Sure. There is no learning curve like playing harder opponents.
But when said Smurfs beat you and take a chunk of rank because your team was better ranked (on paper). That’s a tough lesson to swallow.
And if the Smurf is specifically being used by the opposition team to upset match making. That’s even harder to swallow. And then, if said Smurf happily quits if they didn’t get the match up they wanted and nullifies the results…
They are a blight…
But in this system rank doesn’t matter. It’s just a fictitious CSR so playing the odd better player can only improve your skills
With any ranking system… it is the rank that matters?
We know that the CSR can drift from the MMR. But it’s hardly “fictitious”.
Unless you a Smurf. Then it’s -yoink-.
The rank reset means nothing as long as the game remains unplayable. Desync is at it’s worse and crashing still plagues majority of the community.
CSR It’s a stagnant system that has no reason to be visible. It’s an extended version of MMR. In other words pointless and 343 are using it as a fictitious skill base progression system.
Arguable the system they intend is not what people want. Or a significant amount of people.
I’m not saying the ranking system has changed it’s just got better for the worst.
True skill took longer to get you to that point however reaching that point was the best part.
Now this iteration of TS2 gets you to that point an awful lot quicker.
Theoretically - I could play 20 games and win 20 games and not get a Onyx trophy. However a member of my team that I have played with for 20 games will get that Onyx trophy. Even though they may have not got the Onyx trophy if they didn’t play with me for 20 games.
Edit:
The current ranking system would be fit for purpose if it wasn’t the only was to progress.
(BPs are cash grabs not a progression system.)
Games often use a CSR to express the MMR. It allows them to hide dramatic changes (eg. during / immediately after placement), to stop ranks teetering back and forth on runs of WLWLW (not used in Infinite), and to give a sense of reward or progression when you win but don’t actually deserve to rank up.
It’s the latter that isn’t going down well with the community.
I would instead argue that;
Sort of. I don’t think it’s behaving a lot differently from Halo 5. But the communities expectation of being able to “grind” the number has definitely changed. And brought a lot of toxic behaviours.
I think they need an XP rank (weighted to wins and medals) to take their attention.
If you are talking about Halo 3 then that’s a different story.
The first hurdle was the XP system. Simply chalk up the wins and your CSR catches up with your MMR.
The second hurdle was rank locking. That sucked.
Which is what an ideal ranking system does. It finds your rank as quickly and as accurately as it can.
Anything else is pointless.
And that’s how a ranking system should work.
Not all wins are equal.
Otherwise it’s an XP system. Or a W/L ratio. Neither of which are ranking systems.
Yep. They are on a different MMR journey. Their ranking curve is obviously higher and wider than yours.
But the beauty is, that if you keep playing, and keep winning, you too can rank up. If you are good enough.
I can’t agree with that.
There’s no point in me playing 40-100 games with lower skilled players, stomping through them to reach the top of the pile. That’s what 1-50 was like if you already had the upper limit of skill. Also didn’t work well with rotational or new playlists due to the distributions of skill. It’s also very off putting for lower skilled players who have to contend with people who are pubstomping their way upwards.
In Halo Infinite my first ranked game was with Diamond/Onyx players, as it should be.
The rank system in this game is too Lenient. My path to Onyx was incredibly straightforward regardless of whether I won, lost, played well or poorly. I never ever de-ranked.
I stopped playing after that point but I have heard Onyx is where the proper strict rank system kicked in.
When there are more players in Onyx than in Diamond then there is something seriously wrong.
Congratulations.
You are likely Onxy material. And even Onyx players can have a bad day/game and still be at Onyx level.
No, TrueSkill2 operates at all levels.
But it is harder (or at least slower) to rank up in Onyx.
The system, like any ELO, is open ended… and match-making can find it hard to find a good balance of games for highly rated teams - so they have nerfed the rank scoring (instead of +15/-15 for a win/loss it is something like +3/-8 in Onyx). This tries to reign in those who would otherwise grind their rank up without stopping.
Yes so you are already there on a continuous cycle of games…. Never ending - not really accomplishing more than just playing the same games! This system suits your needs. You have your game loop.
I don’t really want to play the same game / the same seasons / starting at the same rank over and over.
If anything I just want one season. With a beginning middle and end. A journey. A progression system that takes you through meaningful ranks but not one that anybody can reach.
This system doesn’t appeal to me and it’s why I can’t remember the last time I played.
It depends What you want -
Ideal has many forms.
Personally I don’t like the idea of being placed at any point. Especially after ten games.
When I played H3 this system may have suited me. I was definitely more competitive and starting at 35/40 would have been far less time consuming to get to the real meat.
But I’m old now, my ideology has changed. I would like a beginning middle and end with the chance of failure.
This system doesn’t promote that with its continuous seasons/short placements/bland CSR.
It’s difficult.
It sounds like the meat and potatoes of what you want is an XP system. I think something that is weighted to wins, medals, and objective scores. It would satisfy the itch of a lot of people.
To somehow combine it with rank is harder. I’ve pondered in previous threads about an XP/military rank system that operates on each CSR rank. Each skill rank (eg. Plat 4) has it’s own XP progression from Private to 5 star General. Any progress you earn at your current skill rank covers all the skill ranks below.
At the end of each season you place for CSR again (but not really as your MMR seeds through) - but your military ranks continue. The grind would need to be long (maybe not SR152 long) - but it would need to cover years of game play.
Maybe keep repeating the last level over and adding more stars.
