Halo Reach beta is struggling

It’s not a huge surprise that that beta for the online component of Bungie’s Xbox 360 shooter Halo: Reach has proved to be hugely popular, and the developer has stated that while some of the early glitches have been ironed out the service, which went live last night, is not quite fully operational”.

Bungie estimates that around 600,000 players have to date tried to play the beta, access to which is restricted to those who bought Halo: ODST and a select group of industry members and journalists.

The Beta is not quite fully operational, but it should be moving at a pretty good clipnow that our online team has applied some technological fixups,” a post on Bungie’s website explains.

You should still expect suboptimal performance, but you should alsonow be getting games with relative ease. Once again, thanks for being patient. Unless of course you weren’t patient at all and you made like a million posts to the feedback forum to complain about the outage even though there were already like a million posts already made complainingabout the outage. If you were that guy, thanks for nothing!”

The studio also has some tips for those still experiencing problems:

* Don’t restart your search, even if load times are long. The initial load for map and game type will take a really long time, which is super lame, but once you’ve made the connection, the files will be cached to your hard drive and the next time you load to same map/game type, it should be nice and fast.

* Don’t reboot or reload the beta. It won’t help and it will actually clear your cache, making your wait times much longer.

* Don’t leave your party. Since everybody in the party has to load the same files, your wait is tied to other player’s download process as well. Stick with the same crew and things should iron out.