Max Hoberman
@MaxHoberman
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Founder and CEO of @CertainAffinity . Former multiplayer, online, and UX design lead for Halo 2 and Halo 3. @RST_Texas board member.
Austin, Texas
Joined June 2013
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The ignorance here is infuriating:
I see mention of the skill-based matchmaking component I designed for Halo 2 and 3 on this site every so often. It's usually mentioned reverently, but then an outlier jumps in to claim "it can't work today". I disagree.
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Ah, Halo 2. The fear at Bungie and within MS at large when I decided to ditch the game browser and only support matchmaking was palpable. I knew that if I didn't, our matchmaking was doomed to fail though. This was a huge risk, yet I'm not a risk taker. 1/5
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The failure of modern skill-based matchmaking, imho, is that it's designed to maximize these perfect match scenarios and minimize the others. When it's working, a majority of games become super tight, super stressful. That's not fun for most players. Where's the variability?
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Here's a blast from the past – the first ever Halo screenshot, from 1999.
@joestaten
and I crafted it together, in a rush, at his desk. He knew what to put in it, I put my photography degree to work.
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It's interesting that my old ranking system from Halo 2 still gets so much love. I recall when I set out to design it, Michael Evans, one of our engineering leads, introduced me to the Elo rating system for chess. The point swapping made sense, but I wanted progression too...
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One of my devs informed me that there's quite a discussion of my tweets re:matchmaking on Reddit. I read through it all and now feel like I need to clarify a few things.
First, Halo 2 and 3 both used SBMM (before it had a name). H2 was a modified ELO system of my own design...
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As a business leader it's exceptionally difficult to navigate highly politicized issues like transgender and abortion rights. But I'm not content to sit back and say or do nothing. Here's a message that I was thrilled to share with all
@CertainAffinity
full-time staff today.
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Common characteristics of a LAN party: You're playing with people you know and like. There's a wide array of skill and experience. Communication is prevalent and boisterous. There's friendly competition, but the stakes are low. Everyone is having fun.
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Wow, the reaction to my rant about SBMM has been off the charts. I love reading responses, including people on all sides of the fence. It's all useful data for my designer brain. Thanks for sharing your sentiments. Here's another old Halo development tidbit as a holiday treat...
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Segregating high skill players from the population at large, forcing long wait times on them, is a form of discrimination. Designers should strive to find a way that players of all skill levels can have fun together. Casual, inconsequential Unranked matchmaking is one way.
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We also didn't track skill/level globally, only per-playlist. The net result was that Unranked matchmaking allowed a very wide range of skill levels to match together for what everyone agreed was casual, inconsequential fun. Again, that's the way it should be, in my opinion.
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I dabbled with handicap settings and asymmetric game mode design as others. Game devs shouldn't take the easy way out and default to segregation though, there's far more that can be done. Derogatory views like this, among game devs, is a cop out - and a disservice to players.
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The system that I designed for Ranked playlists ensured a healthy mix. Sure, it sucks watching your favorite team get their butt kicked. But it comes full circle when they're the ones kicking butt. Throw in tight, evenly matched games every so often, and that's a ton of fun.
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By intentionally allowing a range of skills to match together, we provided 3 experiences in ranked matchmaking: an easier one where you can kick butt, a harder one where you're likely outmatched, and an evenly matched one. My theory was that a good mix of these three was ideal.
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What I implemented cleanly divided the space into Ranked and Unranked matchmaking playlists. Ranked filtered opponents based on level. This was for when you wanted a competitive match - but even then, I intentionally allowed variability in the range of levels we matched you with.
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I haven't even gotten to Unranked playlists yet. I designed these to NOT factor in skill/level in the search for opponents. Yes, our engineers utilized the same codebase and kept skill/level as a search criteria, but we substantially de-prioritized it in matchmaking.
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OK, brace yourself. It doesn't feel right sharing that old Halo 3 matchmaking design doc without also sharing this UX overview companion doc. This is a big one, with 22 images. Please excuse my colorful language.
Much of this will be hard to decipher, unless you played H3.
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Why not always evenly match people though? My reasoning was that these are actually the most stressful matches of the set. Sure, they're the most fun to watch for spectators: games come down to the wire. That's because the team that wins is the team that outperforms expectations.
