So now it's over. For just about everybody. I thought I'd do one last collection of observations about the Beta before we begin the four months or so waiting for the Real Thing to arrive. However, before that happens, it's interesting to note that the beta didn't end at the same time for everybody...

Parting Shots Are Such Sweet Sorrow

Okay, so the beta didn't end at the same time for everybody. It was perhaps foreseeable that people would find stuff in the Beta that Bungie didn't really intend for public consumption. So it's perhaps not surprising that in addition to items located in the code, people found a way to access custom games, functionality that wasn't supposed to be available.

Without going into detail, the trick involved having a large party join a single user, with one of the large party being booted from the group and dumped into the Custom Games menu. After that, anyone could join that game, back out to the lobby, and they'd be left in a custom games menu as well, allowing the phenomenon to spread virally. One could almost have imagined Bungie did expect people to find it.

Of course, with LAN play and split-screen locked off, and custom games also supposedly unavailable, Bungie had an easy way of cutting everybody off from the beta: simply stopping the matchmaking service from their end. That left custom games as a loophole. Users who began custom games before the beta ended are still in them, and as long as they don't quit the beta or restart their 360s, there may not be any existing mechanism for stopping them.

Of course, once they do quit the beta or restart their boxes, that's it-- attempting to restart the beta results in the expiration message, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody's found a way past that yet.

If you're running a custom game, email me your gamertag, I'm interested to see who manages to keep it open the longest (and if anyone sacrifices a console to the cause).

UPDATE: This may be redundant now, as it seems there are still users in the Custom Games lobby, but who are unable to start games or join other parties. If anybody gets around this, let me know.

Swimming Upriver

There has been a lot of discussion since H2's release about weapon spawns. H1's weapons were on simple timers; H2 employed a more complicated scheme that allowed for "weapon control" as an effective strategy. The Beta seems more akin to H1's method than H2's; at least it was not necessary for a power weapon to be dropped or depleted before it respawned.

However, the Beta did seem to have another spawning problem: player spawns.

It may be simply inherent to the genre and not anything the designers can do anything about, but the act of spawning a player on the battlefield seems to upset the course of a game far more often than seems desireable.

The Beta would gleefully spawn you next to enemies, or even in the middle of a running firefight, condemning you to die in the crossfire. It would spawn you just behind an enemy that had spawned ahead of you, giving you an easy kill. It would spawn you directly in front of a moving vehicle, awarding the lucky driver with a splatter.

Team slayer games that began with clear territorial biases (one team spawns on the beach, the other in the base on High Ground) would shift as players moved. Suddenly you'd find the player you just killed who was trying to advance on your defensive position on the top of the wall has spawned behind you. The only thing less enjoyable than that would be advancing all the way down to the beach to camp the opposing team's spawns.

I'm not sure there's really a solution to this. Dead players have to be brought into the game somewhere. They have to be brought in at multiple locations, and as long as players are allowed to roam over those spots this problem is going to occur. I can only wonder aloud if a temporary period of invulnerability (and perhaps lack of weapons functionality) upon spawning is warranted, to give opponents time to notice you and spawning players a chance to run for a weapon, take cover, or both. Perhaps explain it as a side effect of a Spartan's energy shields powering up.

It seems to me that reducing number of kills that occur within three seconds of spawning-- regardless of who does the killing-- would be a good thing. It would minimize the perception that players appear from nowhere and are either dying or getting a kill because someone was otherwise unaware of their presence.