In Halo Wars ranking up was achieved by gaining in-game experience points. Those points were gained from destroying buildings, killing units, etc. Before anyone gets confused… TruSkill was it’s own separate skill-based ranking system and indicated via a numbered skill level (eg. TS 40) whereas rank was indicated by a UNSC rank insignia.
Anyways, while this system in and of itself is not bad, it was poorly executed. The reason for that being that at the end of a game, certain multipliers were then added based on your gameplay to boost your score and help reward good gameplay with increased rate of ranking up. The majority of the multiplier was derived from one’s combat efficiency.
Still sounds good, doesn’t it? No it’s terrible and here’s why. If you were the more aggressive teammate/did the heavy lifting in combat/used specific, but necessary unit variation combos then you’d end up taking more casualties and lower your unit efficiency. Meanwhile your ally who had done essentially nothing all game could swoop in at the end and kill a few units with little or no harm to themselves to gain a moderate amount of points only to have those points then receive the maximum multiplier. While the major conflict player will receive moderate points with little or no multiplier and in the end receive significantly less points than their under-performing counterparts because of it.
This is especially true of Covenant teammates, when you yourself are UNSC. Covy players often rely primarily on using their one leader and a few auxiliary units. So they don’t receive casualties in the same way that the UNSC does. The Leader will receive many kills at the cost of few deaths, boosting their unit efficiency rating.
You could argue that it’s just a benefit of the Covenant play style, but then I’d say that scoring systems should be applied uniformly and fairly to all teams.
The same thing can happen with all UNSC teams as well. One player may focus on heavy mech units (tanks, cobras) , while another may have to go infantry(marines, flamethrowers) to provide a rounded base of countering (tanks [hard] > infantry, cobras [hard] > mech, marines [soft] > air, flamethrowers [hard] > Hunters/Jackals).
In all likelyhood, the player with the heavy mech will have a higher rating of unit efficiency while the player with the infantry focus will have a much lower one. But these roles are necessary due to unit rock/paper/scissor counterings. I know, there are other combos, but this is just an example.
This is part of the reason why you will see high ranked players who are not even moderately good at the game. They pull little wait, and yet will still reap major XP bonuses simply for not dying. All I’m asking is that a better means of rewarding gameplay and doling out bonuses and XP be implemented in HW2/
****I’d say remove the efficiency bonus altogether. Rather focus on points being earned from Damage Given, Resources Collected, Resources spent on Units, Resources Spent on Upgrades, etc. Raw, quantifiable stats that can’t really be misinterpreted.
P.S. For those who don’t understand [hard] / [soft] it indicates a unit’s countering effectiveness vs. another unit. Example. Flamethrowers are a hard counter against infantry type units (they excel as an anti-infantry option). Marines are a soft counter against air units (they perform moderately as an option for anti-air).