Major Xbox Live bug wipes out Halo Wars leader boards
A major Xbox Live bug has affected millions of Halo Wars players as yesterday the leader boards for single player, all multiplayer playlists and player TrueSkill was somehow mistakenly reset. News of the “whoopsie” are now being reported on gaming websites. Needless to say I am sure Robot Entertainment are working diligently with Microsoft to rectify the problem and hopefully restore the lost data. Community Manager Aloysius has posted the following on the Halo Wars homepage:
An Xbox LIVE technical issue wiped all Halo Wars Xbox LIVE Leaderboards earlier today. This includes all singleplayer, multiplayer and Trueskill™ leaderboards, as well as all matchmaking data. At this time it’s unknown if the data can be restored, resulting in the Halo Wars Leaderboards being reset to original Launch Day status. The Xbox LIVE team is investigating the cause, and they will provide an update to the situation as soon as possible.
We at Robot Entertainment apologize for the LIVE technical issue and any frustration players have experienced in having their statistics disappear from the Leaderboards.
I am sure that there are necessary backups in place and that these will be utilised to restore data. Community opinion is split however on the forums with many of the high ranking players being happy about the change allowing them to rank up higher than before and over take some of the non-active players in the leaderboards. Of course it is unknown how all the other players who dont visit the forums are feeling having their TrueSkill reset to 0. Dave Pottinger, Lead Designer had this to say:
Well, to be fair, we were talking about the best ways to nuke stale folks who were sitting on top of the boards but not active. But, the plan was never to wipe active folks. This mistake has complicated things a bit.
Correction: The failure was due to a problem with the XBOX Live servers not directly under Robot Entertainment’s control, but be assured its being looked at. Stand by for updates as the issue develops.
http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/100/1008709p1.html
Robot resolves Glacial Ravine issues
Great news! Halo Wars fans with the Historic Battles DLC will now have the new map available in matchmaking as of… now! Well.. at least thats what Robot Entertainment Community Manager Duncan “Aloysius” Stanley has to say. At the moment the number of players in 3v3 Glacial still stands at zero so there may still be a delay with the stats.
You may be one of the first to play Glacial online if you log on to Xbox Live right now!
The discussion can be found here:
http://www.halowars.com/forums/thread/665609.aspx
Aloysius sheds light on the OOS / Maphack bans
Just in case you dont want to read through all the threads taking place on Age Community ive included below some extracts from Robot Entertainment Community Manager “Aloysius”. This should help clear up the Robot position on these bans and demonstrates that accounts do get re-evaluated when an appeal is requested and that programmers have indeed looked at the code behind hack detection. Here goes – (and yes, ive added some emphasis on key points)
- We do not ban random people, we don’t just draw names out of a hat and ban people. No one has ever been banned because we didn’t like them or “just because,” or anything like that.
- We examine cheating reports and our server logs, and when an account has been using out of sync and map hacks, we take action against that account. If you get out of syncs all the time when playing multiplayer, try reinstalling the game, and checking with your ISP to ensure that your connection is working properly.
- We examine every account individually for OOS and Map hacking, and examine claims of innocence when the case warrants. We have never reversed a ban for OOS / Map Hacking. After this recent wave of OOS / Map Hacking Bans, the programmers who wrote the tools re-examined the code and ran tests and determined that the bans were valid.
- We cannot release source code, our diagnostic processes, give access to our back-end servers, release private customer data or anything else that would compromise the integrity of our online environment as well as satisfy our legal protection. We can’t really be “transparent” in our security practices so that we can stay one step ahead of the hackers.
- We already permaban the guilty, after investigation.
- We do not re-issue accounts for the people banned. We encourage everyone to maintain secure passwords and never give them out to anyone else, ever, under any circumstance. ESO will never ask you for your password.
- We can tell the difference between a normal OOS and one being caused by a hacking tool.
- Normal OOSs can happen for a wide variety of reasons, bad internet connections, bad installs, bad other software, virus scanners kicking in during a game, etc. We even had a case where every 600 seconds (10 minutes), someone would go OOS no matter what, 100% of the time. They eventually got it fixed by calling their ISP. They were not banned, even though they OOS’d in dozens of games.
All of this seems very satisfactory to me. Players should be reminded that the tools used to identify cheaters at Robot Entertainment are the same as those used at Ensemble Studios. For more information keep track of the discussion at AgeCommunity:
http://forum.agecommunity.com/forums/3/826478/ShowThread.aspx
Bungie CEO: “Ensemble didn’t build a game with a community that carried it”
Some interesting remarks from Harold Ryan the CEO of Bungie who in an interview with Brier Dudley at the Seattle times said:
Q: It’s interesting how you’re mentioning Bungie like that. Are you now trying to raise the profile of the studio? Is this a step toward additional games beyond Halo and saying hey, we’re not just ‘Halo, we’re Bungie’?
A: Yeah, definitely. When you go back to the divestiture from Microsoft, that was when we started paying more attention to the Bungie brand. It means something – there’s now an existing game, Halo Wars, that wasn’t built by Bungie. There’s a big difference in the success – in sales, in the review numbers of the title. The Ensemble guys (who made Halo Wars) are great guys, they did a great job with what they did, but I don’t think they made a Bungie game. They didn’t build a game with a community that carried it.
It seems somewhat a harsh comment seeing as the Halo Wars community website has been online long before the titles launch and was lead by a fantastic community team at Ensemble Studios. One might like to point out that the community was damaged due to the Microsoft decision to close the studio. Obviously, any community will suffer when a company is closed. Today the community is lead by a sole community manager, Duncan “Aloysius” Stanley and Robot Entertainment has recently held a developers play night with the fans and a feedback thread asking for fan feedback on Title Update 3 fixes.
Seattle Times article:
Continuing with the Halo Wars map blogs – “Docks” is added today
Today’s map blog update with the developers is the 2v2 map “Docks”. This time skirmish map designer Justin Rouse and Community Manager Duncan “Aloysius” Stanley take us through thier tips and experiences. The excerpt and link to the blog can be found below:
Because of the choke point and decent travel time from one side to the other early in the game, it’s pretty safe too boom up. This is why I really like using Cutter and elephant/marine rushing on this map. If I can setup my Elephant near the enemy bases and get it pumping I can slow down their boom sometimes, even keeping them off the open base location near their start area while my partner boom/techs freely.
Docks 2v2 (HaloWars.com)
