Last updated Apr. 22, 2014.
Forward
This is a reflective writing. What is your Halo Experience? Assuming that you still have interest in the series, it only makes sense that your tale, like mine, is still being written.
What’s FPS?
My first encounter with Halo was with CE, probably in 2005, at my cousin's house. He had the original XBOX, as you could expect. Coming from a background of Game Boy Pokemon, and GameCube Super Smash Brothers, I had absolutely no idea what a FPS title felt like. Immediately my little brother and I were entranced at the complexity and style of game play that it provided. Whether it was having Tank battles on Blood Gulch, or simply duking it out on Hang Em' High, it was all fun. Interestingly enough, his console wasn't hooked up to the Internet, so we didn't even bother with Multiplayer. My experience with Halo takes a long break - my cousin lived two hours away, and we only visited on holidays.
A Long Divergence
Fast-forward to November 2008. Remember the Wii craze? I was a die-hard Nintendo fan at the time, and the new console with the magic pointing controller convinced my parents that it would be a fantastic present. For Christmas that same year, my older sister purchased me a copy of Call of Duty: World at War, among other titles. I can confidently say that this game started my "Call of Duty" years. Playing the heck out of World at War, it only made sense for me to purchase Nintendo's rendition of COD4 the next year (MW2 was released on other consoles). It was this game, as a major improvement from its predecessor, that allowed me to expand upon my skills in FPS. Quickly I rose to become one of the top 1000 players on the Leaderboards (top 300 spots were hackers).
My interest started to decline after reaching a proficient level in COD4. I noticed the obvious errors present in the game, and the lack of quality on the Wii in comparison to other consoles was quite a buzzkill. Sequentially, the next Call of Duty (for all platforms) would be Black Ops 1 in 2010 - I figured that it would be unwise to invest in more content, but my addiction to COD4 persisted. I believe I have a total game time of approximately 30 DAYS played. Something in my brain clicked - is there a way to show the world that I'm an astounding player? YouTube was the answer. Especially upon the release of MW3 in 2011, I started to grow my YouTube channel. During that period, Wii's were breaking left and right due to the new system requirements. Also, if you thought MW3 on XBOX was bad, you should have seen the one for Wii. I was more interested in exploring commentating than playing the game itself. There is an entire story about my YouTube channel itself, and how I had to hack my Wii to play games, which I would rather abstain from spewing out here. Nonetheless, I left the Wii and MW3 with an in-depth understanding about how the FPS titles worked, and the communities that clustered around them.
The Journey to Starside
Christmas 2011, I believe, was when I received my XBOX 360 as a gift. It didn't come with many games, but I had thought about Halo: Reach from playing it at my friend's house. Remember that it was some six years ago that I had experienced only a sliver of what Halo was, so I was actually more focused on making MW3 Wii YouTube videos more than anything. Even though my interests lied in Halo in the spring, I kept it away from my Wii fanbase of 600 subscribers until that fell through. I had slowly moved away from the YouTube and COD scene as I was simply content with playing Reach for what it was. I got my bearings around the Multiplayer aspect, dabbled a little in some mediocre Forge projects, and explored some campaign material. My younger brother, also a newfound enthusiast of the game, played with me on a consistent basis. Because he was more interested in Forge, he found a YouTube channel called "TheHaloForgeEpidemic". We really liked their content and would watch to see what cool stuff people made. Course we were still shit at Forge, but we tried.
Soon enough, November 2012 rolled around, bringing the all-important Halo 4. Like all new games, there's that "fresh" feeling about them. While others may have jumped into the proverbial "Forge Pool", I took a stab at mastering Matchmaking. Unlocking all the specializations was a challenge, but the main blossoming of my potential was an analysis of the weapons. For a good month or more, I compiled data and analyzed it, potentially being the first to publish such a work. Sadly, I had no one to share it with. Coming from roots foreign to Xbox, I had no network or ties to anyone. It dawned on me that I needed to find a community of Halo players, and THFE looked like it may have the answer. Almost coincidentally, they were advertising this website called "HaloCustoms". I was skeptical at first - why would I need to be interested in that? But after the momentum from THFE was pushing me towards the site, I just had to check it out.
