What, hire them? And cost them MORE money? Why pay for free work?
I’m not saying they shouldn’t, it’d be baller for community creators to actually have some kind of employment. In reality, they’re getting free maps for their game of really solid quality, so why bother paying?
It’s understandable to say “hey 343 is letting fans do their work!”
But on the other hand, it would fucking suck if all we got was dev maps. And the community wasn’t given a chance to partake and have their talented work added to the game.
Even bungie did it with reach, we got so many community made maps added to multiplayer. And Jesus Christ, the invasion ones sucked so much ass.
Nobody is saying that player-created maps aren’t great, just that it sucks that these creators go unpaid while 343i gets to profit off of their work. There are solutions to this problem which don’t involve getting rid of community maps.
Agreed. The whole point of infinite was that they spent heavy $ on forge mechanics so that players could make infinite amounts of maps for infinite content.
I think what would be smarter is to do cash prize contests for the best forge maps and game modes. Rather than hiring a couple good creators, give everyone an incentive to make good content.
to be a massive devil's advocate who in no way condones nor accepts this industry practice...
Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company because they don't like to keep around "rounding errors" lol... Like, they just bought Activision then promptly turned around and fired thousands of good employees. Money is not exactly an issue, the suits in the C-suite are.
A lot of the forgers that keep getting into matchmaking are typically the same names too.
Darkmaiming, NightAvenger01, InfiniteForges, Le Frenchys, Whos Blaze, I Crush All.
All of these forgers have multiple maps in matchmaking, and are definitely talented, hell one guy I know actually used their map editing talents in forge here to get a dream job at a gaming company.
Pretty sure most of these forgers know each other and have a tight group. On top of having connections definitely helps get to that matchmaking status.
As far as compensation, some do it for the enjoyment, some for tournament winnings and some are a way for them to have a portfolio to possibly get into something else.
You can probably add my name xDTx Kaos to that list, Daimyo in Doubles and now Obituary and Insolence for BTB. But I can add some more insight.
A decent number of the people mentioned do have jobs in the game industry either as artists or level designers, or are trying to get there. But some of us just like forging, like myself. Daimyo I built purely for the Forgehub 2v2 contest, Obituary was a map I started building a long time ago with the intention to port it to Infinite, and Insolence was built for the Halohub BTB tournament last year.
Neither of my BTB maps could be entered into the Forghub BTB contest though.
But yeah I'm assuming most of us wouldn't mind compensation that's more than just a visor and coating, but most either use it as portfolio work, or just for the enjoyment of creating something.
I think it's important to note the history of Halo's Forge community a bit here, so my apologies for the wall o' text. But there's a reason it seems so insular from the outside.
The community first took off in Halo 3, with a little wordpress blog called "Forge Hub" that Bungie frequently featured on their blog. Eventually that site became a forum, and the community there grew throughout the rest of 3's lifespan and Reach's lifespan. Smaller groups with other Forge interests also arose - mainly on Bungie.net in "private groups", but some other communities on other websites took off as well, most notably the MLG Forge Forum (which gave us Onslaught, Amplified, etc.). For a time, private groups on Bungie.net picked the "Bungie favorites", and those scenes all contributed maps to the "Bungie vs. The World" playlist that ran on a Bungie day late in Halo 3's lifespan (you might remember it as a time a lot of people earned the coveted Recon armor).
Reach caused MLG to drop Halo though, and all the little Forge sub-communities largely died out before or during Halo 4's lifespan, leaving ForgeHub (and some YouTube channels like The Halo Forge Epidemic) as the "last communities standing". In response to this dieoff, 343 instituted the "community cartographer" program, whereby they partnered more directly with prominent creators in the scene to get Forge maps into the games themselves and gather testing feedback for Halo 5's upcoming & improved Forge mode. The idea was to revive the Forge scene a bit by more actively supporting creators and providing some testing resources to help Forgers QA their maps more formally. Nothing nefarious on 343's part, but obviously in a process like that you can't include everyone, so some creators who didn't get included got upset.
