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December 9, 2010

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343 Industries reverses decision to shut down Halo Wars stat tracking

A few weeks after the shocking announcement that 343 were planning to completely shut down the Halo Wars community website, forums and stat tracking which resulted in fury from Halo Wars fans and press coverage it would appear that 343 Industries have hit the gear into reverse. Cocopjojo has today announced on the Official Halo Wars forums that 343 no longer plans to remove stat tracking and the forthcoming title update will not remove this feature from the game.  Cocopjojo announced as follows:

Good news, everyone: Plans have changed and Halo Wars stat-tracking will continue to be supported after all. In other words, you, the Halo Wars fans, spoke and we listened. 343 Industries and Waypoint are in the process of investigating alternate ways of continuing to support Halo Wars stat-tracking, and while exact plans have yet to be formalized, Halo Wars fans can rest assured that they will continue to be able to access their game statistics online.

This is indeed good news, but I wouldn’t be taken in too much by “you, the Halo Wars fans, spoke and we listened”. One might point out a well-managed community would be one where the community leaders are in sync with the community’s needs, sadly this was not the case with Halo Wars and 343.  With 343 having recently launched their own new set of forums at www.xbox.com/halo they are no doubt keen to move discussion over to that website instead of having satellite websites like HaloWars.com. However, it was totally unnecessary to cripple the Halo Wars community in the process and it is pleasing to see that 343 have now understood this and taken the community unrest on board.

It’s not all good news though…

343 still plans to close the HaloWars.com forum, at least, that’s how it would appear from a further statement:

The forums may stay in a read-only mode after the 15th but I’m not sure. I’d still act as though they’ll disappear and start moving your discussion over to Halo Waypoint, which some of you have already done, thank you. 🙂

I would suggest that a better strategy would be to keep the HaloWars.com website and its community forums running and let people naturally move over to Waypoint if they feel the needs be. HaloWars.com has been open since October 2006 when the site looked a little like this:

Can anyone remember this?

Since 2006 the site has grown hugely and has sizeable fan base with regular community members interacting. In short, why take away something if it’s not broken? It’s not like Halo Waypoint will be able to offer an additional content for Halo Wars. It was promised when 343 took over Halo Wars from Robot Entertainment that “exciting things” were to come but unfortunately no exciting things were ever forthcoming. Halo Wars forumers should be on their guard of the imminent forum closure which may be taking place on December 15th.

Meanwhile, enjoy your access to HaloWars.com stats – a victory for the Halo Wars community!

The full news can be found here: http://www.halowars.com/forums/1/963172/ShowThread.aspx

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