I joined here on January 20th, 2013. The first thing I did was share an abbreviated version of my story:
"Hello people of the Halo Customs forum. My name's Roger, more commonly known as ZeroFlame on the YouTube scene. I've been a YouTuber for over a year now, and have recently started my second channel "Z3R0FLAME".
Anyways, I do have an affinity for forging like everyone else on the forum. There's still a lot for me to learn, but I take a very minimalistic approach to my maps. So far I don't have confidence in them yet as none have been tested by the public, only my younger brother and I play on them.
In addition to the usual, I do have a Halo 4 Weapon Review series going on my channel at the moment. To spread the knowledge, I was hoping to post these here on the non-forging section of the forum.
Thanks for reading, have a good one."
I am tempted to leave you with a cliffhanger, and say that "We all lived happily ever after..." but that chops off a significant portion of my Halo Experience. So I shall continue.
Adventures in the Halo community!
January 2013 – May 2013
As expected, my Weapon Analysis attracted a lot of attention, and currently serves as a pinned community resource. I've never really retracted from being a Weapon Analyst. After all, I took the liberty to update the stats from the June Title Update. There's just a sad reality about statistics such as these - few care about it, especially when everything is working fine. Arguably 343 should have woken up 5 months earlier than they did, when I published my research on their forums and Waypoint. But that is beside the point. It's just disappointing that I can't apply my problem-solving skills to help out the Halo community. For a while, I was just your average Joe when it came to HaloCustoms. That kept me content, but when the summer hit, I wanted in on the action.
June 2013 – November 2013
Through this site I have come to appreciate the power behind the Custom Game in bringing the Halo community together. I would not say that it is the "melting pot" of the Halo Culture, rather, it is the "glue" that keeps together a "cultural mosaic" of different and unique people. I am a Competitively-oriented "piece". I had found this out through my interest in the variety presented in Forge creations, and became interested in testing out maps that had potential. Minigames and Flood were always fun too, but it seemed like they had more attention. Anyways I started hosting "Review Crew Customs" in June 2013. In this, I selected maps, had them tested, and left reviews on the creator's posts. It started out slow, but eventually built up speed. Coincidentally, Charles Stoot had been speaking about his organization, Polar Opposite Squadron Lobbies [POSL]. He had me host a lobby, and it turned out wonderfully. Again as a wonderful coincidence, Online Knights was interested in a group that could do Preliminary Testing on their maps. Having me on board allowed POSL to support, and I would say that we have tested over a hundred maps.
Some time passed and things died down when school started. Custom games became too cumbersome to host any more, but I did find value in playing maps in other people's lobbies. Somewhere around this time the HaloCustoms Review Crew was established. I viewed it back then as almost like, "Hey, that's my idea!". In my heart though, I knew that these people would be more successful at completing a mission that I was unable to fulfill. Thus, I bid them good luck in their mission while I continued to step off the scene for custom games. When I thought I would detract, Charles announced that he wanted to plan a 100th Lobby Celebration. I took some serious time to plan that out, seeing what we could do to make the event as fun and lively as possible. I would say that it turned out to be quite a success, although the really hair-pulling part was when the Staff mis-scheduled their own SvC on the same day/time. Anyways. fast-forward a few weeks. I received a message from Master Debaytes regarding a place in the Review Crew. I guess the community recommended me to him. I submitted my application for a Competitive reviewer and was accepted. While active I reviewed a few maps, trying my best to balance everything out in life. At some point in October, I took a small hiatus to work through this tough Calculus course. As far as achievements are concerned, this was my most active time period to date. I tried my best to help out as many people as I could with their maps, and to get involved within the community.
December 2013 – February 2014
With Christmas ahead of me, I was optimistic about the second half of the year. Maybe this was the time to go full-speed with what I was involved in. I guess fate took a radically different route! Zandril has and will always be a great friend of mine on these forums. He and I agree on a lot of things, especially with Competitive perspective. For the past few months, Zandril had been making some great maps. In fact, you can view his history by looking in the “List of Forging Portfolios”. I had been reviewing and testing these maps with him. Now, I had dabbled in Forge, but not made anything too significant. Out of sheer impulse and excitement, I asked him about doing a co-forge. He agreed, and around December 1 began a long journey behind our pinnacle map, Zed. We completed a solid draft around February 1. The map was released on the Map database on Feb. 22. Its final update was on Mar. 26.