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Since the natural skill level distribution of players follows a bell curve, there are outliers: inherent low skill and high skill players. Characterizing the high skill ones as "sweaty teens hopped up on Monster Energy" is really disrespectful.
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This variability was a topic of hot debate internally, during development, 20 years ago. Obviously no one wants to get stomped continuously. On the flip side, it gets dull (for most people) continuously stomping others. However, it IS fun having the upper hand some of the time.
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Halo was fantastic in this respect. Our explicit goal with Halo 2 mp was to replicate this experience online. Our goal with Halo 3 mp was to refine this and expand the types of online experiences you could have together.
Does this mean Halo has always been competitive? 🤔
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I have Halo 3 on my mind, so I dug through the archive to find something new to share.
You may recall me mentioning that the Xbox Live team made us miserable. Well here's a letter I wrote them in April of 2005, with lots of input from Butcher. Help us help you, essentially. 1/2
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Saturday is the 25th anniversary of my first day at
@Bungie
. I'd packed everything I owned in my car and drove from Austin to Chicago, arriving without a place to stay. I hit the ground running on deadlines for Myth: TFL, and slept on a cot at the office for my first 2 weeks.
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@MintBlitz
I designed the ranking systems for H2 and H3. I had to use Trueskill in H3, but didn't want to – it wasn't aligned with my philosophy. It's predicated on a notion that the faster you reach your actual level, the better, and a belief that perfectly balanced games are always best.
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I also had supreme confidence in the technical implementation. Special thanks to Chris Butcher at Bungie, and
@BoydMulterer
of XBL for ensuring this was the case. Also huge thanks to everyone at Bungie, on the Live team, and elsewhere at MS who supported this grand vision. 5/5
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Planning, partnership, and
perseverance brought Halo 2 online to life, and from what I can tell, online console gaming has never been the same since. Strangely enough, I wasn't particularly nervous when we launched. I knew the design was solid and tested. 4/5
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There's a lot of excitement for proximity chat in CoD. A couple of my guys pointed it out and we started discussing the feature that we rolled out way back when for Halo 2. Then we wondered: was it novel, original to Halo? I actually don't know. Do you?
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I did what I've done a few times since: start with big ambition, then work my ass off to mitigate the risk and tilt the odds of success maximally in my favor. In the case of Halo 2, my design was comprehensive: a popup friends list, presence, invites, messaging, parties... 2/5
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In celebration of reaching 5,000 followers, I dug into the archive and rediscovered one of my early Halo 3 design docs. This is timely because it discusses rankings and matchmaking and everything in between. Note that this was very, very WIP, and shortly thereafter I was...
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... pregame lobby, matchmaking, rankings, postgame lobby, etc. This was far more than we could manage internally, so we partnered with the Xbox Live team, and co-op'd them essentially so Live was an extension of our team. We even pushed them to support live beta testing. 3/5
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For all aspiring time travelers! Very cool, I'm curious how much functionality they'll be able to replicate. If they can reach feature parity in places, I wonder if they might enhance or add features in line with my original design specs... 🤔
Halo 2 will launch on Insignia in Public Beta on March 15th at 20:00 GMT (16:00 EST, 13:00 PST) with the following 10 multiplayer playlists. Please ensure your console is setup, and you've signed up for your Gamertag. See you soon! :D
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Gah, I have Halo on the brain. I sat in on a meeting with our team and 343 today, which started it. Then an employee showed me how my tweets, and sometimes even likes of tweets, get picked up on Reddit. Sigh.
For fun, I looked through the archive again, and stumbled on this...
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Everyone is always asking about cut mp maps from Halo 2. Well here's one I have no recollection of: Overboard. Maybe it morphed into another? Carney would remember, they're his drawings. I recall being adamant that mirrored > rotational symmetry, so that may have been a factor.
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There's some discussion on here about our intent with jumps off subtle geometry in early Halo trilogy mp maps. Let me shed a bit of light on the matter. Trick jumps came in three forms:
1) Jumps we planned for. These sometimes required crouch jumping, by design (my favorites).
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@MintBlitz
By design! Our approach was "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." It was the first Halo online game though, so what wasn't broken?
LAN parties.
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While I'm sharing more old Halo 2 multiplayer map designs, here's what I believe is the very first drawing for Ascension. I'm not sure this has ever been shared before. It obviously went through a few revisions—paper design is cheap.
