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Intelligence Officer

Intelligence Officer

  • [C] UNIT LEADER
  • ACCESS [4] TOP SECRET〔CW〕

Now this comes as a greater surprise to many including myself but with its own challenges its been communicated that Waypoint is closing shop at the end of March. 

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Howdy folks!
Today I need to share some important information with our Waypoint community about changes coming to the site.

Over the years, the ways and places which players engage with each other and with development studios has continued to evolve. Back in my day, we didn’t have many choices – we went to the Bungie.net forums (and maybe one or two fan-run sites – looking at you halo.bungie.org) and that’s where you talked about all things Halo. Nowadays, there are more platforms and opportunities than ever to participate in communities of all shapes and sizes.

At Waypoint, we’ve seen this shift impact our official forums as overall usage has continued to dwindle. Meanwhile, we’ve seen steady growth across other areas – particularly our social media channels and our Halo Discord Server 101 – as our Community Team works to better meet players where they’re at.

Given this ongoing shift in player behavior, preferences, and overall usage, we have made the decision to sunset the Halo Waypoint forums at the end of this month. On Monday, March 20, we’ll put the forums into a read-only state as a transition step before we power down for good on Friday, March 31. If you have content and memories within these forums that you want to hold onto, please take steps to save and archive prior to March 31.

For years, these forums have served as a communal hangout where we’ve shared our passions for Halo, relayed feedback, engaged in lively debates, helped each other with issues, and fostered friendships. Thank you to everyone who has contributed along the way and been a part of the Waypoint community. In particular, I want to give a special shout out and thank you to our Waypoint forum moderators who have worked tirelessly to help make these forums a safe and welcoming space for all simply out of a mutual love and passion for Halo and this community.

At 343 Industries, our commitment to the Halo community is unchanged – we will still be listening, engaging, gathering your feedback, giving you updates, and helping you with support matters.

Halo Waypoint and our Halo social channels will continue to act as a source of official news for Halo (links down below). Player feedback and overall conversations with the development team and community will live on the Halo Discord Server 101. And for feedback in particular, we’ll continue to utilize the Halo Insider Program 10 for periodic surveys along with the ongoing outreach our partners in Xbox User Research conduct. And of course, we continue to monitor social media channels and some other forums, even if we can’t always respond.

For support, please bookmark the Halo Support Site 6 where you can find helpful articles and submit tickets if you encounter bugs or issues. You should also follow @Halo Support 5 on Twitter for timely updates and info for Halo Infinite and MCC. To report players or request an enforcement appeal please visit aka.ms/HaloSafety 1.

Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to seeing and speaking with you across our other Halo channels.

Cheers,
ske7ch

https://forums.halowaypoint.com/t/sunsetting-waypoint-forums/566065 ] 

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Intelligence Officer

Intelligence Officer

  • [C] UNIT LEADER
  • ACCESS [4] TOP SECRET〔CW〕

Just to share separately some speculation is the cost of Discourse and the ease of use to moderate, while I liked the design and the new UI is nice to look at maybe a little challenging to use its overall ethos did not follow what we know in the personifcation of achievements. Recognition from badges and Spartan Companies gone I can see why Discord forums which is still brand new really show the potential Ske7ch and the team want. Discord is not so friendly to long form content but it is a contender and even to us here we have to be careful what and how Discord is providing this service. I personally read and understood Ske7ch's message as an opportunity for other forums to grow and organically build back the community from fan sites. As a forum user myself it is disappointing but I will look to grow this forum here for conversations around Halo. 

To highlight more around costs, Halowaypoint forums are from Discourse in what is perceived as the enterprise package. 

As you can see prices go north of $300 and with the Xbox integration and customization options 343 Industries has done it could very well be higher than that. Where we don't have the official numbers it only makes sense the studios try to reallocate and tighten the ledger everywhere they can and with the free to use Reddit, Twitter and Discord its very easy to cut this form of communication out. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
Intelligence Officer

Intelligence Officer

  • [C] UNIT LEADER
  • ACCESS [4] TOP SECRET〔CW〕

Something else I shared over Waypoint and want to share here too - 

 

I could see an appeal for it but the ad nuasem and everyday conversation here on the forums is had over Discord, Twitter and Reddit. Its no longer a really competitive option to those otherwise free solutions. The forums have in many ways become its own echo chamber of ideas and the most successful ideas filter into the other platforms.

If anything the effort to maintain this forum is clearly harder than the automatic moderation capabilities of Discord which had to have been another reason. We all see misuse everyday, where someone should just make a Halo support ticket but instead come here and look for sympathy posting about their problems.

Discourse and the idea that Microsoft has unlimited money to burn through a forum already doesn’t sound great to type out, especially with the job cuts and ongoing recession. It should be easy to understand this decision was well thought out and calculated.

Given how little time we have left its likely the cost of operating doesn’t reflect the value it has. Its an unfortunate reality that Waypoint is going away like this but in 5, or 10 years we can be hopeful and ask for it to return the way we want it.

In the mean time I recommend other forums that are up and growing to talk about Halo if forums is the medium you want to talk about Halo through https://lysithea.ai

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