HALO INSIDER MCC FLIGHT ONE - RECAP
Good Morning,On June 28, we had our inaugural flight of the Halo Insider program for MCC on Steam. This flight taught us a lot about what it means to bring Halo: Reach to PC players and we wanted to share some results from this flight. Today we're going to breakdown how the flight went and go over key takeaways from our learnings.
Flight One Spec & Goals
The first public flight was designed to help test various amounts of hardware specifications and the delivery pipelines we are using for the Halo Insider program. Hardware ranged from various types of mid-tier to high-tier processors, graphics cards, and memory sizes.This first flight has done its job in helping to fully validate the scalability of our system as well as the hardware configurations. With these learnings, we can continue to scale and progress towards our next flight which should focus on Firefight Matchmaking.
Flight One Results
Thank you to everyone who participated, with your help our first flight on Steam was a success! The team's internal goals for participation and times played were met, and positive feedback was well received.
- Participation: 60.7%
- Times Played: 1,757
- Survey Response Rating: 4.6/5.0
The user group invited to this flight was a very small slice of those who had registered with the Halo Insider program. Of those invited, we saw over 60% of users download and play. This number was quite high given the limited messaging on Twitter (the announce) and one invite email sent to the group.Compared to the number of participants, the number of times people booted up and played was very high. With this being such a limited flight, we were not expecting this. When the next flight comes online, we are eager to see if this trend continues for firefight.On conclusion of the flight, a survey was sent out as follow-up.
Questions ranged from the more generic, 'what is your s experience with Halo' to more granular questions around how the game felt on PC using mouse and keyboard. One of the last questions that was asked was around how fun their experience was on a scale of 1 ("Not fun at all") to 5 ("Very fun"). Survey responses were overwhelmingly positive with most players rating their experience very high. Some of the most common feedback we received was how much fun it was on PC along with hearing repeatedly, "Take your time on development." Both of these sentiments have been very encouraging. All teams are hard at work on development and are looking forward to sharing more of our progress in future flights!
Key Takeaways & Learnings
Successfully executing on this first public flight was a big milestone for the team and everyone working on MCC for PC. Not only did this flight test the foundation for future flights, but it helped us to prove out our workflows and processes in support of the Halo Insider program. This was only the first public PC flight and our aim is to continually streamline and improve.
Communication – Since last year's flights, we have built a new system to directly communicate with all flighting participants. This allows us to send invites, updates, and follow-up messaging to those who are in each flight. This has proved to be a very effective way to reach each person.
Content & Engagement – With the scope of this flight being one campaign mission, we were expecting to have lower numbers in regards to of time played, but we did see that many players played multiple times. With this being a small sub-section of Reach we are anticipating that future flights will have even higher engagement and participation.
Technical Issue Reporting – For this flight, there was a beta test of the new
Halo Support site. One thing we saw was that many users were reporting issues in the feedback forums section called "Community." This customer support resource is new for many, and we know it will take time for people to know where to report issues. We will continue to remind people who use the website to create tickets to report issues instead of posting issues as forum posts.
Thank You for Your Patience – We wanted to say thank you to all who participated and to those who are patiently waiting to be invited. This first flight was to a very small number of users compared to those who are registered. We will continue to grow the number of users that are participating in these flights. We wanted to say thank you for your patience if you were not invited to this first flight and we look forward to seeing you in a future one!
Next Flight – Coming Soon
#FireFlight is the team's next flighting goal which will offer Firefight matchmaking to you on PC. While things may shift, we're currently targeting this milestone for later this month. The team is beginning to review release candidates that have the core features to support this flight. Keep your eyes out for upcoming news articles in the near future!
Additional Bonus Reading
Stay up to date on the latest happenings with Halo: the Master Chief Collection and flighting
HERE! To learn more about the Halo Insider program, including how to join and how to opt-out, head over
HERE. And if you want to chat about what's going on around MCC, please visit the official forums for
Xbox or
PC to stay up-to-date on everything that's happening.Cheers,
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