Yes, Customs Night is on for this Friday. What is Customs Night? It's a magical time that comes just once a week, a time when people are kind and give each other bullets and rockets generously without thought towards receiving anything themselves. Why, someone at Customs Night would give you the shirt off their back (if they thought it would kill you). It's a weekly event that happens every Friday night, specifically at 9:00 PM Eastern time. It's a chance to get away from it all put on by Community Customs (error 21: staff allocation error), where we play custom games in Halo. We play custom and standard gametypes on custom maps (and occasionally a standard map might get played too), ranging from big to small and ordinary to outrageous. Whatever people want to play, that's what gets run (with rare exceptions). If different people want to play different things at the same time we go in order of who spoke up first.
If you want a little more direction than that, you're in luck: Race is back in matchmaking, and we've missed it, so how about you bring along your best racetrack maps? You can bring maps you found and maps you made, anything you think will be enjoyable.

If all this sounds fun to you, why not join us? You can do that by just posting a reply to this post with your gamertag in it. That time again is 9:00 PM EST and this week we'll be playing Halo 4.

All there is to remember as far as rules is that a CC admin-- a group including but not limited to Gnrl Vagueness (myself) and ShadowoftheVoid-- will have party lead at all times (to prevent people from being randomly booted or subjected to broken games) and we won't play any modded content (because of the risk of being banned for playing and/or having it and thus breaking the Xbox and/or XBL ToU agreement).

There's been some confusion or questioning even among the inner circle of Community Customs as to how this measures up with new gametypes, in particular the Race gametype-- a modded gametype very similar to the official one has been around for some time. I haven't looked at the files in detail, and I don't know for sure the origins of the modded version or the precise origins of the official version, and of course there are people that say 343 Industries has allowed the use of modded gametypes and that this supports that. It all comes down to a risk assessment, and there's only one relevant piece of data here: 343i (and thus Microsoft, which they are a part of) provided this Race gametype for everyone to use, so they won't have a problem with us playing it (I really don't see how they could), making it a case of some risk with a modded gametype versus no risk with an on-disk or matchmaking-originated gametype. Some people have pointed out variance in this stance, that is, it being OK sometimes; all I can say to that is that the current iteration of Community Customs has been pretty consistent about it, especially when I'm running the party. Maybe I'm careful, maybe I'm paranoid, maybe I'm crazy, but it's not just me, and this is something that will be held to at Customs Night for the foreseeable future, and hey, they are adding gametypes, it is getting better. Now let's go race.