Holding an online tournament requiring teams form parties to play against each other only works if the teams can form parties, and so the first round of ESL’s Halo Championship Series Open bracket was cancelled over the weekend.
Excitement was high for Saturday’s tournament, in which Halo: The Master Chief Collection teams from across North America would compete for a $US3,000 prize pool and a chance to advance to Sunday’s Legendary bracket tournament. Some 47 teams had signed up for the event, each prepared for exciting online battles.
[NA] Two hours left to sign up for #HCS Cup 1! Don’t miss your chance to compete for $3,000! http://t.co/Ax4Asegf60 pic.twitter.com/lf0frfj4UD
— ESL Halo (@ESLHalo) April 25, 2015
But the chance to compete for $US3000 would never come, as ongoing issues with party connectivity in Halo: The Master Chief Collection reared their ugly heads. While three teams were announced as making it through to the Legendary bracket…
[NA] Congratulations to the first three teams to make it through to the Legendary Bracket: Swerve, Sunset Ballers and Element 6 Gaming!
— ESL Halo (@ESLHalo) April 25, 2015
…shortly after the Halo Twitter announced the cancellation of the event (thanks Kevin for the weekend tip).
We’re aware of and investigating party joinability issues. As a result, we’ll be canceling HCS Cup #1, and apologize for the inconvenience.
— Halo (@Halo) April 26, 2015
Back in March, some 17 weeks after the initial release of the Halo: The Master Chief Collection, we posted a story declaring the game’s biggest issues — matching — fixed. And while matchmaking with strangers has indeed been significantly improved, other problems have risen in their wake, like connectivity with friends.
Hopefully everything will be ironed out in time for next Saturday’s second round. How long can fixing a connectivity bug take?
Comments
10 responses to “Halo: MCC eSports Event Cancelled Because The Game Wouldn’t Work”
What’s really sad is that all bad news about Halo under 343i’s control makes me happy for being validated.
and I hate that feeling.
Vindication is a hell of a drug.
I’m what I like to consider a big Halo fan. I was damn exited about this game. Pre-ordered, limited edition everything like that.
I don’t have this game installed on my hard drive anymore because I gave up hope on it. I was damn close to returning it…I didn’t because it’s not the retailers fault the game didn’t work. I miss the days where games fucking worked.
I agree, remember when you’d buy a cartridge on the Nintendo 64 and there was no need for day one patches, or updates, or fixes before the freaking thing would play?
Those were the days. Why can’t they stop trying to rush them out and actually finish and test properly before shipping?!
I have an Xbox One an a Wii U, no broken games and no massive day 1 patches. And my Xbox One crashes daily, the Wii U has crashed 5 times and I’ve had it since launch 2.5 years ago. I’ve had my Xbox One since after Xmas sales, and the OS is a mess and MS seem to have no desire to fix it, they only want to do stuff like add transparency to tiles if you want it.
While I agree that QA and testing seemed better back in the ship-and-done days, the flip side was that bugs *couldn’t* be patched if they made it through to the final release.
It does seem utterly ridiculous how many games need very large day-one patches these day, though. Seems like dev cycles might be too rushed to go gold, knowing that they can keep making changes, rather than spending the time to make it work before they release.
There was kind of a fix system, some games have multiple cartridge versions. The newer ones would generally be bug-fixes. There are a couple of games where if you have a v1.0 cart, you’re sitting on some surprisingly decent money.
For example, this explains the differences in versions for LoZ:OOT
https://zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/generalknowledge/version-differences
sad times for the once mighty Halo franchise.
Still having issues with it – I give up.
Imagine if Nintendo put out a Mario game that was still busted half a year after launch.
Back in the day all I literally played was halo 1,2,3. Most fun I have ever had in a campaign and the multiplayer was second to none, those were my happiest memories in gaming, I sure do miss those days, simple and fun
Ha! (As a majority xbox gamer and owner of a digital license of H:MCC)