: I STILL don't understand Musical Chairs. I simply couldn't figure out when it
: was safe to stand where. I died early most of the time, so I got to watch
: other people play - and what I saw made no sense.

: Clearly, you had to jump on top of the (camp chairs?) when the 'hill' was
: around them - but when you needed to get off to move to the next one
: seemed... random. At first I thought it was as soon as the current hill
: disappeared - but I tried that, and died. Then I thought you needed to
: wait until the next hill appeared - but I watched people jump down when no
: hill was visible, and THEY lived.

: I don't get it.

Hey, it's not always easy to get these complex things to work the way you want them to. Some times there are rough edges. But just to get this off my chest, and to let you know why it was so bad:

343 Industries killed Musical Chairs when they prevented objects from spawning when a player was nearby. The Halo: Reach version had a beautifully simple design: when a chair spawns, jump on it. Everything else happened automatically, but it required objects being able to spawn regardless of where the player was located.

Halo: Reach's Musical Chairs was like a stack of pancakes. Each new round of chairs, I put another pancake down. I could ignore the state of the previous pancake because players were standing on the new one. For the Halo 4 version, I had to find a way to reuse the same pancake over and over again because I literally can not spawn a new pancake--Halo 4 will not let me.

I've been trying, for 4 months, to come up with a way to mimick that simplicity in Halo 4. Last night's Musical Chairs and Musical Mongoose are my latest efforts. I've now come to accept that it's simply not going to be possible. It's a bummer, because that game was a lot of fun in Halo: Reach.

But basically, I won't be running Musical Chairs any more. I never officially released the map, and I won't. So... yeah. I absolutely get what you're saying, and I hate it being true, but I can't do anything about it except throw the entire concept of Musical Chairs in the garbage. Which just needs to happen, because it's not possible to make it fun.

: I like random custom games - but I really like knowing the rules... and that
: doesn't seem to be an option on nights like last night.

: Oh - and the zombie game inside a single big cube - yeah, I dumped on that,
: cause it's dumb. ;)

I want to make games that don't require explaination. That's my goal. I really hate having to stop and say, "okay, if you want to zoom across the map, jump and thrust." --but I also never tested that map, so I wanted to see how it went.

Z Fighting, Onslaught, Hog Hill, Beacon Brawl, Shrinking Sumo, Paintball, (Actually) Fiesta.. I think those are pretty intuitive. But I don't have enough stuff yet to keep a customs party going for 3 hours :-). Some stuff was pretty bad, I admit. Musical Chairs, Musical Mongoose, Lava Cube, Flood on The Cube, Infinity Slayer on Adrift, CTF on Paradux (which I meant to make shotguns only).. yeah.

If/when I run another customs party, I'll plan a stronger playlist. I ran out of good stuff pretty quickly and I was trying to make it up as I went along. I also wasn't sure how to handle having 4 different teams spontaneously form, although I'll admit it was pretty amusing and it might be worth having some multiteam games available.

I liked the FFA games the best because we could all chat and laugh together. It got pretty quiet during some of the other games when you didn't have the chatty people on your team.

: Mostly, though, the gametypes were lots of fun. We might have pushed the
: limits of what was possible... but the potential for serious enjoyment was
: obvious. :)

I was hoping you'd just say the serious enjoyment was obvious. :)

I'm really glad you came, and I just want you to know, as host, I not only take your feedback seriously, but I totally agree with it. So if I do host another one, I hope you'll join in again, knowing that it should have less of the stuff that you didn't like.

There were also a lot of people there I don't know. I'm not sure if they were HBO lurkers or just friends of friends, but it'd be great to play with those folks again too. If they're reading this, hit me up on Twitter @pete_the_duck.