Customs Night (pre3 edition [Halo: Reach]) (Recruitment)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Wednesday, June 04, 2014, 21:12 (3635 days ago)

Like so many annual events, Customs Night is approaching again. Fortunately you don't have to read months of updates, articles, and forum posts to be ready for the revelations of Customs Night (which is good because I'm only up to about February). What is Customs Night, you ask? It's a weekly get-together held in Halo by Community Customs where everyone present plays custom games. More specifically, it starts at 9:00 PM US Eastern time and continues until everyone or nearly everyone is tired of playing or just plain too tired. At Customs Night we play custom and standard gametypes on custom maps (and occasionally a standard map or two also), ranging from large to small, from competitive to silly, from simple to complicated, and from new to old. Since it's the first week of the month, we'll be playing Reach. If this sounds like fun to you, why not join us? You can do that by simply replying to this post (or the one on HBO) with your gamertag. If you do that, you'll get a message when we're getting started (because you get notified of messages when you log on but not invites, and invites expire). We also accept people that haven't signed up, we just prefer that you tell us beforehand so we can be ready.

Things to keep in mind:

- we pretty much play whatever the people present want to play
- we don't run modded content because of concerns about the present and future risks of bans for it
- one of the CC admins (a group including ShadowoftheVoid, iHyokin, Gnrl Vagueness) will keep party lead all night to try to keep things consistent and fair (this may change in rare instances involving well-known players and file share difficulties or the party being split again)
- if you want to play something we don't already have, you'll have to tell us where to get it, that is, you'll have to put it in your file share or give us the gamertag of someone that has it in their file share (or give us the file name ahead of time so we can search for it)
- we try to change things up by going between more and less serious maps and gametypes and changing whose stuff we run
- suggested supplies: a map, a story, a friend, a joke, a snack, extra armor
- that time again is 9:00 PM EST and the game is Halo: Reach-- I hope we'll see you there!

We had a great turnout last week. The game didn't seem to like a nearly full lobby thought and in the game where we passed 13 or so people nearly everyone lagged out to the lobby or lagged into a different instance of the game. Someone said the game gets laggy with more than 12-14 people and unstable with more than 14 people and I think someone else backed them up, and I think I've seen this happen before. If you were there and wondering what happened, that was it. I'd like to thank everyone that joined, early or late or whenever (except for one or two people that were being jerkish-- I doubt they'll see this but the point stands). The unofficial policy that I go by (which we should get around to making an official version of) is to keep the party completely open until there are 8-10 people in the lobby (or in the game), and then change it to friends only, and keep it friends only until there are 12-14 people and then change it to invite only. I was slow to do this last week and it may have contributed to the game breaking up. I'll try to get that looked at and we'll consider capping the player count at 14. Does anyone have more information on how the game handles larger numbers of people? Just giving your experiences would be fine.

A note: we're considering changing our schedule, which currently consists of playing Reach the first week of the month and Halo 4 the other weeks, with Halo 3 basically thrown in at random every few weeks or months. Some people have suggested adding in Halo 3 on a regular basis, or removing Halo 4, or both, and there have been other variations involving Halo 3, Reach, and Halo 4, all together, in a rotation. We're open to feedback on this, I for one really want feedback in fact.