Understandably, devoting energy to making a map over the course of two months had a major effect on my perceptions. During this time period, Review Crew was rather stagnant and didn’t require too much attention. I was able to immerse in the forging process. Admittedly, I did a lot of the concept work behind the map, while Zandril placed most of the pieces. It’s easy to say (not to brag, but what I see currently) that we made something fantastic. That “we” thing is the real problem here. If it was built entirely by me, I would be confident of my abilities at forging. However, when you add in all the influencers and collaborators... there’s not much of me left. That’s why I asked Zandril to post it – he should take the hypothetical credit involved with posting. Not me. In my mind, I’m a fifth wheel.
Sorry to disrupt chronological order, but we’ll have to backtrack to late January. Keep in mind during all of this that I’m co-forging. The online community was noticeably dying down after Christmas – I wanted to change that. I had three ideas, all of which are currently fruitless. Review Crew was rather inactive because few people were submitting maps. So I pressed for action, trying to reform the system in the Maps database. That didn’t lead anywhere, so I chilled out with reviewing maps for a long while.
The second agenda was POSL. Ever since some of our members declared inactivity (not long after the 100th Lobby Anniversary), it bugged me that nothing was getting done. We weren’t hosting, no one needed their maps tested, and everything was at a halt. It was sad to have a label that meant close to nothing. So I contacted Charles and said, “Either we get our act together, or restart, or disband”. He chose to reform, and I helped him out with some Google Docs and graphics. We were all set to go, but our members were not. At the time of this writing, POSL hasn’t progressed through these changes.
Finally, I had this idea about a HaloCustoms Community Montage. It was a memento from the Wii CoD community. Dax also thought it was a great idea and we made an announcement on it. The plan would have worked – however, Dax went MIA and I didn’t have enough time to promote it myself. There are still around 40 clips just waiting to be assembled. We would have really liked more. This is maybe a plan I can restart later on.
Late into February, Zandril contacted me and asked if I would be interested in ForgeCafe. The leader of the Librarians, X5100, was supposedly resigning. This could open up a new avenue for my reviewing skills to work their wonders. ForgeCafe was a comparatively capsulated community in comparison to HaloCustoms (that’s like… six alliterations in one sentence, #englishswag). Zan had been a Librarian for many months, but with me as the newcomer, they would be more likely to change their ways. Anyways, I accepted. ForgeCafe continues on into the next segment.
March 2014 – April 2014
Madness was of a different order in March. I had started new classes in January, and by now they had snuck up on me, and were kicking my ass. Reflecting back on the hiatus I took in October, another didn’t seem to be in sensible order. I figured I’d play it by week, looking for any open windows I had to interact with Halo. Time is an odd cornerstone. With it, everything becomes possible. Without it, all the bricks you’ve placed start tumbling down. These following situations assumed the latter.
We can say that the Librarian position wasn’t exactly what I bargained for. I was under the assumption that X would leave, so Zandril and I could establish our little kit-and-caboodle. Furthermore, I didn’t know that the site was going to be updated, and the Review Forms they used to submit reviews would disappear. Even though ForgeCafe installed a fully functioning Map Library, our processes came to a dead halt for a long while. We went back and forth, discussing the ramifications of the Librarians’ future. This process wasn’t even that intense, and it took over a month. Then once we figured it out, we waited another entire month for undr zid, the website’s admin, to institute something we could use. As of the date this is being written, he has not made this submission feature public knowledge.
While I was wrestling with ForgeCafe for a month (at that time), MasterDebaytes decided that he’d had enough of the inactivity. We attempted to remobilize the Review Crew in early April to accommodate for all the submissions. In one game night, we had played a good chunk of maps that needed reviews. It’s easy to play a game for 10 minutes, or fly around in Forge, to get an experience on any map. The most difficult part is the reviewing process: sifting through gameplay clips, recollecting about possible issues, synthesizing an opinion, and finally typing it out. Pursuing my original strategy, I was just waiting for that godsend chunk of time. That chunk never came, so I was just actively waiting. In the meanwhile, nothing looked any better. I couldn’t review, host custom games with POSL, or have any meaningful at-length discussions. Everything I had obligated to before, was fading away.