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Alright, third and final round. Which map is this, from the end of Halo 3 preproduction?
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Seeing these old Halo multiplayer maps being resurrected makes me want someone to dredge up Mofocross. It was a Warthog v Ghost race map, with a road that looped around the perimeter of an island. I made it using the terrain editor, way back in Chicago ... I think in 1999.
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@MintBlitz
Because philosophically, and somewhat contrary to this latest blog post, I didn't believe that perfectly balanced games were always the most fun; in fact, I felt they were often the most stressful. This is the fundamental flaw in TrueSkill.
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Stumbled on something fun this morning - a bit more of what we were planning for clan support in the original Halo 2. Wish we'd had time to implement all of this.
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An addendum to this thread I posted yesterday, on Halo 2's 19th birthday. This is a bit more context for people who didn't experience online console gaming before Halo.
Ah, Halo 2. The fear at Bungie and within MS at large when I decided to ditch the game browser and only support matchmaking was palpable. I knew that if I didn't, our matchmaking was doomed to fail though. This was a huge risk, yet I'm not a risk taker. 1/5
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I had a dream with people from my past life at Bungie in it. I woke up thinking about the nervousness that I had making the call to remove falling damage from Halo 2 multiplayer. There are moments like this from my time as a designer that I still recall vividly. How odd.
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I've been sharing tidbits from my original Halo 2 multiplayer, UI, and online specs, but here's a real treat: an entire design doc. I wasn't initially in charge of the larger scale mp game, so I had to play catch-up. This was my plan.
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I think this has been shared before, but I might be mistaken. Here's an iteration of my paper design for Midship. I'd actually like to see this version built in Forge, to see how it plays, if anyone feels adventurous!
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I shared my old Halo 2 UX flow design doc with my team, went in to verify that the small text was legible, and stumbled on this surprise from 2003! I don't think that was final text...
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Above 6, any one player has too little ability to meaningfully impact the outcome of the game. This was for evenly matched teams of course. For mismatched, your mileage may vary.
5 was my ideal number. I tested this a lot during development and it seemed to hold up. Thoughts?
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I'd forgotten how ambitious the original plan for Clan support in Halo 2 was. Here's a snippet from a prototype we built to explain the vision for ranked Clan matches and Clan stats to the Xbox Live team.
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While looking through old Halo documents I also stumbled on this high level online design goals document that I wrote for Halo 3 in January of 2005. Anything interesting here?
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“Ha! hold my brain; be still my beating Heart.”
It's Finally Here.
After 14 Years Halo 2 is back and the original Xbox Live has returned. I spent the last two weeks recording everything that made the game special.
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I also wanted visible ranks. This was inspired by Myth:TFL. Bragging rights matter. Aspiration matters. Knowing at a glance roughly how good your teammate or opponent is matters — a lot. Rankings that feel fair and behave consistently, intuitively, are also extremely important...
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@levij951
@DMC_Ryan
I loved the sandbox before sprint, and remember toying with it (maybe early H3?) and thinking it was unnecessary and added complications. Some argue it's a required feature of modern shooters, and the audience expects it. Priorities?
That said, I also miss dual wielding 😬
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Oooh, I stumbled on one more tidbit from the early development of online features for Halo 3. This is an email. A rare peek into the _______ factory. Interesting?
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@krassenstein
It's also called empathy and compassion, and a good chunk of America is lacking it.
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@Delavegalaw
@gtconway3d
Did I take them, do I know?
If I took them, that would blow.
My boss, he hid them in a shoe.
But I support him, yes I do.
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I had another theory while working on Halo 2/3 multiplayer: that 4-6 players per team was the optimum number for a casually competitive experience. With 3 or fewer, the pressure on each individual is too great: there's no margin for error...
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If you take nothing else from this thread, please take this:
For H2 and H3 I assumed the skill of the player base would map to a bell curve, and I designed the ranking and associated matchmaking systems for the middle of that curve, where the largest population resides.
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@haileyx24
I briefly considered them for Halo 2. The cost to implement was too high—especially if you wanted them to play objective games. I opted to invest our very limited programming resources in creating a strong online ecosystem instead.
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The beauty of showing our own game behind closed doors at Gamescom is that I also get to share a little with you. Take this concept art poster, for instance...
