ScooterPSU’s previous blog post did a great job of answering some of the questions you guys have been asking. Before I go into some of the features I’d like to highlight, I’d like to clarify some things and add some points to a couple of the questions: 

Q: Don’t you think it’s sort of a dick move waiting until the end of Sept to announce an “indefinite” delay on the update?

Scooter’s Answer: “We absolutely thought, at the time, that the end of Sept was a viable goal. Many of us pushed as hard as we could to meet it, but the result just wasn’t worth getting out there. Crashes, input issues, assorted bugs with all kinds of things. It was better than 0.5.1.1, but not at a quality level we felt comfortable releasing. For those of you that have been around, you remember that we needed a bug fix release pretty much immediately after every previous release. Descoping, the nVidia/AMD separate releases, so many big issues that needed immediate patches. Stuff like that scares the average user, and we don’t want to bring in people just to lose them again.”

Scooter’s answer is correct. it was myself who suggested we make the pledge (and who wrote the pledge in the post) to get 0.6 out before the end of September. I accept full responsibility that this was a poor choice of wording that lead people to believe it was a no-exception hard deadline. Serious issues came up that were both unforseen and extremely complicated to fix. Remember, we aren’t working with the engine’s source code, so every modification we make to it is not only time consuming and complicated, but also has the potential to introduce new issues. Releasing at the end of September would have resulted in a release no less buggy than the previous releases Scooter mentioned. For example, very frequent crashes, the scoreboard was broken for multi-round games, spawn zones were not working correctly, and the list goes on and on.

Q: What do you have left to fix?

(Rabid): The remaining bugs on the list are pretty low priority. As Scooter mentioned, what we’re focusing on now is hardening the game and trying to fix any remaining crashes. To give you an idea of how things are going - tonight, we had a testing session where for the very first time, neither the hosts nor any of the players had any crashes for the entire duration of the testing session. 

As for all of the other questions, Scooter’s answers were 100% on point, so nothing more needs to be said. 

Q: What is there for a ranking/progression system?

A: While forge and custom games will be the true bread and butter of 0.6, I’ve designed and implemented a ranking/progression system to fill the gap for the more competitive players. There will be a large set of ‘official’ servers that are running playlists identical or similar to what H3 used in their Matchmaking. These official servers fall under the category of Ranked and Social, while everything else is a custom game (Similar to how H3 did it). While stats from all games (even custom games) will be saved to the new halostats.click for archiving, Social and Ranked games will contribute towards your overall rank, which is the rank you see in the scoreboard in these videos. Example ranked playlists include “Lone Wolves”, “Team Slayer”, “Big Team Battle”, and more. Now since we don’t (currently) have a matchmaking system, my ranking system for 0.6 works a little differently than Halo 3′s did. You can think of it as a hybrid between Halo 3′s TrueSkill and Elo, and that’s all I’m going to divulge for now. :)

You will be able to browse the global leaderboards in-game with Halostats, as well as per-playlist leaderboards.  

Halostats also has an in-game server browser.  This server browser not only lets you see statistics of every player in each match, but you can also search for players to see which server they are playing on, so you can easily hop into the same game as your buddies.

While in-game, you’ll see a link at the top titled “My Stats”. Click this link to bring up your player page so you don’t have to search for yourself. 

Feel free to browse the new halostats that’s WIP (currently http://new.halostats.click)

Q: Show us some gamplay!

Here is some testing footage from a match from the “Lone Wolves” test server

Here is some footage from a dimly-lit blue guardian. 

Team Slayer on Warlock (Credits to Unk and Clutchism):

Team CTF on Warlock:

An image of a warm and cozy Valhalla lighting:

Adding/Editing light properties: