“menotyou135”, over on Beyond Entertainment wrote up this lengthy yet poignant article on
When I first started reading this article, I rolled my eyes a couple of times thinking it was going to be another rant by a competitive player who would whine about not having the competitive settings they wanted in the game. By mid-point that started to change, and by the end, I was cheering him on.
Here it is in it’s entirety. Any comments I have will be in light blue, along the way.
Some of the language in his article is not what I normally allow on my blog. However, given the emotion he seemed to have when writing the article and his coming around toward the end of it, I’m reposting the article in full, unedited. Readers beware….
Let me tell you a little story. When I was a kid, my mother would take me down to a place called the Movie Gallery. She would take me there and drop me off. In the Movie Gallery there was a little setup of 4 TVs next to each other. You paid a few bucks and you could play all day. You could play any game, but there was only ever one game running. Halo Combat evolved. I was around 10 years old and the big kids constantly whooped my ass, but I had fun. I counted off the days until Halo 2 would come out. I was so excited. I spent the next few years coming in and playing a mix of Halo 1 and Halo 2 every week. Sometimes more. My family couldn’t afford Xbox live, so that was how I learned Halo.
Every few months, someone would hook up a screen and show the MLG event all weekend. When other kids were looking up to LeBron James, I was watching Ghandi Rip off faces. Watching team 3D constantly avoid losing their winning streak. My mother obviously didn’t let me spend all weekend there, but I almost always caught the finals.
Then Halo 3 came out. Everybody was stoked and the little game corner was constantly packed. The owners added in two more TV and people brought their own so that we could play 4v4s. It didn’t feel the same though. Something was different. Often we went back and played Halo 2 simply because it was funner to us, but we still watched MLG. They still had the screen on every tourney.
HFFL: While I’ve played every Halo game, I didn’t get into the multiplayer aspect until Halo 3, so I can’t speak to how Halo 2’s multiplayer was. I can say that I immensely enjoyed Halo 3. Considering it’s long time success on XBOX 360, I can’t see how anything it had was bad. It had some amazing population numbers years after launch.
Eventually, the money ran dry, or people were stealing shit, or something because they shut down the Lan part, and I stopped playing halo for a while. Not completely. I would go over to a friend’s house and splitscreen matchmaking with him. I eventually got live in 2009, and I didn’t put the controller down. By this time, I knew that Halo 2 was better than Halo 3, but it was still able to hold my interest. I got an account on the MLG forums and started to bitch like everybody else. We missed the feel of Halo 2. We wanted that back. We wanted Halo to be both awesome and skillful. Halo 3 was awesome, but it lacked what Halo 2 and Halo 1 had.
Most of you know the rest of the story. We saw Reach rising over the horizon. We all were so excited. We saw the lead designer of Shadowrun was working on it. We saw all these interesting, though different things and we took a lot of it with a grain of salt. We figured the gimmicks could be removed if necessary and it was all good… until we found out that it wasn’t all good.
HFFL: Hmm, now here is where I diverge greatly from pro-players. I happened to LIKE Reach. Never mind that chronologically it happened before Halo CE. People often try to give me crap about that, and why did the Spartans in that game have features like jet pack, when Master Chief didn’t. Spartan IIIs vs Spartan IIs. Spartan IIIs needed to make up for what they lacked by comparison to Spartan IIs, nuff said. Personally, I liked sprint being added into games. Why shouldn’t super soldiers be able to sprint? I LOVE Jet pack. Again, why shouldn’t these super soldiers have a jet pack. Armor lock though…ugh
When Bungie released that game Halo got diagnosed with Cancer. We denied it a little at first, but we all eventually came to accept it. We tried to make it work. We tried to doctor it up. Create great forge maps. Blah blah blah… Then we got a miracle. 343i, the new Halo company gave us a title update. We got an answer to a lot of our problems and for a time at least, Halo’s Cancer seemed in Remission. We got some great classic maps from the Anniversary map pack, though many of us were highly upset that we didn’t actually get multiplayer in Anniversary. Still, it looked better than before.
HFFL: And HERE is one big reason why I’ve come to “not appreciate” the pro-player community. Believe me, “not appreciate” is me being VERY reserved from what I want to say here… I blame pro-players heavily for their bad attitudes towards Reach and it’s competitive settings for killing the popularity this game should have enjoyed. To quote my grandmother on an old clichéd line, “If you have something bad to say, better to say nothing at all.” That’s how I feel these pro-players should have taken this. Instead many trashed and thrashed Reach. It will take a lot for me to forgive those certain pro-players of their divisive attitudes towards Reach, then later Halo 4.
We saw Halo 4 on the horizon. This company that had given us this awesome map pack and the title update was going to get a shot at making a full Halo game. We saw this as a sign that Halo was going to come back. That MLG would pick it back up. We hoped that this game had the potential to bring Halo back. We united. We were all on the same page… or at least as close as you can get with a bunch of competitive personalities all packed together.
Then we got some news. We saw little things that worried us, and some big things that worried us, but we ignored most of it at first. However, it didn’t take long for us to realize that the Cancer was back. We saw it coming. However we still watched MLG’s pre-release tournament. We still went out and bought the game. We tried it for ourselves and had a short honeymoon phase. But that didn’t last long. After only a short while, our safteynet dropped us. The company that had gotten where it is today because of our game. They weren’t clear at first, but eventually it happened and we were forced to do something for ourselves.
HFFL: Wow, so Halo is supposed to revolve around MLG? Honest to gawd, this is probably the biggest reason I hate MLG. You did NOT make the game. You didn’t toil countless hours, some into the wee hours of the morning, missing out on your family time, to develop a “AAA” game. WHo the hell are you to say what the game settings should be? Change them for your “sport” but do NOT complain about the game. You only further serve to ruin a golden franchise and split the community even more.
During this time, that 10 year old boy died. The one who grew up wanting to be like the pros. The one who watched every MLG even since 2005 (or tried). I gave up and I grew bitter. I looked at people like Frankie and Kevin Franklin and thought to myself “Who are they to do this to MY game? Who are they do do this to MY community? To MY friends?” I hated them. I grew bitter and sour. I attacked anybody who supported their “creation.” I turned blame at anybody who I could, and I watched my imaginary green internet points skyrocket, because other people felt the same. Other people were just as angry as me.
Even so, I stuck with it. I stuck through them releasing more BTB maps when only 4 of the default maps were even close to reasonably sized. I stuck through them hiring Bravo, and Quin. A small part of that 10 year old boy still lingered inside of me hoping that something would change.
HFFL: I can sympathize somewhat here. Though he does have an air of “entitlement” here. I actually get that. I’m a long time Star Wars fan and when The Phantom Menace came out, I wasn’t a big fan of it as I felt it changed what Star Wars was for me. However, I quickly grew out of that, seeing the potential for more movies and the prequels were catering to a new younger audience. I got that. Halo is similar in some ways. For myself, I was in my very early 30s when Halo came out, so I’ve got a bit of a difference of age perspective here. However, using Star Wars as my point of reference, I can easily see the correlation here.
At the same time, all of the other bitter and angry people started fighting. Started turning against each other. The “Hope” that we had, the “Unity” that we had was crumbling. We were all stranded on an island, and do you know what we did? We drew lines in the sand so that those “other guys” wouldn’t come near us. We blamed people who were on our side. We attacked those who were trying to get the same thing that we were. We poisoned ourselves and it made me sick.
HFFL: It’s funny in a sad way to read that pro-players couldn’t even get along with each other here. See guys, you were ruining your own part (and I do mean PART) of the community here, not to mention affect the greater community that you are but a PART of…
I gave up. I swam away from the island. Waved goodbye to all the friendly faces, and I was never going to come back. I even decided to finalize it by purposefully banning myself from the island. I wanted nothing to do with it.
But that 10 year old inside of me was not dead. I kept up with some of what was going on. Some of the patch notes that were coming out. Some of what the modding community was doing. The ranking system coming out. My 10 year old self wanted me to go back, but my rational self didn’t want to. I was still bitter. I felt like all this was great and all, but it felt like it was too little, too late. That nothing is going to revive Halo.
But my stupid little 10 year old self wouldn’t shut up. He told me that Halo is not dead. Halo is on life support. That it is being held up by people who are far stronger willed, and far more stubborn that I was. It was being held up by the help of the same people I had despised, and insulted, and ridiculed. The same people who I thought I had the right to jab at, just because I had a bunch of imaginary green internet points. I am pathetic. I have no right to call myself a member of this community, when I was so quick to leave when things weren’t looking great. The very same people I thought poorly off were the people who actually had the balls to stay. And not only did they stay, but they did more for this game, than I ever did.
HFFL: So finally, it looks like the writer is seeing the light somewhat. Still a heavy scant to pro-gaming, but he’s coming around.
And then I started typing this message. I wont and say that it is easy for me. Even while I type this very line, I have a tear running down my right cheek. Over a fucking video game. I am pathetic. I don’t deserve any of the stupid internet points people have given me. I am not some great member of this community like I wanted to think I was. I am just a guy. Typing at a computer. Crying about a fucking video game.
The question is: Why bother? Why am I typing this? To be honest, I am not entirely sure. I wish I could make an excuse and say that I am drunk, but I am not. Something that might make it less humiliating when I finally hit send, even though I do not want to. Maybe this is my punishment to myself. For giving up on something that has been a part of me for so long and being such a fucking dick to those I disagreed with.
So what do I want? I don’t want your stupid fucking green internet points. I would prefer the Red ones. They are the ones I deserve, even if they are imaginary. I don’t want pity either.
This is what I want. I want all of you reading this right now who care about Halo to ask yourself something. Who have you been in this community. Think real fucking hard about that for a second. Have you been one of those people who has shoveled through shit to make this game and community better, or are you the shit.
HFFL: I bolded that article because it’s one point that I think EVERY Halo fan needs to read, reread, and contemplate. I hope for my part, that I’ve been a shoveler, and not what is being shoveled…
I will tell you one person you should be like. He is a person that I despised. That I verbally ridiculed on numerous occasions. A person that I laughed at in skype chats and pissed on every chance I got. I got a lot of imaginary green internet points for it too. It felt great at the time. It really made me feel like I was fucking somebody. His name is Eric Hewitt or if you would prefer GH057ayame. This mother fucker has done more for this series than just about anybody who has ever played the game. There are maybe 10 people I can think of that can compete. I hated a lot of things he chose to support during testing. Sometimes, I decided I didn’t like something BECAUSE he chose it.
He didn’t care though. He barely acknowleged me. I was just one annoying fly. He did not let himself breakdown despite me, and the majority of my friends constantly bashing what he did. He pushed forward and he fucking made something happen. Mix that with 343i’s improvements, many of which you can directly thank the person in question for, and Halo has finally come to a point of stabilization. The peak numbers are pretty much the same as they have been and stream numbers have been steadily rising.
HFFL: It was really nice to read that someone could eat crow on their words and actually give praise for a fellow fan.
Look at what we have to be grateful for:
-We got a 4sk BR and it even is able to miss a bullet to be 4sk, making it more consistent
-Bravo is working for 343i
-They gave us a map pack with skyline and monolith
-They have a map pack with pit and vertigo coming
-They added in a ranking system (even if it is cruddy)
-They fixed OS
-They increased the skill required to use the DMR
-They stated that they won’t ban us for playing modded gametypes
-They gave us team doubles
-They gave us team snipers
Now you can point out that all of those things, and more should have been that way when the game released. I agree one hundred percent, and if I were in your shoes, this stupid list wouldn’t change my mind about anything. I would even try to break it down and tell me how I am wrong if I so had the fancy, and I would use my arguing skills to win, because that is what I do here. I debate. I always have. It is what I am known for.
But that isn’t the point. I know there are fallacies in my arguments. There always are because on some level, I am always wrong. So are every one of you here, because we are discussing theoretical concepts of how enjoyable a video game is. Do you see how immaterial that is? How pathetic that is? If we weren’t all on the same page, we would use that argument daily as a cop out if we were losing any debate, and we would not be wrong to do so.
But this is more than a video game to us. We want it a certain way. We want it to be skillful. We want it to promote teamwork. Blah blah blah you know the drill by now. I didn’t see how pathetic and stupid it all was until I took a step back and watched the lines in the sand grow deeper and deeper from a safe distance.
But even with all of that said, is still important. We are so busy looking at everything that has gone wrong, that many of us are having problems realizing what is right.
HFFL: And finally, the writer wins me over. It took him nearly the whole article, but now I read where he seems to get the bigger picture. I’m still not entirely sure that he feels this way, but I think he finally sees that Halo is MUCH bigger than just the pro-player/competitive community. Halo is a gaming franchise and thusly SHOULD cater to ALL fans, not just competitive. There is room for ALL types of fans within Halo.
Halo 5 is looking to be better than Halo 4. We have an in man. Things have been looking up.
I agree that I have a seriously hard time believing that Halo 5 will fix it all. That is because it wont. The damage is done and moping about it won’t do a fucking thing. We all want to raise our voices so that 343i fixes what they broke.
I… get… it….
The part that most of you seem to not understand, and even if you do, you don’t acknowledge it, is that our island is only one of many, and that we aren’t all yelling for help together, that we aren’t going anywhere.
HFFL: HERE is where he finally acknowledges something I wish more pro-players would understand. You are only PART of a greater community. The respect you expect, the attention you crave, the settings you desire are only going to be achieved by being a cohesive part of the greater community for which you are a part of. STOP the needless divisiveness and get on board with the WHOLE community. While we all are never going to be on the same page, we should at least be in the same chapter…
I am not telling you to agree with everything that the other side says. I am not telling you that what you feel strongly about is not important. I am not even telling you to trust the person who this wall of text is telling you to respect. I am telling you to listen. Do you get that? Open your ears and hear what the other people have to say. Think about why they are saying it. We are all people. We all have brains and we all do things for logical reasons no matter how hard that may seem to believe. It is so easy to write someone off as stupid or not well known, and when you do that, you are wrong.
Most importantly, we all want Halo to succeed. We are a community.
HFFL: The above highlighted in light green is one thing I definitely want everyone to take from this article. Regardless if you are the head of a BIG Halo forum, a single gamer, a podcaster, a blogger, etc., we need to respect each other’s opinion’s, even if we dont’ agree with them. We should all understand that passion for Halo comes from all over and that just because someone isn’t known as well, does not mean their opinions are any less valid. That is something I face VERY often in the Halo community and it’s sickening. It’s one reason why I try to give voice to those individual gamers here. It’s why I seek out new and upcoming faces in Halo. It’s why I interview fans who may have a unique perspective on Halo but aren’t well known. It’s why I choose to promote fellow small blogs like myself. If the community is going to grow and be more effective, all of our voices need to be heard and not the relative few large sites or “famous” pro-players.
I spent a lot of time on MLG Forge Forum in Halo 3. There was a great guy there named Fritzter. You may know him as the maker of Amplified.
When we had stupid forge drama going on and everybody was arguing, he always repeated one thing.
“Sit down. Shut up. And forge.”
So in honor of him, I have this to say:
“Sit down. Shut up. And save Halo.”
HFFL: That last line in the article sums it all up very well.
-Sal
