Halo Waypoint just dropped a new post addressing the current state of the game and all their plans to fix it. Since some of these fixes haven’t come to the game quite yet, their post is a road map of sorts that will include mechanical fixes. In terms of a content road map, 343i isn’t sharing that yet and hopefully we will get that soon.

Starting off, the developers plan to fine tune is shooting dynamics. More specifically, being shot and shooting around corners. By the looks of things 343i is really goanna be paying attention to where the player is standing around a corner, as well as how your bullets fly through the sky at your target. So long story short, 343i is planning to optimize these dynamics that are based on networking latency to help make the experience better for everyone.

“Imagine the server as the arbiter of multiple different timelines and having to reconcile everything that happened in those timelines into something that makes sense for all players.:

343 Industries

As outlined in the post on Waypoint, the first steps that 343i took today include:

• As of today, we’ve increased the priority of low pings to our servers in the matchmaking process. This step should help you match with local players, and therefore have a better connection, more often. As you get more of these local matches, instances of playing on further data centers will also decline.
• Separate from the bullet point above, our Services team has taken additional steps to help ensure you can have quality matches with players from your respective regions, more often. We expect this to have a noticeable impact when making matches for players in less populated regions around the world including – but not limited to – Australia and Asia. This update, which went live yesterday, has already shown promising results and should take further advantage of this morning’s changes. Please keep an eye out and let us know how your games start to feel.
• This morning’s update should also prevent players from “geofiltering” their online matches. Since this was impacting matches after they were put together via our matchmaker, it was causing unstable connections for the other players in the lobby. To learn more about this and why it’s being prevented, please read this post on Waypoint.

On the note of how the weapons fire, the next fix is going to come in the form of melee and shot/hit registration. This is one of the fixes I have been waiting for, I can’t tell you how many times I have run into the problem of not having my melee smacks and energy sword hits register, so this fix is a welcomed one in my eyes.

“This is one of the top priority issues for my team because if you can’t trust your shots or melees to land, your whole Halo experience begins to suffer. We know we still have a few bugs here and are actively working to make sure we fix them as fast as we can.”

343 Industries

Along with fixing hit registry they will also be helping the flow of combat by fixing the missing collision and melee phasing. So, if you’re driving a vehicle and you miss a splatter you swore you should have hit, then now that will be getting a fix as well. Melee phasing, phasing being the launch attack that payer can perform with the energy sword as well as normal melee attacks and will be reworked and be getting a distance adjustment.

FAQ

Q: What’s the server tick rate?

A: Our 4v4 matches run at a 60hz tick rate, and Big Team Battle games run at 30hz. In the future, online campaign coop will run at a 30hz tick rate as well.

Q: Why do my shots appear to miss when I watch back in Theater films / Observer mode?

A: This is due to the latency compensation the server does to ensure shots land correctly. Remember that when the server receives a shot it rewinds time for that shot so that the shot is performed in the same way as the client fired it, this means that shots in Observer / Theater mode will appear to miss as we don’t rewind time in these modes.

We have future work planned that will perform the latency compensation when viewing a player in first person, but unfortunately due to the way the system works, third person in theater / observer will always be slightly off. Again, the higher the latency of the shooter, the more significant the error will appear.

For more information, visit this link for a more in-depth look at the coming changes.