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Cool wall in the
@CertainAffinity
new Toronto office space. We keep busy — this isn't everything we've worked on!
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@Halo_VFX
We're not doing any remaster work at
@CertainAffinity
at present, though there is something nostalgic in some of the work we're doing.
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I've explained the mechanics in excruciating detail. It was designed to grind™.
Halo 3 used a modified TrueSkill system designed to roughly mimic H2. Your visible rank, which was also used for matchmaking, was the LOW end of the TS probability range, not the middle, as they...
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So I kept a symmetric point swap, but started everyone at level 1, rather than middle. Then I had to factor in early player experience, so as to not turn people off, so I added in a de-escalating "point loss reduction" factor. I went with 25 levels at first but expanded to 50...
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If you enjoyed Lockout from Halo 2 you might also enjoy seeing our original design doc for it. I'd forgotten that this was initially intended as our 1x1 level, designed for poor split screen souls without Internet access or a LAN party to call home.
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Here's one more old Halo 2 mp map paper design as we rush headlong into the weekend — another Carney special. This was an attempt to follow up our E3 showing with another dynamic BTB map. I prefer Zanzibar, but this did have some epic vehicle moments.
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Considering a talk about bringing Halo 2 online and spearheading XBL & console online gaming in the process. Any interest?
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And since someone mentioned Halo 2's mp map Waterworks, here's some very, VERY early drawings for it. Not my favorite map, but we learned lessons from it that affected subsequent maps. I don't believe these images have ever been shared before.
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❤️ this. I'm breaking my self-imposed Twitter ban to share.
Hi, I'm Max, CEO and founder of
@CertainAffinity
. I'm not going to
#GDC
because I have too much on my plate, other travel, back issues, and I'm an introvert.
I try to make the world a better place, and lead by example.
Not going to
#GDC
and I never have bc I could never afford it. So instead, let’s do a round of online networking?
Hi, I'm Shila. EP for
@MetalHellsinger
Believer of kindness and hope to encourage an ounce of humanity in our industry.
RT and say hi?
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2) Jumps we didn't plan for, subsequently discovered by QA, but that we decided to leave in.
3) Jumps we weren't aware of, discovered by the community after we shipped. Many of these would have fallen in the second category, had we known - high skill level, more layers of depth.
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I always get such a strong reaction when I share tidbits about Halo 2 mp development. I gathered a bunch of files a while back, including this drawing scraped from our Bnet post showing Carney and my original design for Zanzibar. What do you notice changed?
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Since
#Halo3
is trending, here are some miscellaneous (and a little absurd) thoughts on multiplayer that I jotted down at the very start of development.
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@MintBlitz
At its core, what you're all calling the 50 level system was about grinding to acquire an accurate level over time, not about getting you there as quickly as possible. And it was tuned with matchmaking to allow a decent amount of variability in matches...
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This brings back fond memories. Making Halo 2's multiplayer was intense, but a lot of fun. Carney doesn't mention the time before Cotton, when the powers that be tried to take him for sp, leaving me with zero mp artists, but in hindsight I'm not sure that I ever told him.
The story of Halo 2's iconic multiplayer maps: tight deadlines, a tiny team, and a visit from Napoleon Dynamite
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I maintain that allowing this was the right call, and suspect that current SBMM systems are often too strict. This is a configuration (and philosophy) issue.
Both games also increased the assumed level of players in parties when they were outside of allowable range for mm...
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@MintBlitz
In order to make it work I had to alter the fundamentals of how Trueskill worked, and in ways counter to it's core design and intention (and invention). Even then we lost the transparency and intuitiveness that I desired.
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...intended. Then we manually, drastically slowed down TS convergence, so the probability range (your lowest and highest statistical skill) shrunk very slowly. Ta-da, a 1-50 system where everyone starts at the bottom. I thought this was very clever at the time. I agonized over...
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Today was a second full day of behind closed doors pitches at Gamescom, and our playable demo put a lot of smiles on people's faces. We tell everyone the project codename, and it's bound to get out, so let me be the first.
Say hello to Loro, a working title for our original FPS.
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I signed a new game dev agreement for
@CertainAffinity
today and I couldn't be more excited! If you're a developer please check out our many open positions in Austin, Toronto, and for select roles remote.
