User blog comment:Echowaffle8/SPARTAN-II Policy/@comment-1210220-20170624203144

Considering how the relatively few known SPARTAN-II's in the site's early years allowed for an abundance of fanon characters, the prospect of there being too many canon S-II's really wasn't something planned for aside from the rare tag conflict. It's not a particularly good situation, but something we'll have to deal with as fanon writers.

Personally, I really wish to avoid ignoring new canon and creating a situation similar to the one we had a few years back where a good portion of the site completely ignored post-war 343i canon because it clashed with their previously-established work. However, I'm not sure if a canon policy update forcing everything made past a certain date to be compliant like the one we had in 2015 is appropriate for an issue affecting a rather specific - if important - part of our site work. In the case of some of our older SPARTAN-II articles written by now-departed users conflicting, I think the Contradict template would likely suffice. As a mainstay of the Halo universe, Class I SPARTAN-II's are more often than not some of the first characters many newer users create, and the idea of closing off that avenue completely in the future isn't one I enjoy.

That being said, I think alternatives should be explored. As Sniper mentioned, my Project SIGMA is comprised of twenty SPARTAN-II candidates that weren't chosen by Halsey and were instead picked up by ONI to be trained on Reach. (On a slightly related note, I am considering opening up and replacing the Sigma-Gamma group with user-created Spartans should making Reach-trained S-II's become too difficult for users.). A solution like that gives users a number of free slots to work with, and falls into our usual site fare of using secretive projects this way.

I had also briefly considered the possibility of ONI discovering more prospective candidates in 2517 outside of Halsey's initial sweep to cover conflicting tags, though it's not an idea I'm particularly fond of outside of the worst-case scenario of all 150 SPARTAN-II names and tags being revealed. With the official SPARTAN-II numbers being rather murky beyond the initial 33 augmentation survivors with confirmation that a number of them were resuscitated and properly augmented later, that remains as another avenue for users. Speaking as someone who had to recently renumber two of his major SPARTAN-II's, the arrival of new tags is certainly a pain, but not something insurmountable.