Somewhere in the final thousand words of last week’s Weekly Update, we mentioned a special playlist that would be launching this week just in time for Valentine’s Day – the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The playlist will be a variation of the existing Team Doubles hopper, trimmed down to just Team Slayer (and variants of) and will blast off on Thursday morning at 10 a.m. Pacific time and evaporating at 2 a.m. on Monday (Feb. 18) morning.
In addition to providing a respite from spouse and significant other-related duties, the V-Day playlist serves a secondary purpose for us. We’ll be testing both the timed release functionality of the hopper – the ability to turn a hopper on and off at certain times (something we’ve looked at once already with the Halloween “Living Dead” playlist) – and the hopper’s short lifespan lets us cull data in a confined period of time (in this case, the length of the tournament).
Tyson, Lars and the multiplayer team contemplated a bunch of different variations of what would evolve into the Valentine’s Day hopper, with one candidate being very Action Sack-y in nature, but the decision to focus some of our resources on testing the Tournament environment made more obtuse gametypes less ideal, which resulted in the decision to make the playlist a Ranked Team Doubles experience.
There will be prizes that we’ll be awarding for a variety of things from this hopper. We’ll have a pretty detailed set of information and statistics at our disposal to use to figure out what prizes should go to whom (things like most vehicle jacks – while we won’t use THAT statistic, that’s just an example of the sorts of things we may look at) and we’ll be watching the hopper for cases of cheating, chicanery and general in-game jerkdom. So now would be an excellent time to NOT cheat.
A much-loved and now fixed "bug" from Halo 3's development. You will not see this tomorrow.