Fun facts: We're now 14 yrs old, still indie, and have never had a layoff.
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Let's play more Halo guessing games! Here's another map at the end of preproduction. Which is it?
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For those wanting to dig deeper into these old systems, here's the nuts and bolts of Halo 2's ranking system described in explicit detail:
Oh wow, I didn't realize I still had this. In the 2nd episode of the Halo 2: Artifacts podcast I mentioned messaging for an internal beta test seeking people to cheat the ranking system. I eventually turned that into a post on explaining the system.
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I wrote this on November 13, 2004. It's a snapshot in time. I didn't know definitively how Halo 2 would be received at the time.
It's a shame that I never made it past this very rough beginning of the tale—it would have been good! So much invention. So much that's now the norm.
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Hey look at that, I'm almost to 5,000 followers. Seems like something to celebrate, so I dug through my old Halo design docs and stumbled on something that will be a real treat to share with you all when I hit that number!
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Fun fact: My first full-time job in the game industry was titled "Graphic Designer/Webmaster" at Bungie. That was ... oh ... coming up on 25 years ago, geez!
Love Halo and have a passion for creating Halo art and design? We're looking for a skilled Community Graphic Designer to join us and create awesome content. Would love to hire from within the Halo community! Details on this contract position below.👇
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@MintBlitz
Exactly. It's fun to be the better player at times, everyone knows that. It's also fun to face a more skilled opponent sometimes, as you learn and admire and aspire. The big caveat here is that rampant cheating degrades trust and ruins the effect in both scenarios.
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...point loss than gain. This asymmetry was the worst part of my design. I'm sorry once again! I've often thought of what I'd do differently, were I ever to do it again, and I have an idea I hope to explore further. It's inspired by CoD's best enhancement of my systems: prestige.
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OK Halo 2 multiplayer fans, here's another blast from the past: our paper design for Ascension. This was actually the 2nd, revised version of the plan.
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@TheFoxEssence
Getting online at 2am the night it went live. Everything up to that point was theory. Seeing it play out just as our small mp/online/UX team had hoped, with the world finally able to experience our friends list, messages, parties, matchmaking, rankings, maps, modes, etc. was epic
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To clear up another misconception, both H2 and 3 would try to match you close to your level, but there was some mismatch intentionally allowed (and more over time, if you couldn't find a quality match). Butcher and I had a passionate debate about this in 2003! I remember it well.
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I'm starting to see Twitter staff get locked out as part of the massive layoff, and it's heartbreaking. I've been running my company for 16 years as of this week, a bootstrap startup now with hundreds of employees, and I've never had a layoff.
@elonmusk
there is a better way.
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...a solution for months before landing on this idea.
Going back to H2, at low levels you were artificially boosted by reduced point loss. This was hard on players on the low end of the skill curve. Sorry!
Players at the high end of the skill curve were punished by greater...
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A blast from the past that I shared with one of my employees today. I wrote this to explain Halo 2 rankings when we rolled them out, many moons ago. The system I designed had it's faults, but I know some still look back on it fondly.
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This approximated what we had in Halo 2. There was no way it would ever be as intuitive, but the response still seems like it was very positive. That's a big relief, I was very nervous about this. Thoughts?
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Almost a year ago I made a commitment to our employees, with the fate of Roe v. Wade looming, and against a backdrop of an uptick in legislation restricting access to healthcare, including for trans people. I shared that message here afterwards, so it only feels right to let
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For Halo 3, I couldn't roll my own rankings, so had no choice but to tame Trueskill. I did my best by displaying rank not as the middle of the probability range, but instead as the lower bound. Then we forced TS to slow down its convergence: essentially put a speed limit on it...
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We've been in development on this for quite a while, so it's exciting to finally be able to announce our involvement! It's a very strong partnership on an inspiring new IP. Of course we can't say any more about the game now, but our team is in the mix doing awesome work daily.
We are proud to announce our partnership with
@ArchetypeEnt
as a lead co-developer on
#EXODUSGAME
, the exciting new sci-fi RPG first revealed at The Game Awards.
Learn More:
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We showed off our new original game and I got this. Hype!
The hot topic in our team sync was X. They really liked what was shared at the all hands and there is great interest in participating in playtests. I also had more than a few people ask how or when they can transfer to X.
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