You could have roadblocks to pass. Going from one rank to another requires a specific set of skills or weapon mastery. Or maybe you need to be a certain rank in more than one playlist to progress. Something to keep it interesting and a reflection of effort AND skill.
The same can be said for any game, or social Halo. I’m accomplishing a fun time. They aren’t the same. The gametypes change and I look forward to my favourite ones coming up, CTF and Strongholds. A close game is exciting to me, win or lose although obviously the wins are better. Having a strong comeback too, nothing really beats it for me, especially knowing I stopped the other team when they wanted it so much. The team getting that win, people getting their CSR gains.
I’m not accomplishing anything different playing 1-50, I still hit the same peak and enter that continuous loop. It just takes longer for me to get there and it ruins a lot of less experienced players games on my way.
If progression means beating up on worse players who just want close competetive games then I don’t want progression. The journey for me is developing my own personal skill against players who are similar skill to me.
I don’t thing it’s that difficult. Think of a campaign you start your story you progress your player through levelling up and you fight hard bosses. Not everybody completes games - well they never used too. They are some what easier these days.
However if you could put this into multiplayer you would level up with aesthetics and the hard bosses are your Onyx’s.
@Ken_CTF said that running through 1-40 in H3 was boring…. Stomping can be tedious… he is right, it is.
But I think if they added purpose to going through the ranks at the beginning then it would become less so. Maybe second season the TS2 could kick in and place you where you’re at.
But just turning the game on and throwing you into upper plat/diamond and moving up 6 ranks then reaching your level with no other way of saying ‘you’ve done well, good work’ felt very dissatisfying and I think it has hindered the longevity of the game.
I guess they could start you at Bronze 1 and make you work your way up to your actual rank.
As long as you aren’t expecting the match-making to use that as your rank. Not only would the inevitable stompings be tedious for the good players… they would be absolutely demoralising for the not-so good ones.
And after a few games you’ll probably know where you are heading. If you are playing lots of mid-diamond teams then it’s probably no secret where your final rank is going to end up.
Fair enough. But by this time the system has pretty much nailed your rank. That’s where it’s at. So you might as well own it.
Your purpose and progress should be measured in getting better as a player. Working out what you are doing wrong and changing. It’s no secret it’s a tough grind - much like any life skill.
And it may take weeks, months, or even longer just to move up a couple of tiers.
But that’s got to be far more satisfying then imposing an artificial limit / delay on your current rank being “revealed”.
I’ve been sitting in Diamond 6 for about a week. Trying my best to grind to onyx before the reset. At 1491 now, with a few days to go. Wish me luck!!!
The matchmaking is so strange. I went on a massive loss streak recently that took me right back to the start of D6, most of the time due to one player who was completely out of their depth, going something like 3 kills 15 deaths. It is matches like that where it really gets to me that the system ranks me down. Like, I get it, we lost, but surely when you have somebody dragging the team down so heavily then that should be taken in to account (not just the predicted chance of winning) in determining how much CSR you lose. In fact, that isn’t so much the problem, more that those people are put in the match to start with. Hopefully the reset will fix it. I can tell the system is trying to level me off now, frustratingly right at the edge of onyx 
. Here’s hoping I can get there this weekend
I don’t think it needs to be artificially hidden I just think it needs to have more purpose. Any company that calls their ranking levels bronze 1, 2, 3 have run out of ideas.
However, the business model 343 have chosen is making it very difficult for them to make a more interesting and progressive CSR system.
Infinite could have been the extension of H3 in respect to how or who you become within the game.
What type of game you played; multiplayer, campaign, firefight. Where ever you play it could have become apart of your identity.
Imagine if you partied up with friends and you were in a social game and the other side was a mix of players visible on screen saying; diamond slayer/platinum forger/bronze collector/onyx historian… etc…
people complain about… ‘the game lacks cosmetics - I can’t be who I want to be’.
I think ‘you are what you play’…. But this isn’t shown in the game, so when I played, it made me feel like I was a bland clone.
343 can bring out all these game types, but they are all just stand alone projects, no interconnectivity.
So yeah the CSR system is so basic and boring and more so than stomping on golds.
An account level before joining ranked would be really good. I haven’t really thought about it, but pretty much every other competitive fps does this
Part of the prediction might have been that player underperforms. I know it’s dumb cus realistically you want 8 players predicted to go 12-12 in an ideal world of slayer games. But sometimes they balance players and one player might be expected to go ham to compensate for a player that will clearly struggle. It’s up to that player that goes ham to get the job done. A player of lower rank can’t just stop dying and playing better, if that was the case they’d be a higher rank. It’s happened to me before where higher ranked players slip me in their pocket and I can’t do anything against them. If you’re better than the enemy team then that usually means your teammates are likely not so you have to help them as much as possible or they will have an awful time.
Had a great game last night. Had a game we were predicted to lose 52% in enemy team favour. I was highest player on the team I think and we had a Plat player that was really struggling in the game. We started losing 1-0 so I went full tryhard mode and popped off in the end, think I went 21-10 and was doing serious objective focus. Was a really satisfying win to take and I think had I not started using comms and calling out how the spawns needed to be played, when to push etc, what we needed to do then it may have gone differently as we were struggling at first and the team were constantly out of position. Then we started making it work and everyone started doing better. Was a great feeling.
Good luck on getting Onyx, you’re so close. I’m sure you can do it!
I was excited for the rank reset until I realized they’ve changed nothing of value and its no coincidence they’re doing it the same day Destiny DLC drops. They’re trying to give people a reason to keep playing without actually doing anything. We’re being hustled