I matched a player in Squad Slayer tonight playing his second game of Halo Reach ever. I checked to see how he did in his first game, and he was 1-22. Since he did so poorly I assumed he had matched one of my friends in his first game, and after checking bungie, I was Right. His second game of Reach ever was against me and my party, and I was 400+ wins in squad with 0 losses. He didn’t fair much better this game.
After the game I sent him a message and told him it would get better. As I checked his Bungie page to get the links for this thread, I noticed that he was no longer playing Team Objective, or Squad Slayer, he had moved to Action Sack. If my first two games of Halo were against a player of my caliber right now, I wouldn’t have stuck with playing harder playlists either. Simply put, the matchmaking system failed him.
This is what social playlists do to a MM system. They give players an opportunity to match people way outside of their skill range, and create frustrating matches. This causes the casual players to move to playlists like Action Sack, and the competitive players to quit the game outright because of the lack of competition.
Reach, especially post TU, did alot right in terms of gameplay. However, its MM system is absolutely atrocious, and I just hope 343 doesn’t make the same mistake Bungie did with Reach.
New account = sky high trueskill sigma (basically, the system doesnt have a clue what his real skill level is because hes only played 2 games), plus Reaches somewhat loose skill matchmaking in general, means it is absolutely possible for a new player to get put in with experienced ones the first few times.
He will badly lose a couple of games in a row, and the sigma will lock him in low pretty quick taking him out of that environment into a more low skill one, and he and work his way up from there.
People say newbies shouldnt ever be put in general population with the average and above players, but the problem is that this is the only way for the system to find out how hes doing skill wise. The xbox cannot read minds. And trueskill only ranks of the final team standings of a match too, nothing else matters, so matches have to be played to completion. What else is the system supposed to do, put the handful of new players in a sort of little creche all by themselves, where it will take forever for them to find a match anyway?
I do however feel that Reach should have its implementation of trueskill tightened up to at least halo 3 levels, with the prefer skill option then making it even tighter still. Youd probably pay quite a time penalty for this though in some playlists, given populations in the low hundreds.
When I saw costa posting I was ready to take it with a grain of salt but when I saw the matches I was disgusted.
This kind of crap happens to me from time to time, Im no MLG pro, but Im definitely good at this game, (good win loss, +2 k/d, 20% onyx) but Ive had games where it was someones 1st, 2nd, or 3rd game of reach.
I know there is a skill searching option, but I have NO idea why matches like sub generals against black ranks are allowed to take place.
Ive posted an explanation for whats happening in this thread. Why are people still wondering why its happening?
Am i not very good at explaining things?
Trueskill is very loose in this game, and sigma is sky high with new accounts. Similar skill function doesn’t work. This is honestly my only beef with Reach. At all, but damn is it a big one.
New players should be an equivalent to a level 1 in Halo 3 ranked. The system assumes you the lowest of the low, and put you there, however with that, you can easily climb through the true skill levels to how good you really are.
But then if that happened, people would make more second accounts for the hell of it and go to every playlist with the equivalent of a 1 and beat up on people who at their honest skill level at the time, making everything crappy.
Reach’s system is fine, until new players match great players with their high sigma, then they get way discouraged.
> But then if that happened, people would make more second accounts for the hell of it and go to every playlist with the equivalent of a 1 and beat up on people who at their honest skill level at the time, making everything crappy.
This is another good reason why bungie banished 1-50. The system was flooded with second accounter sdue to rank-lust which totally screwed up trueskill for everyone.
As far as i know, halo 3 was the only game to start people off at trueskill level 1, probably because its the only game to display the number (well there might be others but i dont know about them). To my knowledge most XBL games which dont show the number start people off at lvl 25 which is average.
Sigma is designed to very rapidly lock in too, i think i read in an official powerpoint its designed to do so after only 20 games or so.
Thanks for reading and understanding my post though. Again, i agree that Reach displays some problems with matching people together with too disparate skill levels than is comfortable.
> Ive posted an explanation for whats happening in this thread.
Based on that explanation, I wonder… How feasible might it have been for Bungie to allow one’s Halo 3 skill level to influence one’s Reach skill level when Reach first launched? That is – if someone’s a 50 in Halo 3 by the time Reach is out, then maybe they shouldn’t be a 1 when they first play Reach.
Based on what you know of the skill matching system, could that have been a viable solution for Reach had it been used? Could it be a viable solution for the transition from Reach to Halo 4?
The system is and never will be properly function-able in halo reach. Why? because it wasn’t made right. Halo 4’s system how to completely start from scratch imo
> > Ive posted an explanation for whats happening in this thread.
>
> Based on that explanation, I wonder… How feasible might it have been for Bungie to allow one’s Halo 3 skill level to influence one’s Reach skill level when Reach first launched? That is – if someone’s a 50 in Halo 3 by the time Reach is out, then maybe they shouldn’t be a 1 when they first play Reach.
