Hawty McBloggy Invites You to Play

From Bungie.net :

In the 35 days the Halo 3 Public Beta existed, players spent roughly 816 years in-game with discarded Hot Pockets cardboard container thingys and empty soda can mountains slowly growing around them. During those 816 years, a snapshot of the hive’s file share would show at least 2.7 terabytes of sharable data. But we didn’t conduct the Halo 3 Beta to suffocate you with a pillow of statistics; instead we were actually culling data, watching player behavior and listening to squawking, raucous feedback from the community. Now that it’s over and the multiplayer guys are getting their heads above water (only to put them drown again in a sea of polish), Multiplayer Lead Tyson Green, Designer Lars Bakken and Producer Joe Tung explain some of what they learned from the Halo 3 Public Beta (yes, we know the Carbine is really effective, Interwebz).

What sort of information were you guys focusing on in the Halo 3 Public Beta?

Tyson Green: First and foremost, to see what happens when some hundreds of thousands of people leap from on high and land on our server infrastructure. We found that out pretty quickly (it goes “crunch”).

After that, we wanted to see how people responded to the entire package. When you’re obsessing over a particular game, or even a particular weapon or piece of equipment, it’s really hard to take a step back and see what the big, overall issues are. The Beta was good because it let a few thousand people help us do that. When you think the biggest issue in the world is “man, I think the Spikers do at least 10% too much damage”, and someone says “no stupid, Slayer comes up too much in Team Skirmish!” that helps you refocus.

And after that? We check to see if the Spiker is, in fact, doing 10% too much damage.

Read the complete article.

The Halo 3 Beta Series
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10