No, I'm not perfect, but I have the feeling you're the kind of person who is used to meeting imperfect people on the internet.
Posted by: FyreWulff Rex
I'm following my strategy in the Megalo thread of asking a bunch of questions since it's now or never, and seeing what comes out the other end if any of them get answered.
1) Is there any particular person at Bungie that pushed for Halo to have a complete stat tracking system starting with Halo 2? About how much time did it take to get Halo 2's stat system up and running?
2) As someone who is learning by trail-by-fire on real time stat tracking databases work, what's the highest row insertions per minute you've seen on something as big as Halo stats? Another way to word this is what's the highest amount of data per minute you've usually seen in terms of MB/GB?
3) Who thought of the Game Viewer and can we give that person an award? Mapping 3D data to 2D images was a pretty cool idea to give you a web-usable view of kill lines. Was there ever any consideration of implementing this in game (ie, press a button while watching a film and all the kill lines from the entire game show up)
4) As the Halo games went on, the number of "unreliable" games seemed to drop dramatically. There was a lot in Halo 2, less in Halo 3, and now I hardly see a game come up unreliable in Reach. Was this due to improvements in the netcode along the way, or an increase in the amount of data Bungie.net is fed?
5) Who wrote up and maintained the Reach Stats API? I like that person and/or team. About how much data has been used to date from that API?
6) In the ODST stats, we have the cool circle-thingy for Firefight games which let you quickly select stats for the whole game, or rounds, or sets within seconds. That was pretty neat. Why didn't it come back for Reach? Was it due to the expectation that FF MM would be a fix amount of rounds/sets?
7) Can you give us a rough number on the amount of people that have linked up to Bungie.net and have stats all across (say, at least one campaign and one multiplayer game) Halo 2, 3, ODST, and Reach combined?
8) Can you give us a breakdown of male vs female spartan models in multiplayer across 3/ODST/Reach? How about people set to Spartan vs Elite for model preference for 3/Reach? (Although I guess ODST's gender split would mainly be "who plays as Dare and who does not")
9) Before you hand off the stats, can you change my callsign in Halo 3 to 'N64'? Because it's blocked by Halo 3's callsign settings option but some lucky jerks got it randomly generated by the game, and therefore can have it while I cannot. The internet cannot stand for this injustice. Have I ever told you how cool Bungie employees are?
10) Were Halo 2 stats something that started early on in the game's development or something that came in later and was bolted on before ship?
11) Percentage wise, how much data does Bungie.net actually use versus the amount of data actually sent to it per game?
12) Were there any planned nameplates that got cut for Reach or Halo 3? I know one person in Halo 3 has an abandoned Bungie "Pro" nameplate for that game.
13) How many people unlocked Recon on their own between ODST releasing and now before the global unlock by 343? If you can't say a specific number, what % of the userbase has Recon right now in Halo 3?
14) How much cR has been earned off weeklies alone by the Halo: Reach userbase in total?
15) Was there ever any stat-based armor (beyond total cR) or nameplates considered for Reach or Halo 3?
16) Can you give us a breakdown on the % of the userbase that is wearing each base helmet? Was there a helmet that you thought would be fairly popular but turned out not to be, or the other way around?
17) Was Hayabusa ever considered for Reach, or was that a one-off tribute to Team Ninja for Halo 3 alone?
18) How many people are wearing the Pilot skull face? Was the skullface always for Pilot or would it have been wearable with other helmets?
19) Because it'd amuse me and other people, just how many Target Locator kills on ONI Sword Base have there been since Reach launched, versus TL kills in the rest of Firefight matchmaking combined?
20) How many BOBs has the Reach community sent to their demise?
21) How many people have killed the grunt at the end of "Halo" in Halo 3? Since it's the only Grunt in that level, I would think you could track how many people couldn't resist the urge to make a detour..
22) This one might go a bit deep, so I don't expect it to be answered, but here it goes. In Reach, we have a page in the Service Record with "legacy" data for Halo 3 and ODST, as a quick glance at that person's previous Halo career. And to be honest.. ODST's stat is how many grunts you have killed. That's a bit esoteric as an important legacy stat. Now, you guys didn't know Halo 2 was going to be shut down until we did. Was ODST always on that service record, or was there any plans at any time to have Halo 2 stats on that in-game screen, but it was dropped since nobody could play Halo 2 anymore?
23) Why did Bungie.net never track Halo 2 PC stats? Why could we never unlock the Halo 2 nameplate with H2 PC?
24) What is the total disk size of all Halo 2, 3, Reach, and ODST stats on Bungie's servers combined as of this mailbag? Total size of map variants and total size of films as well?
25) What is the most played developer map in each tracked game? I know at one point Jeremiah showed us a graphic that Lockout was the most popular map by a large margin, followed by Midship. How does that shake out for 3 and Reach, and what was the most popular Firefight map in ODST?
26) Did Bunge help the Halo Wars guys with stats for that game with manpower or consultation?
27) To this day people still describe a game as having "Bungie.net style stats" if it has any. Can any employees name or talk about another game's statistics support that they've liked, or you wish you had thought of a specific feature that Bungie.net doesn't have?
28) We can expect Bungie's Next Game(tm) to have stats of SOME kind. Has it been a great challenge to not only provide stats for a completely new game, but also have these stats work across multiple platforms?
29) How many times has Urk died in Halo across all tracked games? This across all modes.
30) Why is the gameviewer for Standoff some sort of weird N64-quality version of Standoff? Did somebody forget to render the final version of the map?
31) Since we won't be able to change them anymore, what's the final count on people wearing each lobby nameplate?
This.