One Billionth Halo 3 Game Played

adeelarshad82 writes "Bungie recently announced that Halo 3 has served its 1 billionth game. It's an important milestone which Halo 2 failed to reach. The billionth game was played at 6:36 PM PST last Saturday and lasted three minutes and 19 seconds. The total amount of active match time exceeds 64,000 years." Frank O'Connor, director of the Halo franchise, also made comments recently teasing future Halo games.

Re:That's funny

[Spy der Mann]

I think I got my billionth Double Kill the other day too.

Amateur. Call me when you get your trillionth Double Kill.

- Chuck Norris

1 Billionth Burger?

[mackinaw_apx]

Mmm... sort of reminds me of fast food. One Billionth served... I wonder how long it took someone to eat the 1 Billionth hamburger?

Re:

[iYk6]

Except that it makes sense that McDonald's is able to count how many hamburgers they serve. They can check receipt records. But there is no way that Microsoft can monitor every single Halo 3 game.

Re:

[not already in use]

Something tells me you're not being sarcastic.

Re:

[Walpurgiss]

I assume that while Halo3 probably runs matches on one of the clients, rather than running a server, the lobby/game searching feature is probably centralized.

Thus they don't have to monitor anything except some count made by the lobby server that keeps track of how many game match-ups it creates that get played.

So like McDonalds can check receipts, I'm sure MS can check server logs, and probably this is automated for them.

Re:

[iYk6]

I haven't played Halo 3, but according to the Halo 3 Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], Halo 3 supports multiplayer via split screen or LAN, just like Halo 1 and 2. Assuming this is true, and I see no reason to believe otherwise, it would be impossible for MS to monitor every single game.

Re:

[Walpurgiss]

That's true, anything s/s or LAN would not be counted, I think people have pointed out that bungie did not try to include those games in their numbers, so they are celebrating the 1 billionth xbLive matchup..

4000 empire state buildings

[goombah99]

So that's about as many man hours as it would take to build every skyscraper in the world.

One is tempeted to snark something like "what a waste of manpower" but chances are those folks would not be puting that lost time to productive use but instead idle hands would find the devils work. So perhaps another way to say this is that something like a billion petty crimes were prevented.

Re:

[SupremoMan]

So you say all people who don't work 16 hour days, 7 days a week are wasting time? People have free time, and what they do with it is none of your fuckin' business.

3 mins 19secs

[Hecatonchires]

Isn't that how long most Halo players last in the presence of a woman?

Re:

[Walpurgiss]

Fail. Overshooting their stamina.

Re:

[u4ya]

give or take 3 minutes

Re:3 mins 19secs

[MooseMuffin]

Perhaps. Luckily such a scenario will never occur.

Re:

[RuBLed]

It is that long too even if they're all by themselves.

Re:

[Hogwash McFly]

Yeah, but you are including the three minutes required to put the condom on properly.

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[incognito84]

Yes. Successful games like Halo 3 and the success of films like Harry Potter continually remind me that the general public has very poor taste. Now that I have that out of my system, I'm going to order another Vente coffee and continue writing my screenplay about gay cowboys while pondering why chicks are stupid for not digging tweed jackets with scarves.

64,000 years?

[detox.method()]

Of course that CPU time could'nt have been spent on anything more productive...

Re:64,000 years?

[superdave80]

...said the man posting on /.

Re:

[Cheapy]

You know, I keep seeing this post everywhere about this topic. Yes it could've been better spent elsewhere, but so could all those hours lost to the internet and crapping.

Re:

[Walpurgiss]

72,203,447,307.2 games. Roughly quintuple that if you include non-Source CS.

English

[Idiomatick]

64,000 year eh. Even for /. that's pretty bad.

Re:

[Xest]

I'd say a possibility is because there are still a shit load of people out there who aren't keen on the idea of playing online and to rack up these kind of hours is likely evidence that online play is becoming something more people feel they can partake in.

I don't play online games much on consoles but Halo 3 is one of the few I have played online along with CoD4, CoD5, GRAW2.

On the PC we have things like WoW which has no doubt racked up far, far more hours of course and probably even Counterstrike did, but

Re:

[fyrewulff]

It's notable because Halo 2 never hit it, and it's been up for 4 years now. It's currently sitting at 798 million.

Also, 1 billion games recorded is quite an accomplishment for any game.

what could we do in 64,000 man hours ?

[RGRistroph]

What could have been done instead in 64,000 man hours of focused attention ? I bet Slashdot has an even greater negative effect on our nation's productivity.

Re:

[Kral_Blbec]

Watched 64,000 hours of spongebob? Seriously, consider the population that plays this.

Re:

[chammy]

64,000 YEARS if I read the summary right

Re:

[shawb]

That's not 64,000 man hours. That's 64,000 man YEARS. About half a billion man hours. And that's not even including campaign mode, custom maps, waiting around in the lobby, reading FAQs and hint guides, making and watching machinimas on Youtube, and even more. [youtube.com].

Re:what could we do in 64,000 man hours ?

[revengebomber]

Well, considering the average Halo player, you could probably get a LOT of coloring done.

Re:

[Walpurgiss]

And only 15-20% outside the lines.

active match time exceeds 64,000 year.

[Orionn2000au]

Stop talking like a farmer.

Geez...

[feepness]

They gotta come out with some new games...

64,000 Year(s)

[Bloodmoon1]

Aside from the obvious grammar error, that's more time than recorded human history by a factor of... I don't know, 12? 14? Whatever, I'm not a math major. Imagine if all of those people had done something worth a god damn instead...

Re:

[N1AK]

Like complained about all the time wasted posting and reading posts on Slashdot? People get born, live a little and then die. There is no secret formula to define true success, though some people will equate it with exploration and some others will equate it with living a satisfied life. If people want to use time (likely relaxation time anyway) to play games then so be it.

Re:

[Bloodmoon1]

Halo does not = success in any way. I'll cop to playing a few games, but really, it gets old after a bit. And after they redid the ranking system, I think everyone I knew that played the game quit.

Re:

[luke2063]

33 minutes divided by number of players in the match, which varies from match to match

Count LAN Parties?

[Secret Agent Man]

I'm sure HALO/2 reached this number through the sheer amount of LAN/offline matches played. Sure know my group of friends contributed significantly, anyway.

Halo 3 does NOT serve though.

[ifrag]

Of course Microsoft is too cheap to setup servers that actually run the game on their end, which would benefit everyone by having a more ideal point of contact for all players. The matchmaking service is only matchmaking. The game itself is actually Peer to Peer, which of course causes lag when the best peer isn't very good. Even worse, it's probably more like the best peer with the proper ports forwarded. And when the host leaves the game needs to iterate back through that process to pick the next best

Re:

[Drumforyourlife]

I serve myself, but I simply refuse to serve my peers. :P