The 2024 HCS season is coming to close this weekend in Seattle. For those interested in following along via Halo Query, I'd like to publicize a little known feature of the site: Did you know that with a bit of url manipulation you can query entire teams and find a history of all the games they've played together?

Here's links for every Worlds team that this hack works for:

• Spacestation Gaming
• Optic Gaming
• Rebellion
• Faze Clan
• Complexity
• Native Gaming
• Quadrant
• Into The Breach
• Sentinels
• Team Lethal Fox
• Akave Esports
• Ascend Baseline
• Mindfreak

You can do this for almost any* team, not just the ones at Worlds (including your own 4 stack or duo). Just plug the gamertags that make up the team into the gamertag parameter of matches page URL, separated by commas. For example, that Optic Gaming link above looks like so:

So uh, what gives GravlLift, how could you forget about Cloud9, Dark Inside, and Pure? Well... there's a catch to this trick: the first gamertag in the list needs to have their privacy settings set such that their games are searchable, and unfortunately, at the time of writing this, all of the players on those teams... don't. You can still get to a match that they played against one of the other teams, you just can't list their own full custom game histories.

Anyways, I'm off to Seattle. If you see a pair of dudes rocking old school Instinct/Final Boss hockey jerseys, that's my brother and I. Feel free to say hello, I love talking to the people who use the site!

With the patch today, we now have 4 ranked playlists to choose from (3 permanent and one rotating). To celebrate the occasion, I'm pleased to announce the addition of public ESR and CSR leaderboards to the site.

The leaderboards will track any CSR or ESR that is seen by Halo Query in a match played in the last 7 days. That includes players beyond the ones that were explicitly being searched for — anyone who was involved in the match will get their skill levels added to the leaderboard. That means when you load up your profile page and your 200 most recent matches are fetched to render your skill charts, almost 1600 entries are potentially being added to the leaderboard.

That graph at the top of the board shows the distribution of skills as recorded by Halo Query. Each bar can be clicked to jump to the corresponding page in the leaderboard.

If you're logged in to Halo Query, you'll also see a new "Leaderboard" button in the player search and your user menu. Clicking this will jump you directly to that player's page on the leaderboard.

However, being logged in is not a requirement to view the page, so share the link as much as you like. Happy grinding!

By popular demand (2 whole people!), I've added the ability to save and share the queries you build on the "Matches" page. As you modify the filters, columns, or page size, you will notice that the URL of your browser will update. That URL will now contain all the data anyone would need to run the exact same query at a later date, so you can share it with your friends or bookmark it in your browser for later.

Let's walk through a quick example. I use a specific gametype to do my warmups, and I like to be able to see my progress (or lack thereof) over time. I need a query that shows me all my games of that gametype, so I set up a filter for matches played with that Game Variant.

The URL in my browser now contains a whole mess of characters that represent this particular filter. The relevant part will look something like: &filters=%7B%22and%22%3A%5B%7B%22%3D%3D%22%3A%5B%7B%22var%22%3A%22Game+Variant%22%7D%2C%22Bot+FFA+Training%22%5D%7D%5D%7D

Now I want to share a column layout. The "Shyway's Bot Training" preset (relevant Shyway video) is a good start, but I'd like to make a few tweaks to it. First I select the preset from the Column options to use it as a starting point.

Then I flip the preset to "Custom". This gives you all of the columns of whatever preset you were just on, but now you can modify them to suit your needs. Personal preference, there are a few columns in the preset that I don't care about, and I'd like to add a few that are important to me. I'm going to drop Deaths, Assists, and Damage Taken, swap Kills and Damage for their 'per minute' counterparts, and add the Duration column so I know if I cut a warmup short.

Our URL will now contain a bunch of numbers that describe the column layout I've selected. In this case, it looks like so: &columns=11641134627437484456082978756924276810 Fun fact, there are currently 193 different columns you can activate, and that jumble of numbers can represent any combination you choose. There are 2¹⁹³ possibilities to choose from!

Query's looking good. I'll be on the HCS circuit in no time (I hear Complexity might have a roster slot open).

Note that query URLs are inherently tied to whatever gamertag you're currently querying. If you share the query with someone else, it'll load up whatever gamertag you were looking at when you ran the query, so if someone wants to run the query for their account instead, they'll need to change the gamertag once the page loads.