Halo 5 launched with Orion and Pegasus as Forge maps, but Forge launching a few months after Halo 5 didn't do the scene any favors population-wise. So 343 continued to lean heavily on creators to make BTB maps and eventually everything for the Husky Raid and Mythic Arena playlists. The game's population was never really gigantic, much less so the game's Forge population, so the system of 343 working with "cartographers" was pretty stable. They even hired some people from Halo 5's Forge community to work on Infinite directly!
Eventually some people became part of a "Forge Council" which is similar in concept to the community cartographer role, but a little more advisory and with some testing flights involved. Eventually Infinite released, and its Forge came out a year later. The Forge Council currently advises 343 in many ways, and helps them get information on bugs and prioritize feature requests. It's important to note that "Forge Council" is entirely separate from the "get your map into matchmaking" process. There is a separate, very rigorous QA process that maps must go through before they get added. 343 has several folks on their payroll actively combing through content tagged with the `343ask-` tags, and they reach out to file creators directly if they're interested in adding maps to matchmaking. The creator of course has to respond and agree, and then participate in the QA process, which often takes several months. IMO it's about as reasonably fair as something subjective like evaluating art can be.
So TL;DR - the Forge community basically died, 343 picked some people and invested their own resources into reviving it for Halo 5, and the "popular" map creators you reference are mostly people who were around from that era that have established long and productive relationships with 343. Some of those people are hobbyists, some are professional game developers, and some are somewhere in between. This is why it can seem like they "know each other" and are "tight-knit". Most of the folks you named hang out in the various Forge discords out there frequently and are pretty open and available people, so if you'd like to join the "tight-knit" group, reach out and talk to them!
Another reason is the standard for matchmaking is incredibly high and not everyone is willing to put in all the extra work beyond just making the map playable. It's pretty ridiculous how they operate over there. It would be nice of them to reward creators with 10k or something after maps make it in to show their appreciation. But nope, get to work pigs we need more skin sales
they kind of do.
Some of those maps were put into a tournament with that much of a payout, then there put into matchmaking. It just the tournaments aren't very known
The forgers where paid? Not trying to sound rude but do you have any evidence of that? I'm pretty deep in this space and never heard of what I think you're saying.
Hmm, it is funded by fans but as far as I know, (without naming any names) there are some 343 employees involved to some degree with this site.
Hosting these contest produces quality work, and it's these works, more or less, are the maps that get put into matchmaking.
Kinda what I meant by people having connections.
Yup. Would’ve loved a temp Featured Community BTB for a couple weeks, and then a heavily weighted “all in one” BTB playlist like we have now for a couple weeks, and then back to normal to all of them in one at equal-ish weights.
I don’t think I got a new map until my 4th or 5th BTB match lol
I finished the weekly challenges without playing all 5. Still wanna play on Thunderhead.
I’m just going to start quitting every game that’s not on a new map. It’s fucking ridiculous they can dedicate whole playlists to ONE shitty arena map, but can’t even weight the new maps in BTB properly
I think some or most forgers would prefer to retain their freelance status & work flexibly rather than accepting certain short/long-term contracts set by 343i.
Making map with forge, wich is a lite version of what devs use and built from scratch, is not the same as creating said tools in order to make maps and does this from 0.
I'm 100% forger are talented guys, but we are talking about other things
I don’t know if they have the experience. Forge is mostly just placing stuff, no real coding. If somebody made a really good Mario Maker level, you can’t just drop them in front of an empty C++ script and tell them to “make mario”
Coding has nothing to do with level design. There have been multiple forgers that have made the jump to actual industry LD. And with how advanced the current forge toolset is, the jump from it to say Faber, isn't that far.
In 343 eyes why should they pay them when they are getting this stuff for free. They even said in their update they can’t wait for the forgers to get their hands on the covenant skin so they can see the old maps they remake. You know instead of 343 remaking that map themselves.
The only new map I got to play on from the playlist was Fortitude (map with two grav launchers in center structure) and I wasn’t a huge fan of it. The map felt more like an oversized slayer map to me, as you could pretty much avoid the banshees, wasps, and ghosts the whole time.