It took me until around 2/3 of the way through April for something to click. I did some deep reflecting on this whole situation. Why am I here, doing nothing, feeling bad about things outside of my control? There wasn’t anything left to wait on! My status as this really involved community member dude was a mirage. That was back then. I wasn’t going to be subservient to an empty shell of who I was before. So on April 22, 2014 I resigned from the Librarians, Review Crew and POSL.
What’s Next?
Right now, I’m uncertain about my role in the Halo community. In less than a month, I’ll have the time to be somewhat involved. What’s to do, then? I’m not going to revert back to what I was doing before. That was too stressful and consuming. Forging doesn’t seem to be my thing still. Statistical research has promising results, but no one gives a flying fuck about it now, almost a year after the last title update. Even if it would help them with Forge, it’s nothing groundbreaking. Maybe for next game. Then there’s my own forging, but I have no confidence in myself. Who would play new maps anyways, especially a Competitive one? HaloCustoms Community Montage could be revived, but it needs heavy promotion from the website’s staff. I’m going around in full cycle again – I play games for fun. So yes, there’s definitely going to be Customs involved.
What about the good people of these forums? Who am I to them now? Am I just another username, or something more? Do I care about them anymore? I want to say all the right answers, but I’m not sure. Hopefully I don’t choke on uncertainty.
It’s Not Over Yet
In about four months, I’ll be starting my life at college. There’s absolutely no guarantee that anything will be the same. Lots of variables will have to be aligned just right for me to continue activity into Halo 5, or XBOX in general. Things come and go, so I’ll try to make the best of my time in this community. I don’t want my Halo Experience to come to an end based upon regrettable circumstances.
I should also mention separate from the chronology, that the countless amount of people I have met and have come to know have an existence in my mind and soul. No names need to be given for this idea to be understood. I'm sure that's part of your Experience, too.
"In conclusion..." would be an easy way to summarize my sentiments about what my Halo Experience really is. To be honest, I don't know. No amount of reflection can really put words into my mouth about it. Maybe one day, when the journey is over, we can sit back and really know what it means.
One thing I can say for sure: the Halo Experience is not just about a video game.
It is the culmination of much more.
Forward
This is a reflective writing. What is your Halo Experience? Assuming that you still have interest in the series, it only makes sense that your tale, like mine, is still being written.
What’s FPS?
My first encounter with Halo was with CE, probably in 2005, at my cousin's house. He had the original XBOX, as you could expect. Coming from a background of Game Boy Pokemon, and GameCube Super Smash Brothers, I had absolutely no idea what a FPS title felt like. Immediately my little brother and I were entranced at the complexity and style of game play that it provided. Whether it was having Tank battles on Blood Gulch, or simply duking it out on Hang Em' High, it was all fun. Interestingly enough, his console wasn't hooked up to the Internet, so we didn't even bother with Multiplayer. My experience with Halo takes a long break - my cousin lived two hours away, and we only visited on holidays.
A Long Divergence
Fast-forward to November 2008. Remember the Wii craze? I was a die-hard Nintendo fan at the time, and the new console with the magic pointing controller convinced my parents that it would be a fantastic present. For Christmas that same year, my older sister purchased me a copy of Call of Duty: World at War, among other titles. I can confidently say that this game started my "Call of Duty" years. Playing the heck out of World at War, it only made sense for me to purchase Nintendo's rendition of COD4 the next year (MW2 was released on other consoles). It was this game, as a major improvement from its predecessor, that allowed me to expand upon my skills in FPS. Quickly I rose to become one of the top 1000 players on the Leaderboards (top 300 spots were hackers).
My interest started to decline after reaching a proficient level in COD4. I noticed the obvious errors present in the game, and the lack of quality on the Wii in comparison to other consoles was quite a buzzkill. Sequentially, the next Call of Duty (for all platforms) would be Black Ops 1 in 2010 - I figured that it would be unwise to invest in more content, but my addiction to COD4 persisted. I believe I have a total game time of approximately 30 DAYS played. Something in my brain clicked - is there a way to show the world that I'm an astounding player? YouTube was the answer. Especially upon the release of MW3 in 2011, I started to grow my YouTube channel. During that period, Wii's were breaking left and right due to the new system requirements. Also, if you thought MW3 on XBOX was bad, you should have seen the one for Wii. I was more interested in exploring commentating than playing the game itself. There is an entire story about my YouTube channel itself, and how I had to hack my Wii to play games, which I would rather abstain from spewing out here. Nonetheless, I left the Wii and MW3 with an in-depth understanding about how the FPS titles worked, and the communities that clustered around them.
