343 Industries studio chief Bonnie Ross has issued an apology to fans on behalf of the development team for the issues that are beleaguering "Halo: The Master Chief Collection" at this time, and has stated that the team is "committed to working around the clock" to fix things.
"With the initial release of 'Halo: The Master Chief Collection,' however, we have not delivered the experience you deserve," the exec wrote on the Halo Waypoint blog. "I personally apologize for this on behalf of us all at 343 Industries. Our team is committed to working around the clock until these issues are resolved."
Ross guaranteed that the team will fix the issues that players are having and then detailed how it plans to make things right with fans. "While our team works on continual improvements and towards solutions, my commitment to you is that we will take care of all owners of 'Halo: The Master Chief Collection.' Our primary and continued focus is first on fixing the issues at hand. Once we've done that, we will detail how we will make this right with our fans."
"On the matchmaking front, we have encountered unexpected issues that were not apparent in our internal test environment and that have resulted in a frustrating experience, including long matchmaking times and low session success rates. Within 343 Industries and Xbox, I can assure you that resolving these issues is our #1 priority," she continued. "We continue to partner with the Xbox platform team to analyze all data to make ongoing server-side adjustments to continually improve the matchmaking experience."
"We are also preparing additional content updates that will address existing campaign, UI, and other issues to improve the overall experience. With each update we will carefully analyze data to confirm that the improvements we're seeing internally are also happening with fans at home."
Since launch, the title has been suffering with numerous matchmaking issues, from long wait times to unevenly matched teams. Several server and client-side patches have been released that have helped alleviate the issues slightly, but, according to 343, there are still "far too many" players that are not seeing improvements.
"Know that we're trying to be as nimble as possible to put fixes in place," she added. "We are planning multiple server-side tweaks and game content updates over the coming weeks. Looking forward, I want to give you a high-level cadence of the latest updates we're currently working on. Development and testing of our latest content update continues and we are on track for release later this week."
"We will update you on the status and patch notes of the content update once we have a better understanding of our release window. Only through making changes on both the 'server side' (matchmaking and other server rule sets) and, via content updates (to the game itself), can we make the significant progress we're working towards. And in the interest of expediency, we're attacking the problem from both sides, non-stop."
"Please accept my heartfelt apologies for the delay and for the negative aspects of your experience to date," Ross concluded. "We're doing everything in our power to resolve it as quickly as possible."