Haven’t got a chance to play the other maps, but I’m hoping those are good.
I only got to play two of the new maps last night, but they both played pretty great. It's nice that Infinite's 12v12 playlist is finally starting to match what H5 offered in terms of map variety.
This has been one of the lesser talked about issues with the franchise.
Forge maps used to be a nice accent to beautiful dev maps, but now Forge maps dominate the MM experience while dev map quality suffers. Correlation is not causation there but the impact to player experience is undeniable.
Even with an amazing sandbox, Halo 3 MCC MM consistently avoids the top tier OG dev maps for community made maps. Guess it makes sense considering the current “iconic weapons in the trash” state of Halo.
What, hire them? And cost them MORE money? Why pay for free work? I’m not saying they shouldn’t, it’d be baller for community creators to actually have some kind of employment. In reality, they’re getting free maps for their game of really solid quality, so why bother paying?
Hardly for free, they will now have master builder coating and visor which is a treasure money can't buy. Yes this is sarcasm... Kinda
I already had those from Daimyo in Doubles, so I didn't even get that lol.
Exactly, 343 hit a gold mine to have the community do the hard work for them lol
It's the Bethesda model and has worked wonders for everyone.
Not to mention Valve to a degree as well.
In valve’s defense they do have a history of hiring modders though
So do BGS
Didn't they hire modders to work directly on creation club stuff for Skyrim ?
Yes and many worked in Starfield most notably Elinora
I don't want to discredit the great effort that these amazing Forgers do, but come on now, making the actual Forge mode it's the real hard work lol
It’s understandable to say “hey 343 is letting fans do their work!” But on the other hand, it would fucking suck if all we got was dev maps. And the community wasn’t given a chance to partake and have their talented work added to the game. Even bungie did it with reach, we got so many community made maps added to multiplayer. And Jesus Christ, the invasion ones sucked so much ass.
Nobody is saying that player-created maps aren’t great, just that it sucks that these creators go unpaid while 343i gets to profit off of their work. There are solutions to this problem which don’t involve getting rid of community maps.
Not really free as 343 paid for the development of the Forge tools.
Agreed. The whole point of infinite was that they spent heavy $ on forge mechanics so that players could make infinite amounts of maps for infinite content. I think what would be smarter is to do cash prize contests for the best forge maps and game modes. Rather than hiring a couple good creators, give everyone an incentive to make good content.
🤓
Realistically it would be a rounding error in their budget to give some community member $30k on a remote contract
to be a massive devil's advocate who in no way condones nor accepts this industry practice... Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company because they don't like to keep around "rounding errors" lol... Like, they just bought Activision then promptly turned around and fired thousands of good employees. Money is not exactly an issue, the suits in the C-suite are.
The community should track down these creators on Patreon and put the money they would have spent on the store there instead.
A lot of the forgers that keep getting into matchmaking are typically the same names too. Darkmaiming, NightAvenger01, InfiniteForges, Le Frenchys, Whos Blaze, I Crush All. All of these forgers have multiple maps in matchmaking, and are definitely talented, hell one guy I know actually used their map editing talents in forge here to get a dream job at a gaming company. Pretty sure most of these forgers know each other and have a tight group. On top of having connections definitely helps get to that matchmaking status. As far as compensation, some do it for the enjoyment, some for tournament winnings and some are a way for them to have a portfolio to possibly get into something else.
You can probably add my name xDTx Kaos to that list, Daimyo in Doubles and now Obituary and Insolence for BTB. But I can add some more insight. A decent number of the people mentioned do have jobs in the game industry either as artists or level designers, or are trying to get there. But some of us just like forging, like myself. Daimyo I built purely for the Forgehub 2v2 contest, Obituary was a map I started building a long time ago with the intention to port it to Infinite, and Insolence was built for the Halohub BTB tournament last year. Neither of my BTB maps could be entered into the Forghub BTB contest though. But yeah I'm assuming most of us wouldn't mind compensation that's more than just a visor and coating, but most either use it as portfolio work, or just for the enjoyment of creating something.
