Play Counts Go Brrr
The play counts for Halo Infinite maps and modes suddenly started rising into the millions.
Written by Okom on Nov 25, 2024 in Halo. Last edited: Nov 25, 2024.
On November 17, 2024 at 09:23 UTC+2, the chat of a Halo Infinite Forger Discord started lighting up with messages about the new 1v1 and Legacy modes doing well play count-wise and topping the next most popular mode by over 300,000 recent plays.
Enjoyers of those modes within the chat were excited at first, thinking that they had sparked new interest in the Halo community and fixed the population issues, but it took only 7 minutes of back-and-forth chatting for the Forgers to start doubting the anomaly of such a high play count.
Doubts and anomalies
In just over an hour from the discovery, the Arena:Legacy Slayer mode had gained nearly a million recent plays, which for a rather unpopular game like Halo Infinite could obviously not have been true.
10 hours later, the Arena:Legacy Slayer mode was sitting at 11,130,000 plays with 830 total bookmarks. The numbers should speak for themselves about something being wrong.
Only affected some assets
Something interesting to note is that not all assets were affected. I asked a good Forger friend of mine nkdape about this as he has been tracking the plays, bookmarks and ratings of his maps since their release and he had only seen some maps of his get affected.
Out of nkdape's selection of published assets, only Hacksaw Canyon and Delta Myth got hit with an increased play count. He shared the play count charts from two of his maps "Reactor Site" and "Flowstate" with me which show that they haven't seen any anomalies in play count since November 17th.
Affected unpublished assets
Out of curiosity, Forger DarkMaiming had copied the 343 Industries-made map file for "Recharge" into his own asset library and kept it unpublished. He reported the play count for the map staying at 0 at the time of duplication. After playing only a single match on the unpublished file and letting it sit for four days, the play count had suddenly risen to 14,000 plays! Now, eight days later, the still unpublished map sits at 16,500 plays, which raises questions for just how such a thing can happen if it's even affecting a single play on an unpublished file.
8 days later
It's November 25, 2024 and the play counts of the affected assets are still steadily rising at a steady million-something per day for some popular maps. I took a peek at the tracked play count of Smallhalla on Cylix Guide, where the current matchmaking version had jumped from 380,000 to 81,640,000 (yes, eighty million) and the original file from 12,600 to 720,000 in just eight days.
Questioning the cause
At the time of writing, it still remains a mystery why the play counts skyrocketed on only some assets. Forgers have thrown assumptions for the cause such as it being an attempt by Halo Studios to artificially make their asset play counts look more grand, a mistake in their system causing a multiplication of the received data or it now being an "orb counter" that now tracks the amount of grenades thrown per match.
It can't be an increase in player count as proven by SteamCharts, which shows no major anomalies in the player count for Halo Infinite apart from an increase of about 2000 players during peak hours on Nov 17 (Sunday) and 18 (Monday), which may be due to players getting to try out the new update that released on Nov 12, 2024.
Whatever the cause may be, it seems like it's here to stay. Unless a fix for it is found that cancels out the sudden spike in play count and returns it to normal, players can't trust the play counts anymore on multiple assets nor make any assumptions based on them anymore, which is an L in the turst and reputation of Halo Studios.
