Hi everyone, Chief here, I took a hiatus last week as the bulletin didn’t have any new information. It was just a Q&A from PAX East and all of the questions were answered by my PAX East video anyways. So here we have a doozie of a bulletin fill to brim with Castle Map Pack and CSR details so lets dig in! Click here for the full bulletin.

Thursday April 4th

• Welcome to Daybreak: Map walkthrough and strategies by 343 Industries on Daybreak

Friday April 5th

• Welcome to Perdition: Map walkthrough and strategies by 343 Industries on Perdition

Saturday April 6th

• Welcome to Outcast: Map walkthrough and strategies by 343 Industries on Outcast

Sunday April 7th

• Castle Map Pack Livestream: A livestream hosted by 343 Industries (most likely on their twitch.tv livestream channel http://www.twitch.tv/343industries) showcasing all three maps for the Castle map pack.

Monday April 8th

• Castle Map Pack Release:
  • 800 MS Points or Free to owners of the War Games Map Pass
  • 3 medium to large sized maps: Daybreak, Perdition, and Outcast
• CSR (Competitive Skill Rank) Release
• Multiplayer Update
  • Multi Team – 6 teams of 2 players
  • Castle Team DLC – 6v6
  • Rumble Pit (FFA) will replace Community Forge FFA Playlist
    • Infinity Rumble and Rumble Pro
  • Team Objective will transition to a 6v6 playlist
    • on-disc maps, Crimson DLC, and Castle DLC
  • Extraction Playlist will transition into Team Objective Playlist
• Encore Episode 1 of Spartan Ops

CSR (Competitive Skill Rank)

“There are two different ways we calculate your CSR. CSR is closely based on your TrueSkill rank, which ensures that you’ll be ranked – and matched – against opponents of comparable skill. Your CSR is dependent upon your personal performance as well as the rank of those you play with. While several playlists will use a win/loss system to determine whether or not you rank up, others will use individual scoring, which will rank you based on your performance against everyone in the match, teammates included. In some playlists, you’ll rank up faster than others – these vary in order to create the most optimal experience for each playlist.”

There will be two different scoring systems: Individual Scoring (compares you against everyone in the game) and Team Scoring (based off wins and losses and objective play). Playlists will only feature one system:

Playlists that use individual scoring:

• Infinity Slayer
• Big Team Infinity Slayer
• Rumble Pit
• Multi-Team
• Team Action Sack
• Flood
• Team Snipers
• Regicide
• SWAT

Playlists that will use team scoring:

• Castle Team DLC
• Team Objective
• Capture the Flag
• Dominion
• Team Throwdown
• Team Doubles
• Grifball

“CSR challenge where playing the Castle DLC playlist and reaching level 35 or higher between April 8 and April 22 will award you with an exclusive Avatar t-shirt, so stay tuned to Halo Waypoint and our Twitter account for more giveaways and surprises.”

In mainstream playlists it will be very difficult to carry your teammates CSR if they continually end up on the bottom of the scoreboard, it will be easy however for the weakest link in your party of friends to bring down their CSR and risk losing lots of matches.

If you leave early once a match has started, it treats it as if you were the lowest rank in the match for the individual-scored playlists and as a loss on the team-scored playlists. Players that join in progress are currently treated as if they had played the entire match. That said, in our selected, more competitive playlists, there will be rules in place to mitigate the effect. Namely:

1. You can only join in progress during a small window of time in the beginning of the match, so those players will still have time to contribute meaningfully to the match.
2. Friends are not allowed to join a game in progress. Only random players searching through Matchmaking can join during that 60-second window.

The rules for these playlists restrict the amount of noise from Join-in-Progress since that feature is only possible during the first few moments of the match. They also help improve the purity of CSR in these playlists. We plan on putting in these Join-in-Progress parameters as close to CSR launch as possible.

We are actively investigating occasional CSR resets, both globally and for certain playlists. Reasons for resetting ranks include overhauls to CSR calculation, Halo 4 game updates, and events and promotions centered on CSR. Resetting CSR is not something we’re taking lightly so when we do reset it, we’ll be sure to provide ample messaging describing the reasons for doing so.

Castle Team DLC – 6v6

Map	Game Type
Daybreak
	Infinity Slayer
	Capture the Flag
	King of the Hill
	Extraction – 1 Plot
	SWAT
	Snipers
Outcast
	Infinity Slayer
	Capture the Flag
	King of the Hill
	Oddball
	SWAT
	Team Regicide
Perdition
	Infinity Slayer
	Capture the Flag
	King of the Hill
	Extraction – 1 Plot
	SWAT
	Snipers

Also, these maps will be integrated into many of our existing playlists. DLC maps will appear in a playlist if all players in the match have downloaded the content.

Playlist	Map
Capture the Flag
	Daybreak
	Outcast
	Perdition
Infinity Slayer
	Daybreak
Multi-Team
	Daybreak
	Outcast
	Perdition
Action Sack
	Daybreak
	Outcast
	Perdition
Dominion
	Outcast
Flood
	Daybreak
	Perdition
SWAT
	Daybreak

Rumble Pit

Replacing Community Forge FFA, Rumble Pit will feature both Infinity Rumble and Rumble Pro in the voting options. Here are the maps that the playlist will launch with:

• Skyline
• Landfall
• Monolith
• Haven
• Solace
• Adrift
• Abandon
• Shutout
• Simplex
• Dispatch

Phewf! That was a big one.

– Chief Landless

Geronimo!