The Journey to Starside
Christmas 2011, I believe, was when I received my XBOX 360 as a gift. It didn't come with many games, but I had thought about Halo: Reach from playing it at my friend's house. Remember that it was some six years ago that I had experienced only a sliver of what Halo was, so I was actually more focused on making MW3 Wii YouTube videos more than anything. Even though my interests lied in Halo in the spring, I kept it away from my Wii fanbase of 600 subscribers until that fell through. I had slowly moved away from the YouTube and COD scene as I was simply content with playing Reach for what it was. I got my bearings around the Multiplayer aspect, dabbled a little in some mediocre Forge projects, and explored some campaign material. My younger brother, also a newfound enthusiast of the game, played with me on a consistent basis. Because he was more interested in Forge, he found a YouTube channel called "TheHaloForgeEpidemic". We really liked their content and would watch to see what cool stuff people made. Course we were still shit at Forge, but we tried.
Soon enough, November 2012 rolled around, bringing the all-important Halo 4. Like all new games, there's that "fresh" feeling about them. While others may have jumped into the proverbial "Forge Pool", I took a stab at mastering Matchmaking. Unlocking all the specializations was a challenge, but the main blossoming of my potential was an analysis of the weapons. For a good month or more, I compiled data and analyzed it, potentially being the first to publish such a work. Sadly, I had no one to share it with. Coming from roots foreign to Xbox, I had no network or ties to anyone. It dawned on me that I needed to find a community of Halo players, and THFE looked like it may have the answer. Almost coincidentally, they were advertising this website called "HaloCustoms". I was skeptical at first - why would I need to be interested in that? But after the momentum from THFE was pushing me towards the site, I just had to check it out.
I joined here on January 20th, 2013. The first thing I did was share an abbreviated version of my story:
"Hello people of the Halo Customs forum. My name's Roger, more commonly known as ZeroFlame on the YouTube scene. I've been a YouTuber for over a year now, and have recently started my second channel "Z3R0FLAME".
Anyways, I do have an affinity for forging like everyone else on the forum. There's still a lot for me to learn, but I take a very minimalistic approach to my maps. So far I don't have confidence in them yet as none have been tested by the public, only my younger brother and I play on them.
In addition to the usual, I do have a Halo 4 Weapon Review series going on my channel at the moment. To spread the knowledge, I was hoping to post these here on the non-forging section of the forum.
Thanks for reading, have a good one."
I am tempted to leave you with a cliffhanger, and say that "We all lived happily ever after..." but that chops off a significant portion of my Halo Experience. So I shall continue.
Adventures in the Halo community!
January 2013 – May 2013
As expected, my Weapon Analysis attracted a lot of attention, and currently serves as a pinned community resource. I've never really retracted from being a Weapon Analyst. After all, I took the liberty to update the stats from the June Title Update. There's just a sad reality about statistics such as these - few care about it, especially when everything is working fine. Arguably 343 should have woken up 5 months earlier than they did, when I published my research on their forums and Waypoint. But that is beside the point. It's just disappointing that I can't apply my problem-solving skills to help out the Halo community. For a while, I was just your average Joe when it came to HaloCustoms. That kept me content, but when the summer hit, I wanted in on the action.
June 2013 – November 2013
Through this site I have come to appreciate the power behind the Custom Game in bringing the Halo community together. I would not say that it is the "melting pot" of the Halo Culture, rather, it is the "glue" that keeps together a "cultural mosaic" of different and unique people. I am a Competitively-oriented "piece". I had found this out through my interest in the variety presented in Forge creations, and became interested in testing out maps that had potential. Minigames and Flood were always fun too, but it seemed like they had more attention. Anyways I started hosting "Review Crew Customs" in June 2013. In this, I selected maps, had them tested, and left reviews on the creator's posts. It started out slow, but eventually built up speed. Coincidentally, Charles Stoot had been speaking about his organization, Polar Opposite Squadron Lobbies [POSL]. He had me host a lobby, and it turned out wonderfully. Again as a wonderful coincidence, Online Knights was interested in a group that could do Preliminary Testing on their maps. Having me on board allowed POSL to support, and I would say that we have tested over a hundred maps.
