Hey, did you hear Halo Waypoint got a huge facelift in time for Halo: Reach? No?

Well, that says it all right there. It's not like we're talking about a $10 downloadable; this is a free program, the self-proclaimed "hub for all things Halo." You'd think that might at least merit a curious glance from the fanbase. Yet, of all the Halo players I know, nobody uses it. Fewer than 80,000 people have reviewed Waypoint on Xbox Marketplace. If we're generous and quadruple that number, the tally of gamers bothering to download Waypoint comes to less than eight percent of gamers who bought Reach in its first week of release. The other 92 percent presumably don't consider it worth the price of free.

Never heard of ya.

I even put the question to the entire Bitmob staff, and only one person owned up to giving it a go. Unfortunately, he still had no idea what Waypoint is actually for.

When someone sees your product, uses it, explores it, and still can't figure out why they need it, that's a problem. Sure, 343 Industries made a decent enough repository for Halo-related media, but then, so did YouTube. Which is a shame, because there are unexplored opportunities here, possibilities unique to Halo and its wonderfully rabid fanbase. They can fix this neglected service. They can make it worthwhile. And they should start by giving Waypoint what all products need: a purpose.

To date, Waypoint mainly serves two roles: video warehouse and points tracker. The first is almost entirely machinima, anchored by episodes of comedy series Red vs. Blue and padded by a lot of series wanting to be Red vs. Blue, plus "best kills" countdowns, tips, interviews, and in-depth looks at the Haloverse. Originally a complete mess, the update finally organized things into desperately needed menus, though the branches are still a bit thick.

The second is a meta-Achievements system called Milestones, which tracks Achievements earned across all six Halo games. There are also Waypoint Awards for tagging certain combinations of Achievements. Only the truly insane care about scoring any of these.

There are incentives. Milestones unlock Avatar gear and pets (343 Guilty Spark now periodically taunts my Avatar thanks to this). Since the update, these carrots now include unlocking certain pieces of Reach armor, done through a combination of Milestones and specific Achievements. To unlock the CQB helmet, for example, you must reach Career Milestone 20 (i.e. earn 900 total Halo gamerpoints) and complete Reach's campaign on Heroic difficulty.

But that alone won't do the job. Your precious rewards are held hostage until you download Waypoint, sign in, and view Career.

Sad Dead Spartan is sad, dead.

Essentially, Waypoint tracks made-up statistics, adds unnecessary hassle, and plays funny videos. I can't help but think it should aspire to greater things. Certainly, it's capable of greater things. By all means, keep the stats around, but if Waypoint wants to find a way out of redundancy, it's time to appeal directly to the hardcore Halo fans. They're the only people spending time in Waypoint, after all, so go big and really dig in to their interests.

Start with the content. When I'm in the mood for machinima, Red vs. Blue pretty much feeds the need. Waypoint offers up another three or four machinima shows, none of which can touch Rooster Teeth's series. That's a steep hill to climb, after all.

So why climb it? Introduce variety to the written entertainment. Waypoint dabbles occasionally in motion comics -- cheap to produce and fairly striking when done well -- so it's safe to assume the architecture is in place to do more. Commission a full season. Tell the untold stories. Then find other media that make sense for the money and use them to deliver smart, compelling productions. Plenty of fan-made, live-action Halo videos go viral every year. Tap into those talented, dedicated people and put them to work.

You can always count on Halo fans wanting more Halo. Just make it different Halo.

That's all just fun stuff on the side. A destination is pointless without something to do when you arrive. To give Waypoint direction, they must create a specific reason for people to go there and unique things for us to do, preferably things that tie directly into playing the games. I happen to have a few in mind.

Original Halo developer Bungie -- and now, presumably 343 Industries, who inherits the franchise post-Reach -- always made their fan communities a major component of their corporate culture. In fact, a chunk of the content on Waypoint right now is community oriented and/or community created. That's a good start, but Waypoint should be an interactive gathering point, a literal waypoint into people discussing and playing the games together.

Superman is not your friend.

Waypoint does have a proper web presence (though it requires a plug-in you likely don't have and won't work at all in Firefox) with a very active community forum...which isn't accessible from the Xbox 360 interface. Likewise, you can't go directly from a forum conversation into a co-op game at the touch of a button. And that should be entirely possible.

Get the community interacting on Waypoint. Hook in the forums, enable voice messaging and voice chat. That's especially important, because next they should bring back clan support.

Bungie dropped clan support after Halo 2 and never picked it back up, citing unpopularity relative to other matchmaking modes. Well, it's a different landscape out there now. For one thing, the number of people playing online has shot up in the last few years. For another, Halo players didn't have a console-ready platform devoted solely to them for use as a rally point. They do now. It's no small coincidence that the players who want clan support most are the most likely to use Waypoint in the first place.

"Boom" is a good look on you, Chuckles.

Waypoint is potentially the perfect gateway: accessible, integrated, and yep, free. It can bridge online forums to campaign co-op and multiplayer matches in ways nobody's ever done before.

And if Microsoft and 343 do indeed plan to ramp up Halo production to the "every two years or so" mark (if not annualizing it), Waypoint should be the pointman. Use it to tease the community, dropping clues ala the old "I Love Bees" meta-game. Or drop an upcoming game map for download and use in the current Halo game, just to give fans a taste of what's coming. Keep it fun. Make it so anyone not jumping on Waypoint is genuinely missing out on something vital and cool.

Because if the question is "What's Waypoint actually for?" the correct answer should be "It's for the community."

To truly be the "hub of all things Halo," you can't just post videos and count numbers. You have to cater to the mindset, the camaraderie, and the competition, friendly and otherwise. In many ways, the community is Halo. As-is on the 360, Waypoint excludes them to a shocking degree. Bring them in. Turn it into a hub for all Halo people. Give them a place to be Halo fans together, in easy reach of the rings. That's a purpose worth having, and I guarantee the community would respond.

Nobody's getting much use out of Waypoint now, but shift the focus slightly to where it truly belongs, and it'll become the most useful gaming tool on the market...and a model for others to follow.