Before the game was released, we were told that this ranking system ranked you in 10 matches against players of all different skill levels to find where you most fit. Then you get your ranking and you get placed in matches against people of equal skill level so that every game is close. That sounds perfect, except that’s not what’s happening at all. And I’m not talking about someone being placed in gold that should be in platinum or diamond or something, because they can move up in rank by playing. I’m talking about the fact that I am a decent gold level player, yet I’ve had matches where I’m on a team of all Golds and maybe on Silver and we play two Platinums and two Unranked players who are all in a party and absolutely destroy us. And you know it’s going to be one of those games within the first two minutes or so. So if you know you’re gonna get destroyed and not have fun in the process, why stay? So people quit. I’ve been in the reverse situation, too, where my team is destroying a lower ranked team, and that’s not fun either. Close games where you really need to try and outsmart the opponents to get those last few kills first are fun and exciting. But those games occur SO sparingly when they were advertised to happen much more frequently. I also don’t think you should be matched against unranked players after you play a certain amount of matches, or something that’ll keep that from happening. Because at this point it’ll match a team of Golds against two Platinums and two Unranked players. And I’m sure the logic is that the Platinums are higher than the Golds, but the Unranked players are lower, so it evens out. And I guess that could happen, but those two Unranked players could also end up being Diamond or Onyx level players, in which case you just put that Gold team at a MASSIVE skill disadvantage and essentially render the ranking system completely useless. And that leads to people not having fun from being absolutely crushed, so they quit. And that makes it harder for the players that stayed, which is unfair. But they were also ALL put in an unfair situation to begin with.
I apologize for the rant, I just needed to let out that frustration
Yeah, the ranking system is a joke. I was on a 14 game winning streak earlier, top player each match, just destroying Onyx players. Meanwhile, the game ranked me as a Platinum 1 and I had to work all the way to Diamond 2, while all of the Onyx players I’m facing have only played like 15 games, lost half of them, and have negative K/Ds in the playlist. This isn’t fair for me nor them, and I’d actually really like the game to just rank me according to my skill like Halo 3 did. Meanwhile I can lose games over and over in FFA and get Onyx without trying. Stupid system.
If only some of you knew what the Trueskill system, to which the CSR is a modified version of, was really meant to do.
> “We have done a significant amount of testing with Halo 2 data, the results of which give us a great deal of confidence about the performance of the TrueSkill system. It is difficult to quantify the improvement over previous systems, but for those people who play Halo 2, we can say that TrueSkill will need no more than 10 games, depending on matchmaking, to estimate your level exactly right.”
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> If only some of you knew what the Trueskill system, to which the CSR is a modified version of, was really meant to do.
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> http://halo.bungie.net/Forums/posts.aspx?postID=24806385&postRepeater1-p=1#24807589
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> > “We have done a significant amount of testing with Halo 2 data, the results of which give us a great deal of confidence about the performance of the TrueSkill system. It is difficult to quantify the improvement over previous systems, but for those people who play Halo 2, we can say that TrueSkill will need no more than 10 games, depending on matchmaking, to estimate your level exactly right.”
The point of a ranking system is to tell you how good you are in the least amount of time possible with utmost accuracy. Halo 3 could do this in 14 games for the best players, meanwhile Onyx level players across the board in Halo 5 are being initially rated as Platinum (in everything but FFA) and because they are being inaccurately placed in Platinum via a skewed placement system that supposedly takes K/D into account - have we learned nothing from Reach? - they steamroll players until the system eventually ranks them up to Diamond and beyond, where they actually belonged in the first place. Winning every single placement game should not net players an average rank like Platinum. Something is definitely wrong here. Winning should be all that matters, but instead winning only starts to matter once you’ve been inaccurately pushed back from where you should actually be placed.
You are describing, with harrowing accuracy, exactly what was wrong with the Halo 3 ranking system. Why so many people continue to this day to use that system as the measure of all other systems is completely beyond me. It was garbage. This system is too, and for many reasons beyond those stated here. Normally I prefer to offer solutions instead of simply bash a game feature, but this one is too horrendous not to bash, and the purpose it serves is far too important and complex for me to have any idea how it should be salvaged or replaced. The only “solution” I’ve come up with, if it can be called a solution, is to stay out of arena altogether. Thank the Halo gods for warzone.