CSR - The Big Picture

Games Other Halo
1

Will the CSR even work? will it accurately reflect a persons true abilities? This is the question that people should be asking but everyone is too concerned about how the CSR wont be in game…

It’s amazing how many posts read like this “CSR is useless if it’s not viewable in game and no one will care about it.”
Well as far as that point of view goes I think it’s simply not valid. Previous Halo Titles have never shown ones overall K/D in game but that didn’t stop people from caring a lot about it.

At the end of the day, people will care about their rank if it’s visible in game or not and what people should be more concerned with is if the new ranking system is actually going to work, how will it work and will it be accurate?

Halo 3’s ranked playlists were not competitive because people had ranks, they were competitive because people were matched up against others of similar skill (no more than +/- 10 difference). Matching based on skill is one of the fundamental aspects of competition (It’s why boxing has weight divisions and why men and women compete separately at the Olympics etc). Matching based on skill is what creates close scoring games which in turn drives people to play to the very best of their abilities.

If a highly skilled player faced off against (and inevitably destroyed) little timmy then how would they respond when asked about the game? They would probably say “That was too easy, it was just no competition”

Will Halo 4’s CSR be used to strictly match people of similar skill?

I highly doubt that it will because matching people this way means longer search times and many playlists simply do not have the number of people required to achieve it within a reasonable time frame.

If this is true then games will consist of players that cover a very wide skill spectrum and will result it outcomes that have abnormal consequences for each players rank.
For example, 8 people searching get matched up…
Team A is 50, 40, 10, 2.
Team B is 40, 40, 40, 30

It is likely that the above game would result in Team A losing because the two lower ranked people would both have very negative K/D’s for the game.
This would cause a decrease in skill for all members of Team A simply because the search system did not find suitable team mates and/or opponents.

I fail to see how any ranking system can accurately gauge a players skill if skill is not used as a requirement for matching team mates and opponents.

And lets not forget about JiP and the randomized unbalanced nature of Halo 4, both of which will also have adverse effects on one rank…

So many people have so many opinions about the CSR but who has actually thought about any part of it aside from the aesthetic?

If the CSR is going to ‘fail’ or end up being pointless then it wont be because it’s only on waypoint, it will be because it isn’t accurate and hence has no true meaning.

<mark>TL;DR</mark>
<mark>You shouldn’t be worried that the CSR is not in game, you should be more concerned about whether or not the CSR system will actually work and accurately reflect your actual skill.</mark>

2

I completely agree with this. Nice post!

3

Accurately reflecting a persons skill has never been the issue for me.

The main goal of ranks for me has been and still is motivating people to give it there all. Give me and my enemy something to gain and lose. Something to fight for.

As it stands I will more often build the best loadout I can come up with and just squash some one trying to complete their plasma pistol commendation? Really, where is the “fun” in beating that kind of enemy?

4

wow… there’s another 8 or so threads about CSR not being in-game…

get over it people

5

Exactly. I made a thread earlier stating something very similar.

Will each playlist that get’s CSR be balanced? Will it have narrow true skill restrictions so you can match people of similar skill? Will the maps in each playlist be balanced, and symmetrical? Will load outs be balanced for every player? Will JIP be restricted to work properly and not hand out free wins, and losses? Will they remove random elements that take away from a competitive game?

I think it is obvious that they will not be doing that. If they did keep to competitive, and skilled restrictions they would have to do it to every playlist including action sack, because CSR will be in each playlist. If they did make every playlist meet requirements then there would no longer be any playlist for the core demographic, and in turn they would alienate the other side of the community.

In a nutshell CSR is just a waypoint app which holds less merit than previous ranking systems, which I didn’t think would have ever been made possible, but where there is a will there is an awful way. So sad that a COMPETITIVE SKILL RANK is neither competitive or skill based.

6

Yeah… i am absolutely positive that they are not going to use a matchmaking system like they had in halo 3 and that is the main reason why they refuse to put ranks in games.

7

TrueSkill is already used as the basis for matching you with other players in every playlist in Halo 4, it’s just that in order to reduce search times (or for some of us, ever find a match at all) the system quickly expands it’s matching range if other players of a similar skill and connection availability aren’t found.