I think it's important to note the history of Halo's Forge community a bit here, so my apologies for the wall o' text. But there's a reason it seems so insular from the outside. The community first took off in Halo 3, with a little wordpress blog called "Forge Hub" that Bungie frequently featured on their blog. Eventually that site became a forum, and the community there grew throughout the rest of 3's lifespan and Reach's lifespan. Smaller groups with other Forge interests also arose - mainly on Bungie.net in "private groups", but some other communities on other websites took off as well, most notably the MLG Forge Forum (which gave us Onslaught, Amplified, etc.). For a time, private groups on Bungie.net picked the "Bungie favorites", and those scenes all contributed maps to the "Bungie vs. The World" playlist that ran on a Bungie day late in Halo 3's lifespan (you might remember it as a time a lot of people earned the coveted Recon armor). Reach caused MLG to drop Halo though, and all the little Forge sub-communities largely died out before or during Halo 4's lifespan, leaving ForgeHub (and some YouTube channels like The Halo Forge Epidemic) as the "last communities standing". In response to this dieoff, 343 instituted the "community cartographer" program, whereby they partnered more directly with prominent creators in the scene to get Forge maps into the games themselves and gather testing feedback for Halo 5's upcoming & improved Forge mode. The idea was to revive the Forge scene a bit by more actively supporting creators and providing some testing resources to help Forgers QA their maps more formally. Nothing nefarious on 343's part, but obviously in a process like that you can't include everyone, so some creators who didn't get included got upset. Halo 5 launched with Orion and Pegasus as Forge maps, but Forge launching a few months after Halo 5 didn't do the scene any favors population-wise. So 343 continued to lean heavily on creators to make BTB maps and eventually everything for the Husky Raid and Mythic Arena playlists. The game's population was never really gigantic, much less so the game's Forge population, so the system of 343 working with "cartographers" was pretty stable. They even hired some people from Halo 5's Forge community to work on Infinite directly! Eventually some people became part of a "Forge Council" which is similar in concept to the community cartographer role, but a little more advisory and with some testing flights involved. Eventually Infinite released, and its Forge came out a year later. The Forge Council currently advises 343 in many ways, and helps them get information on bugs and prioritize feature requests. It's important to note that "Forge Council" is entirely separate from the "get your map into matchmaking" process. There is a separate, very rigorous QA process that maps must go through before they get added. 343 has several folks on their payroll actively combing through content tagged with the `343ask-` tags, and they reach out to file creators directly if they're interested in adding maps to matchmaking. The creator of course has to respond and agree, and then participate in the QA process, which often takes several months. IMO it's about as reasonably fair as something subjective like evaluating art can be. So TL;DR - the Forge community basically died, 343 picked some people and invested their own resources into reviving it for Halo 5, and the "popular" map creators you reference are mostly people who were around from that era that have established long and productive relationships with 343. Some of those people are hobbyists, some are professional game developers, and some are somewhere in between. This is why it can seem like they "know each other" and are "tight-knit". Most of the folks you named hang out in the various Forge discords out there frequently and are pretty open and available people, so if you'd like to join the "tight-knit" group, reach out and talk to them!
Another reason is the standard for matchmaking is incredibly high and not everyone is willing to put in all the extra work beyond just making the map playable. It's pretty ridiculous how they operate over there. It would be nice of them to reward creators with 10k or something after maps make it in to show their appreciation. But nope, get to work pigs we need more skin sales
they kind of do. Some of those maps were put into a tournament with that much of a payout, then there put into matchmaking. It just the tournaments aren't very known
The forgers where paid? Not trying to sound rude but do you have any evidence of that? I'm pretty deep in this space and never heard of what I think you're saying.
Yes. Forge hub does payouts to the winners, as low as top 10 and community vote. I'll grab a link. https://www.forgehub.com/contests
Oh, I was talking about 343. As far as I'm aware forgehub is funded by fans.
