The premise is that less skilled players get stomped ALL the time. That’s bad for player retention.
Draw a normal curve. Put your little dot way out on the right hand tail. In the top 3-4%.
Now pick ‘random’ players from the area under the curve.
Notice how pretty much everyone is to your left. Your opponents will have an average of Gold 6. They are ‘25’ to your ‘50’ (and we’re not talking the watered down Halo 3 version of ‘50’).
How often were you expecting to get ‘stomped’ yourself…
The more I think about it the more Social has to differentiate itself from Ranked by the type of game play. Again - multi-team, handicapping, short / silly games. Just don’t put everyone on a carefully honed ranked map and expect the gameplay to be different.
As I pointed out already, this problem is solved and does not exist. Any player who wants a competitive game where they will not get stomped has easy access to ranked play.
By contrast, currently nobody has access to true social play.
Out of interest… what is your definition of “true social play”.
Is there a minimum K:D attached?
For me it’s a close competitive game - but where the result doesn’t matter… so you can muck around a bit. Experiment with vehicles / weapons. Play more brazenly. Take some risks to pull off that awesome kill. Just get out there and have fun.
And I’m assuming your argument is anecdotal at best.
Do you have any numbers to show… player retention etc.
The only thing we really have to go on is Halo 5’s comment from 343 that SBMM increased player retention by 20-30%. But I don’t know exactly what data that is compared to.
Halo 2 and 3’s system. Minimal or no skill based matchmaking in social modes.
Player numbers for halo 3, reach, and I believe halo 2 are all easy to find on Google.
No 343 games have come close to the player retention of the earlier games. I’m not making any argument here for why that’s the case, but 343’s argument of “no SBMM means less player retention” is a bit laughable to me given that they have yet to make a game that retains players, and the two most lasting games in the franchise - H2 and H3 - both had ranked and social play.
It needs party matching. Matching based on your party size. Give us search preferences so we can play how we want. If we want sweaty social matches then let us search based on skill or if we want social let us search solo/duos/squads or anything goes.
I’d be completely fine with them getting rid of it entirely in social. The randomness creates far more unique matches game to game. It makes you want to play more.
True. When playing alone, I noticed that scores would always be extremely close (50 - 49 win or loss) and my KD would barely be above 1. Win some lose some i guess? Idk.
Just my 2 cents, SBMM in both BTB and social feels overtuned. Its either a blow out or neck to neck. 95% of my matches play out like this, which is mind numbing. My friends can barely stand playing with me because they just get obliterated unless they try their best. Which doing that every match is just not fun for them. Isn’t the point of games to have fun, with or without friends. Just loosen it up a bit to add some variety and fun to the matches like the good old days.
I bet this is just an effect of people getting better at the game at different paces, and the differences between player to player starting to becoming more and more noticeable over time. This actually happens in quite a lot of games, for instance, try playing super smash bros game with people in person against large groups of people and there are almost always groups of people that will just destroy everyone they play, and most of the time they’re not even trying.
You also gotta take that people can shift between how serious they take a match too. Even during a match.
If this is a case, this is not because the match is becoming less social, but the people who are slow at getting better or not trying to improve at all are just getting left behind. Not entirely sure if there is a way to really fix this either…
Best thing 343i could do is allow community servers with server lists to be made so people can pick servers they enjoy playing on and favorite them for later.
If your friends got good. These days competitive gaming is higher than ever. Gamers have gotten better because of it. Pvp games where you want to relax just don’t exist. You need to be competent.
“git gud” is a really dumb argument that doesn’t apply to anything here. I could just as easily say that bronze players should never be capable of winning a game or going better than a 0.1 K/D because they need to “git gud”, and that would also be a really dumb argument.
And “gamers have gotten better” isn’t true either. Go watch some “game journalist” footage if you need proof.