>
> Based on what you know of the skill matching system, could that have been a viable solution for Reach had it been used? Could it be a viable solution for the transition from Reach to Halo 4?
That actually would have been cool if they had done that. Giving people that extra skill-level boost depending on their performance in past games of the Halo franchise that have that kind of information would have done wonders to keep players of equal or similar skill paired up a good amount of the time. However, I still see the “multiple accounts” issue happening again, though still this would be better than starting everyone at the same level, when clearly there are those above and beyond what the starting level is skill-wise.
Perhaps Halo 4 may have something like this, though it is only a thought. It would be cool, though.
What if the difference between ranked and social was just a search filter and not two separate playlists? When you turned the “ranked filter” on your search times may increase but there is a guarantee of matching closely skilled players.
This system would have to know the player’s skill so all players should be forced to play a certain number of games in a training playlist before being released into the general population. A AI “training course” where the player faces bots designed to test and measure different skills like reaction time, accuracy, and precision could be used to gauge player skill before enough matchmaking data is available.
I usually don’t have this problem. I guess it’s just me. Before anyone makes fun of the account I recently had to make a new one (my old account was stolen). I guess that is just another luck based thing they threw into the mix.
> New account = sky high trueskill sigma (basically, the system doesnt have a clue what his real skill level is because hes only played 2 games), plus Reaches somewhat loose skill matchmaking in general, means it is absolutely possible for a new player to get put in with experienced ones the first few times.
>
> He will badly lose a couple of games in a row, and the sigma will lock him in low pretty quick taking him out of that environment into a more low skill one, and he and work his way up from there.
>
> People say newbies shouldnt ever be put in general population with the average and above players, but the problem is that this is the only way for the system to find out how hes doing skill wise. The xbox cannot read minds. And trueskill only ranks of the final team standings of a match too, nothing else matters, so matches have to be played to completion. What else is the system supposed to do, put the handful of new players in a sort of little creche all by themselves, where it will take forever for them to find a match anyway?
>
> I do however feel that Reach should have its implementation of trueskill tightened up to at least halo 3 levels, with the prefer skill option then making it even tighter still. Youd probably pay quite a time penalty for this though in some playlists, given populations in the low hundreds.
It shouldn’t work like this, if you’re new it should match you against other new players and make you fight your way through the new player skill pool and have you climb the skill ladder, not make you fall off of its highest point.
sort of like like a survival of the fittest type of thing, the better players of the new player pool move on while the rest stay behind untill they’re ready to advance like the others.
a ranking system like that doesn’t take as long to advance as you might think.
those who showed promise in individual skill would advance quickly, while the others simply wouldn’t until they were ready/ and or advance slower than the others.
> > Ive posted an explanation for whats happening in this thread.
>
> Based on that explanation, I wonder… How feasible might it have been for Bungie to allow one’s Halo 3 skill level to influence one’s Reach skill level when Reach first launched? That is – if someone’s a 50 in Halo 3 by the time Reach is out, then maybe they shouldn’t be a 1 when they first play Reach.
>
> Based on what you know of the skill matching system, could that have been a viable solution for Reach had it been used? Could it be a viable solution for the transition from Reach to Halo 4?
I can see what your saying, but the main problem with this is that halo 3 skillsets and Reach skillsets are not wholly comparable (causing endless strife on the forums as we know). You were very much expected to forge a new skillset with reach given all the new options, instead of just duct taping up your old one from the previous game (like from h2 to h3)
There are people who were excellent in halo 3 who cant get into the Reach mindset at all, should they still get an automatic 50 in reach?
This is also why each individual playlist also has its own skill record for everyone…someone might be bad at slayers but an incredible objective player, mixing their skill record between the two would mess things up.
Its worth noting that its not as if MM deliberately throws newbies in with the decent players, its just that the decent players happen to be the biggest proportion on the population in the game. Its all about the bell curve. As i said before, once they get some games finished and results collated then MM can start to pair them up more accurately.
Also consider this, lots of good players make a second account to start over, yet they then have the appearance of a newbie. If MM started them off at lvl 1 and kept them there until 100 games or whatever like people seem to want, theyd just stomp everything in sight the whole time, whereas now starting everyone off at the median skill of 25 and quickly moving them up or down from there, means the genuine newbs move down and the decent ppl move up. The situation cuts both ways as you can see.
Apart from that though, i reiterate that skill matching does need to be tightened up by probably atleast ± 5 levels on a permanent basis. Or perhaps people in general just need to stop being such stupid quitting tards, regardless of their skill level.
New players shouldn’t be thrown in with the best of the best. I don’t care what their sigma score is, they should never be placed in a game with the best players in that playlist on their first or second or even 20th game.
I’ve had WAY too many games that have people with incredibly low ranks and less than 50 games overall. And I or the OP or anyone incredibly good certainly shouldn’t be the opponent in the kid’s first game of Reach online.