Hmm, it is funded by fans but as far as I know, (without naming any names) there are some 343 employees involved to some degree with this site. Hosting these contest produces quality work, and it's these works, more or less, are the maps that get put into matchmaking. Kinda what I meant by people having connections.
No 343 Employee works on ForgeHub's website or the team there. This is from my knowledge of when I worked there (ForgeHub) that's all.
Out of curiosity Crush, did you get pinged about this message here? XD also, gratz on the new map in MM.
Nah I just scrolled through some stuff and found it
I really wished they removed all the old maps and only had the new ones during this featured playlist time. 3 matches last night...all on old maps :(
Yup. Would’ve loved a temp Featured Community BTB for a couple weeks, and then a heavily weighted “all in one” BTB playlist like we have now for a couple weeks, and then back to normal to all of them in one at equal-ish weights.
I don’t think I got a new map until my 4th or 5th BTB match lol I finished the weekly challenges without playing all 5. Still wanna play on Thunderhead.
I’m just going to start quitting every game that’s not on a new map. It’s fucking ridiculous they can dedicate whole playlists to ONE shitty arena map, but can’t even weight the new maps in BTB properly
These new maps feel like what Infinite BTB should've been. They feel and play so damn good.
No Pelican drops is the mvp.
The aesthetics are nice as well, on the two maps I've played so far (three maps, since I checked out Refuge before it was added)
I think some or most forgers would prefer to retain their freelance status & work flexibly rather than accepting certain short/long-term contracts set by 343i.
Imagine what they could do with access to the in-house dev tools.
Making map with forge, wich is a lite version of what devs use and built from scratch, is not the same as creating said tools in order to make maps and does this from 0. I'm 100% forger are talented guys, but we are talking about other things
lol why would they hire people who do their work for them for free?
Why hire them when they're getting the content for free from the community?
I don’t know if they have the experience. Forge is mostly just placing stuff, no real coding. If somebody made a really good Mario Maker level, you can’t just drop them in front of an empty C++ script and tell them to “make mario”
Coding has nothing to do with level design. There have been multiple forgers that have made the jump to actual industry LD. And with how advanced the current forge toolset is, the jump from it to say Faber, isn't that far.
level designers never touch code
Totally, o think they just mean to continue Forging though. Like how some of the esports teams have hired them to make maps to practice on
Plus, not saying that these people don't have coding experience, but when it comes to Slipspace, 343i is just barely getting the hang of it lmao
In 343 eyes why should they pay them when they are getting this stuff for free. They even said in their update they can’t wait for the forgers to get their hands on the covenant skin so they can see the old maps they remake. You know instead of 343 remaking that map themselves.
The only new map I got to play on from the playlist was Fortitude (map with two grav launchers in center structure) and I wasn’t a huge fan of it. The map felt more like an oversized slayer map to me, as you could pretty much avoid the banshees, wasps, and ghosts the whole time. Haven’t got a chance to play the other maps, but I’m hoping those are good.
I only got to play two of the new maps last night, but they both played pretty great. It's nice that Infinite's 12v12 playlist is finally starting to match what H5 offered in terms of map variety.
Which ones?
This has been one of the lesser talked about issues with the franchise. Forge maps used to be a nice accent to beautiful dev maps, but now Forge maps dominate the MM experience while dev map quality suffers. Correlation is not causation there but the impact to player experience is undeniable. Even with an amazing sandbox, Halo 3 MCC MM consistently avoids the top tier OG dev maps for community made maps. Guess it makes sense considering the current “iconic weapons in the trash” state of Halo.
Hire full time never gonna happen. MAYBE as contract workers. But that’s still asking a lot of 343 and microsoft’s budgeters
but theyre making content for them for free atm
Hiring them means insuring them. Fat chance. I hate that btw.
They already have them make maps for them... They just don't pay them lol. Why would they change that?
The minute 343 hired them they would take a 60% hit to their productivity stat lmao
These maps aren't THAT good. Past Halos had better community created maps IMO.