Some time passed and things died down when school started. Custom games became too cumbersome to host any more, but I did find value in playing maps in other people's lobbies. Somewhere around this time the HaloCustoms Review Crew was established. I viewed it back then as almost like, "Hey, that's my idea!". In my heart though, I knew that these people would be more successful at completing a mission that I was unable to fulfill. Thus, I bid them good luck in their mission while I continued to step off the scene for custom games. When I thought I would detract, Charles announced that he wanted to plan a 100th Lobby Celebration. I took some serious time to plan that out, seeing what we could do to make the event as fun and lively as possible. I would say that it turned out to be quite a success, although the really hair-pulling part was when the Staff mis-scheduled their own SvC on the same day/time. Anyways. fast-forward a few weeks. I received a message from Master Debaytes regarding a place in the Review Crew. I guess the community recommended me to him. I submitted my application for a Competitive reviewer and was accepted. While active I reviewed a few maps, trying my best to balance everything out in life. At some point in October, I took a small hiatus to work through this tough Calculus course. As far as achievements are concerned, this was my most active time period to date. I tried my best to help out as many people as I could with their maps, and to get involved within the community.
December 2013 – February 2014
With Christmas ahead of me, I was optimistic about the second half of the year. Maybe this was the time to go full-speed with what I was involved in. I guess fate took a radically different route! Zandril has and will always be a great friend of mine on these forums. He and I agree on a lot of things, especially with Competitive perspective. For the past few months, Zandril had been making some great maps. In fact, you can view his history by looking in the “List of Forging Portfolios”. I had been reviewing and testing these maps with him. Now, I had dabbled in Forge, but not made anything too significant. Out of sheer impulse and excitement, I asked him about doing a co-forge. He agreed, and around December 1 began a long journey behind our pinnacle map, Zed. We completed a solid draft around February 1. The map was released on the Map database on Feb. 22. Its final update was on Mar. 26.
Understandably, devoting energy to making a map over the course of two months had a major effect on my perceptions. During this time period, Review Crew was rather stagnant and didn’t require too much attention. I was able to immerse in the forging process. Admittedly, I did a lot of the concept work behind the map, while Zandril placed most of the pieces. It’s easy to say (not to brag, but what I see currently) that we made something fantastic. That “we” thing is the real problem here. If it was built entirely by me, I would be confident of my abilities at forging. However, when you add in all the influencers and collaborators... there’s not much of me left. That’s why I asked Zandril to post it – he should take the hypothetical credit involved with posting. Not me. In my mind, I’m a fifth wheel.
Sorry to disrupt chronological order, but we’ll have to backtrack to late January. Keep in mind during all of this that I’m co-forging. The online community was noticeably dying down after Christmas – I wanted to change that. I had three ideas, all of which are currently fruitless. Review Crew was rather inactive because few people were submitting maps. So I pressed for action, trying to reform the system in the Maps database. That didn’t lead anywhere, so I chilled out with reviewing maps for a long while.
The second agenda was POSL. Ever since some of our members declared inactivity (not long after the 100th Lobby Anniversary), it bugged me that nothing was getting done. We weren’t hosting, no one needed their maps tested, and everything was at a halt. It was sad to have a label that meant close to nothing. So I contacted Charles and said, “Either we get our act together, or restart, or disband”. He chose to reform, and I helped him out with some Google Docs and graphics. We were all set to go, but our members were not. At the time of this writing, POSL hasn’t progressed through these changes.
Finally, I had this idea about a HaloCustoms Community Montage. It was a memento from the Wii CoD community. Dax also thought it was a great idea and we made an announcement on it. The plan would have worked – however, Dax went MIA and I didn’t have enough time to promote it myself. There are still around 40 clips just waiting to be assembled. We would have really liked more. This is maybe a plan I can restart later on.
Late into February, Zandril contacted me and asked if I would be interested in ForgeCafe. The leader of the Librarians, X5100, was supposedly resigning. This could open up a new avenue for my reviewing skills to work their wonders. ForgeCafe was a comparatively capsulated community in comparison to HaloCustoms (that’s like… six alliterations in one sentence, #englishswag). Zan had been a Librarian for many months, but with me as the newcomer, they would be more likely to change their ways. Anyways, I accepted. ForgeCafe continues on into the next segment.