I have no idea how CSR will work with the TrueSkill system already in place. 343 is already on shaky ground with how they are implementing CSR to seem like a progression system, which no ranking system should be (Bungie already made that mistake in Halo 2 and 3).

Ideally a ranking system should:

  1. Quickly converge players to their ideal skill, creating evenly matched games a high percentage of time
  2. Encourage players to “play to win”, and to enjoy the experience and come back for more.

The Halo 2 and Halo 3 systems did an alright job of #2, but a terrible job of #1. Halo: Reach’s Arena system did an excellent job of #1, but not a good job of #2. I see no indication that CSR will do either.

8

343 is implementing CSR in such a pointless fashion that you have to ask yourself why they are even bothering. Anybody with half a brain can see that it will be a pointless fail in every measurable way. The real reason why CSR is being released is so that Frank O’Connor (a self admitted unskilled player and thus most likely hater of seeing his poor rank) and his devs can say that rank wasn’t popular in halo 4 and thats why it wont be in halo 5 at all.

9

> 1) Quickly converge players to their ideal skill, creating evenly matched games a high percentage of time
> 2) Encourage players to “play to win”, and to enjoy the experience and come back for more.
>
> The Halo 2 and Halo 3 systems did an alright job of #2, but a terrible job of #1. Halo: Reach’s Arena system did an excellent job of #1, but not a good job of #2. I see no indication that CSR will do either.

Reach did an awful job at #1. You literally had to cheat in order to get a match in higher levels of play. Halo 3 did a great job at #1 20’s always played like 20’s, 30’s always played like 30’s, 40’s always played like 40’s, and so on. Yes there were a few cheaters, but that was fixable. You don’t cut your arm off cause its broken, you fix it.

10

> > 1) Quickly converge players to their ideal skill, creating evenly matched games a high percentage of time
> > 2) Encourage players to “play to win”, and to enjoy the experience and come back for more.
>
> Reach did an awful job at #1. You literally had to cheat in order to get a match in higher levels of play. Halo 3 did a great job at #1 20’s always played like 20’s, 30’s always played like 30’s, 40’s always played like 40’s, and so on. Yes there were a few cheaters, but that was fixable. You don’t cut your arm off cause its broken, you fix it.

That problem with Arena is not a problem with #1, but a problem with #2 (not enough players). It also only affected a very few players, I had no problems getting matches at 30-40% Onyx.

Halo 3’s system was actually a form of TrueSkill that Bungie purposefully broken to progress you slower. You would eventually end up playing at your ideal level, but it took forever. During that time, you would be repeatedly crushing players at low-to-mid levels, tending to drive them away from the game. This created an inverse bell curve of player population, with players concentrated around the very high and very low levels. That in turn created an attitude of good players gaming the system, repeatedly creating new accounts to try to try run through the “progression” again. Not cheating, but not how the system was intended to operate. So not actually that great at #1.

Arena addressed a lot of those problems by using unrestrained TrueSkill, adding the percentile system, and doing “seasons”. Unfortunately Arena had many other issues that resulted in a low population: a lack of a prominent display of your division, the lack of feedback as to how you were doing (in-division %), the fact that at first your TrueSkill was adjusted individually based on your Rating, the fact that people didn’t understand how that worked, and that fact that some people didn’t like the resets. A lot of these things were addressed later, and the final seasons of Arena were actually quite fun and competitive, but the damage had already been done.

It would have been nice to see 343 make an attempt to continue to learn from these lessons and try to implement something that would improve the ranked gameplay experience from previous games, but I think it was just too much of a challenge for them to take on. Halo 4 was partially unfinished as it was, and they are only now getting around to making something resembling this (CSR), which I really can’t seen anyone getting much out of. I’d much rather they spend their time on improving the playlist gametypes.

11

> So sad that a COMPETITIVE SKILL RANK is neither competitive or skill based.

True, but although the CSR will be available for all playlists it doesn’t mean that it has to be accurate or taken seriously for all of them…

Hopefully after a bit more time we’ll get some new playlists that are actually designed to work with a ranking system: matches based on skill, no loadouts, balanced starts, weapons on map, no ordnance, no JiP etc (you know the drill)