I had been playing Custom Edition between 2008 and 2010, and there was a huge playerbase, and the majority seemed to be pretty chill. around mid 2010, unforseen circumstances forced me away from playing until this year, and for the last few months, I've noticed greatly reduced numbers of players, especially in the Custom Maps.

Not to mention that everybody seems to be easily angered by being killed, or they just behave like complete idiots. It's like the Destiny Forum on Bungie.net make up 90% of the playerbase these days. Everybody is either a child with anger management issues or unable to string a coherent sentence together.

So, what happened to Halo Custom Edition between 2010 and now, that caused a great deal of the playerbase to leave? Another game release, loss of interest, the GS servers shutting down, Nuclear Holocaust? A combination of them? I'd made friends with a few prominent members of the community, who now seem to be completely off the grid. It's a shame to see such a toxic community in such a great game.

All the good members fled the community and started playing Planet Explorers.

Most members went and moved on to Minecraft. The ones who returned from Minecraft came back autistic.

kek. It seems that way, nobody seems to understand it's about having fun. not insulting everybody.

exactly :) wise words *smiles and flys away*

there are some pros left but most like me are hoping the next os is even better for mp ..

What. As far as I remember nobody played custom maps except for a few like coldsnap and extinction.

Same,
and yet every time you try to point it out, some clan leader decides to log on to a**pull some tidbit about why people still play regardless

You see, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked...

That's racist.

mexico's not a nation you short sighted bigot

Mexico is a race because that's racist.

http://haloce3.com/ce32014/

CE3 gets longer and bigger (hehe) each year

The problem is as you get older you tend to have less time, henceforth a lot of the older members don't have the time to play Halo CE.


Google trends shows that Halomaps.org has been declining in popularity for some time.




Furthermore Halo CE starts getting stale after playing it for so many years.

All that said though I still think there is much to look forward to still.

The Halo maps community is volatile, jaded, unruly, insuperably biased and incredibly lethargic. People spend more time making posts titled "what is your least favorite map series and why is it takedown?" Or "DAE know dennis is 50?) And arguing over whether halos recent changes were necessary than they do filling quos they set for maps they were supposed to release. Custom edition is a fun game because it's actively being created by the menagerie of halo maps drones. If the drones don't work on new maps, then only the old maps and daily halo 3-4-reach reskins (all three at the same time) of blood gulch are being played. Everyone gets bored sometime.
Edited by AllySuzumiya on Dec 29, 2014 at 04:25 PM
Edited by AllySuzumiya on Dec 29, 2014 at 04:26 PM

Plus, the focus of most projects nowadays are less on multiplayer maps, and more on singleplayer maps or Firefight mods (see Lumoria, CMT SPV3, Takedown, Project Contingency, Halo Composition, Firefight Portent etc.) since like 2011...

...and most of these are done by secretive mapping groups or partnerships, too.
Except around the Halo CE3 expo event that we have every summer hosted by Dratt and SlowBullet since right around when you left, most projects now seem to involve long-term, singleplayer investments that spend years in closed-door development rather than rapid streams of MP maps.

This change in focus might be a part of a reason why you feel like this, too.


Edited by renegade343 on Dec 29, 2014 at 04:53 PM

I guess I should finally get around to learning how to make maps myself. I waste far too much time procrastinating /:

I wish somebody would announce a new good mp map though. Or we should just start playing some of the great maps already out that noone ever actually played when they were released for some reason.(such as MPG3)
The recent bigass got quite popular for a while though and I had a few awesome games on it. Wish that had lasted a bit longer; though I haven't been on in a bit over a week. A few servers had some unique scripts running that spiced the game up a bit which was great.

Bigass 2.104 is still popular; there was an issue that banned a lot of people with pirated CD keys the past few days (see Altis' thread), but it's back up and as popular (read: 2~4 full servers) now.

But besides that place, I know right... ._.

HCE is more popular now than it ever was a few years back. Cross-version support has let the massive spanish speaking player base of pirates fill up the servers for us richy-rich buyfags. Map downloaders have enabled custom map servers to actually exist and have a map ROTATION!

And people have bitched for over a decade when they get killed by grenades, so that's nothing new at all.

Strange, I could always find plenty of servers on custom maps outside the main ones with plenty of players back then. Maybe my memory is a bit dodgy, but I could swear there was a time when at least a few hundred players were on custom maps at any given time.

The only big change in the community I've noticed is the influx of Mexicans. The majority of the community has always been a bunch of angry kids, the difference is that when we first started playing Halo we were also angry kids so it didn't bother us.

I love you.

Truth.

I remember playing extinction in 2010, although people mostly played extinction and coldsnap, at least back then you could actually talk to your team and devise a plan, nowadays its all jajaja and insults flying around, everyone is a godamn lone wolf or a Mexican, there are actually nice people who don't speak English playing this game, but I've met like two so far, also back then your team could all get in a pelican, now its almost impossible to even fill a goddamn warthog!

I also play Halo CE but recently I have not been able to play it because of finals. Also about the behaviour, for me in most of the games, we worked together as a team. Sometimes, all were lone wolf.

How much a game can be modded+time is how it tends to work with games at least. Some games like Doom (honestly the easiest game to mod for+it is fun) may have a smaller community that is a fraction of what they used to be but the modability kept the game alive to a few thousand people today. Most games that aren't modded a lot die in a lot less time. Even if Halo CE isn't modded as much as it used to be (and multiplayer mods aren't popular compared to the default vanilla maps) it has the title of being the only Halo game to make it to PC (we don't talk about H2V, that never happened.) Considering the age of Custom Edition, it is doing pretty good. Yeah the community may be a bunch of whiny wristwatches, but the fact the community is as well as it is is pretty good. Halo CE will probably last another few years considering the small modding community that is left has some talented members (that make advancements like OS and the attention projects like SPV3 and CE3 have gotten.) The community isn't dead but unless another Halo game gets ported with a good editing kit, I would not expect this community to get a ton of new people. This game will be another one of those games that are played in 3rd world countries due to ease of piracy and low hardware requirements once the modding community dies out. Even if most of the multiplayer is dead and doesn't touch mods, the single player portion of the community relies upon big projects (look at the downloads Lumoria, SPV3 T&R, and Firefight Descent have gotten.) Once the modders of the community either disappear or move on to bigger and better things (like every previous modder here) this game will be nothing but a forgotten memory of Halo's past only played in the web cafes of countries with a meh-bad economy.
Edited by ZOBI3KING on Jan 1, 2015 at 05:34 AM

Because people are getting sick and tired of playing a 13 year old game which has a terrible netcode. And the original playbase who played 2004-2009 has now moved on to newer PC games or consoles.

The new community is comprised of lots of other countries (South and Central America, as far as I'm decently aware but maybe Dennis could shed light on what countries are downloading the game) who aren't as technologically ridiculous as every US gamer and so they settle for cracking easy-to-play games like Halo CE (which runs on about anything these days). Which also means they could be on various versions. Because this isn't really a well advertised game either, lots of US gamers don't know nor care for the game anymore which leaves the playbase ever sinking.

Ive been here since 2003, all good members have gone, now it consists of kids...

lolulie it sayz u joined in 2012. lier.

We were all kids.

If I may, between the trolls, inflated egos, and power plays between project teams, this site became a very toxic environment for people who wanted to contribute.

this.

As much as I want to think myself apart from the "kids", I think I've been squished into this generation. That said, I miss the older members. :(


He's not lying.

Why would he need so many accounts? Was it because he was...:o
a bad boy???
Edited by Noble on Jan 1, 2015 at 02:53 PM