March 2014 – April 2014
Madness was of a different order in March. I had started new classes in January, and by now they had snuck up on me, and were kicking my ass. Reflecting back on the hiatus I took in October, another didn’t seem to be in sensible order. I figured I’d play it by week, looking for any open windows I had to interact with Halo. Time is an odd cornerstone. With it, everything becomes possible. Without it, all the bricks you’ve placed start tumbling down. These following situations assumed the latter.
We can say that the Librarian position wasn’t exactly what I bargained for. I was under the assumption that X would leave, so Zandril and I could establish our little kit-and-caboodle. Furthermore, I didn’t know that the site was going to be updated, and the Review Forms they used to submit reviews would disappear. Even though ForgeCafe installed a fully functioning Map Library, our processes came to a dead halt for a long while. We went back and forth, discussing the ramifications of the Librarians’ future. This process wasn’t even that intense, and it took over a month. Then once we figured it out, we waited another entire month for undr zid, the website’s admin, to institute something we could use. As of the date this is being written, he has not made this submission feature public knowledge.
While I was wrestling with ForgeCafe for a month (at that time), MasterDebaytes decided that he’d had enough of the inactivity. We attempted to remobilize the Review Crew in early April to accommodate for all the submissions. In one game night, we had played a good chunk of maps that needed reviews. It’s easy to play a game for 10 minutes, or fly around in Forge, to get an experience on any map. The most difficult part is the reviewing process: sifting through gameplay clips, recollecting about possible issues, synthesizing an opinion, and finally typing it out. Pursuing my original strategy, I was just waiting for that godsend chunk of time. That chunk never came, so I was just actively waiting. In the meanwhile, nothing looked any better. I couldn’t review, host custom games with POSL, or have any meaningful at-length discussions. Everything I had obligated to before, was fading away.
It took me until around 2/3 of the way through April for something to click. I did some deep reflecting on this whole situation. Why am I here, doing nothing, feeling bad about things outside of my control? There wasn’t anything left to wait on! My status as this really involved community member dude was a mirage. That was back then. I wasn’t going to be subservient to an empty shell of who I was before. So on April 22, 2014 I resigned from the Librarians, Review Crew and POSL.
What’s Next?
Right now, I’m uncertain about my role in the Halo community. In less than a month, I’ll have the time to be somewhat involved. What’s to do, then? I’m not going to revert back to what I was doing before. That was too stressful and consuming. Forging doesn’t seem to be my thing still. Statistical research has promising results, but no one gives a flying fuck about it now, almost a year after the last title update. Even if it would help them with Forge, it’s nothing groundbreaking. Maybe for next game. Then there’s my own forging, but I have no confidence in myself. Who would play new maps anyways, especially a Competitive one? HaloCustoms Community Montage could be revived, but it needs heavy promotion from the website’s staff. I’m going around in full cycle again – I play games for fun. So yes, there’s definitely going to be Customs involved.
What about the good people of these forums? Who am I to them now? Am I just another username, or something more? Do I care about them anymore? I want to say all the right answers, but I’m not sure. Hopefully I don’t choke on uncertainty.
It’s Not Over Yet
In about four months, I’ll be starting my life at college. There’s absolutely no guarantee that anything will be the same. Lots of variables will have to be aligned just right for me to continue activity into Halo 5, or XBOX in general. Things come and go, so I’ll try to make the best of my time in this community. I don’t want my Halo Experience to come to an end based upon regrettable circumstances.
I should also mention separate from the chronology, that the countless amount of people I have met and have come to know have an existence in my mind and soul. No names need to be given for this idea to be understood. I'm sure that's part of your Experience, too.
"In conclusion..." would be an easy way to summarize my sentiments about what my Halo Experience really is. To be honest, I don't know. No amount of reflection can really put words into my mouth about it. Maybe one day, when the journey is over, we can sit back and really know what it means.
One thing I can say for sure: the Halo Experience is not just about a video game.
It is the culmination of much more.
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look forward to playing with you again in the future.
but as you may have read, as far as hosting goes, I'm done with that.