statistics. Dedicated gamers are obsessed with statistics. They want them all, with the ability to
slice them and dissect them in every conceivable fashion. They do not want them to be
restricted to what you want to show them because you do not have the resource budget to
build Halo 4 Waypoint-style statistics applications for every possible analysis a player may want
to perform. Sortable, tabular displays are fine particularly if they are exportable (hence the
popularity of independent sites like Halotracker). What the MCC offers in the way of statistics is
unacceptably sparse. You will receive significant criticism for this, and even in the face of the
launch problems that disable key game features, you have already received some. How this
decision was made despite the repeated calls for more information is incomprehensible.

Playlists. The inflexible structure of the traditional playlist arrangement received significant
criticism in Halo 4, yet rather than progressing, the MCC takes a step backwards. Players who
want to play CE multiplayer cannot because CE is third in line for a tiebreaker in all playlists in
which it appears. Players who want to play objectives cannot because Slayer is overall a more
popular game mode. There is no legitimate reason for playlists to be structured in this manner.
Concerns about playlist population if players were allowed additional customization for
searching are entirely an artifact of the traditional arrangement yet they are illogically being
used as a reason for maintaining it. There is a conceptually simple solution that players have
proposed in the past:
o Each gametype is a separate entity
o Playlists serve only to organize gametypes that are commonly searched simultaneously
o Players are allowed to broaden or narrow the search based on gametype, team size, or
(MCC specific) Halo title
o Matching combines players that share at least one common gametype + size + title
combination and selects the gametype automatically
o Players either veto a proposed map (preferred) or vote between a set of proposed maps
o Estimated time-to-match can be calculated and shown to players based on search
selections, which would help players decide between search times and narrowness of
the search
There is no need to remove gametypes or restrict the searching ability of players once the
traditional playlist concept is abandoned. Give players the ability to search for what they want
and the information to decide how long they want to wait.

Permanently saving films. Until the Xbox has significantly greater storage capacity, replacing the
film feature in Theater mode with the Xbox Game DVR is an awful decision. The Game DVR can
only record up to five minutes, records in 720p, limited to 30fps, and cannot be uploaded to
your fileshare. Being able to share whole-game films with other players without needing to buy
capture equipment was a popular feature that has been replaced by a significantly less capable,
significantly more storage-intensive feature because you the developer wanted it that way . . .

not because your customers wanted it that way. This decision will affect your revenues, even if
you do not have the ability to monitor or calculate the effect.

Fileshare. Fileshare is not accessible outside of the Xbox itself, limiting the ability for players to
share content by PC or phone. This is a terrible decision that affects the ability of players to
maximize usability of custom games and Forge. There is no player upside to this decision. See
directly above for the impact.

Controller bugs. Certain control layouts cannot fire the Banshee bomb in certain titles. Lefty
controls do not properly work with dual wield. The option Press X to set for all games when
setting up controller layouts does not work. Forge mode switches layout settings, sometimes
between object selections with no indication of the switch on the settings menu. Loss of sync
with controllers necessitates a hard reboot. These are just a taste of the issues that will be
expressed with regard to controls. These are items that are apparent during normal gameplay.
They do not require special conditions to occur. They should not have been missed.

Customs. Players want to play customs. Custom games is one of the most popular features
associated with the Halo titles, and players very clearly wanted more flexibility with respect to
customs. In this iteration, almost everything about custom games is either more difficult than
past titles, or is simply broken. Even the basics like menu depth are awful. Simple, commonly
used features such as team and color changing require far too much menu navigation. This is
exacerbated by the fact that team settings do not persist between games.

Ranking and matching. While many Halo traditionalists lauded the return of the Halo 2 ranking
system, the numerous problems with that system will not be long forgotten once the
multiplayer launch issues are sorted. The fundamental problem (and this is industry-wide) is
that developers refuse to accept the fact that ranking and skill matching are impossible to
simultaneously optimize. A good ranking system like Halo 2 will always provide suboptimal
matching just as a good matching system like individually-based TrueSkill / ELO scores will
always remain suboptimal for ranking. With a release like the MCC, 343i had the opportunity to
demonstrate how a hybrid (matching via TrueSkill and ranking via Halo 2) could provide players
with a much more satisfying experience. That opportunity is lost. Given all of the player
concerns with the performance of TrueSkill ranks in Halo 3, 4, and Reach and the concerns with
the past abuse of the Halo 2 system during matching, it is hard to fathom why the MCC would
not be used as an opportunity to fine tune a better system that could be employed for Halo 5.
CLOSING WORDS

With respect to the Halo franchise, as Halo 4 winds down and Halo 5 grows closer, some encouraging
signs have emerged particularly with respect to multiplayer. 343i has given the impression that they
have a genuine interest in blending both the needs of the fans and the creative wants of their own
designers. This is a healthy sign.
On the other hand, with respect to feature usability and flexibility, the MCC demonstrates a worrisome
trend: that 343i will choose to spend resources re-developing features and game behavior that 343i or
Microsoft wants even if those features and game behaviors were already rejected by the fans a trend
which is made worse by the conscious removal of features and game behaviors that fans clearly enjoy.
If this continues, future titles are likely to be no more than footnotes to a franchise created by Bungie

and mismanaged into oblivion by wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft with a name that had some
numbers in it. Bungies sins and 343is strengths will be simultaneously forgotten, just as Bungies
successes and 343is failures will be concurrently remembered.
With respect to the Xbox and the Live service, unless Microsoft can stop relearning the same painful
usability lessons with every major platform release, the Microsoft gaming arm will wither and die. The
Xbox 360 interface after many updates had finally grown into a slick, intuitive piece of software that
was summarily discarded. Both Microsoft and Sony seem to forget that no customer cares whether the
interface is elegantly programmed or is aesthetically pleasing if it is inconvenient. No one cares if the
software platform is designed to share the same architecture across multiple device types if the
architecture or implementation of the architecture is flawed. No one cares how impressive the graphics
are if the console crashes whenever they are displayed. No one cares how difficult it is to make a visual
and audio command system work as well as it does when as well as it does is simply not good enough.
There will come a time when a company will approach console gaming with a focus on usability and
stability, and that company will dominate the market. Does anyone remember that the first true
consumer tablets were introduced onto the market in 2002 based on the Microsoft Tablet PC
specifications? The devices were commercial failures, primarily due to usability issues. If you were to
ask most people, they would assume that the market was invented by Apple despite Apple not having
entered the consumer tablet computing scene until 2010 and despite having started iPad development
prior to starting iPhone development (a product released in 2007). Apple cornered the tablet market
because they spent a decade focusing on usability and did not release a product until the technology
associated with it was mature and the software was flawlessly intuitive.
Whether the company that does this is Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, or an outsider like Apple is irrelevant.
The company that manages to do this will (for a time) relegate the others to obscurity. Having invested
nearly a thousand dollars into an Xbox One and accessories, I am one fan who hopes that the Xbox One
does not become the Xbox Done.
Please fix your products . . . not just for my sake, but for yours as well.

Sincerely,
I IZ CAB0OSE