A lot of people have made a huge fuss over showing ranks in game vs. only via Waypoint. I do agree that it should be shown in game and their reasoning for leaving it out is flawed and not very convincing in the first place.
Either way, I think that the main purpose of a competitive skill rank is to ensure fair competitive games via matchmaking, and while it works better than the MM at launch, it is still flawed in several ways.
First, the fact that it was implemented 5-6 months after launch when the population has dropped to much lower numbers limits its effectiveness. As the information of ranks in Halo 4 disperses through the community, news will reach different players at different times and when they come back to start as a rank 0 it may take a while to work up to a rank that reflects their actual skill and they could get bored before then. Or newer players may hop in and unfortunately get paired against great players who have just started ranking in a new playlist and get dominated and discouraged from playing more.
That limits the ability of ranks to revitalize the community, if that is even possible this far into H4’s lifetime, which I hope it’s not too late. In any case, with most playlists having populations in the 100s and only a few popular playlists reaching the 1000s on a regular basis, there simply aren’t enough players to fairly match similarly ranked people into games in a reasonable time, especially when you consider location, internet connection strength, language, and other things that are factored into MM.
I’m pretty good at Halo, but for some reason a lot of the players I face in the 30s or even high 20s in rumble pit are just too far above me in skill and I haven’t worked up to that level yet in this game. I feel players of that caliber should be in the mid 40s but there just aren’t enough people playing RP consistently to allow more accurate ranks. It could be that they’re just working up and I caught them in the middle, but it’s happened to me consistently and I don’t know what exactly to make of it. For comparison, according to Halotracker, I was rank 48 in my later days of Halo Reach rumble pit, which I know played much slower and differently than H4, but I feel my skill should translate to a rank somewhere around the mid 30s but I’m stuck in the high 20s for now.
Second, using individual scoring in team playlists leaves huge potential to game the system. Say 4 players of similar skill who could achieve ranks in the high 40s or a 50 in infinity slayer decide to only play as a team once ranks are released. Because they will always be playing with each other, it’s unlikely that any player will dominate several games in a row in terms of the score, and if they keep rotating between scores of 1-5/6 (out of the 8 total players per match), they could continue dominating other teams without their ranks increasing much to reflect their actual skill because their individual performances are being measured against each other.
They could potentially stay in the 30s in terms of their ranks and exploit the individual scoring while playing as a team to dominate others playing alone whose skill actually peaks in ranks of 20s or 30s. The same could happen with Big Team, Swat, Snipers, etc. I’m not sure if this has been considered by 343, and I haven’t really run into something like this yet, but they should certainly keep an eye for it. In my opinion, wins should always mean something towards ranks in every team playlist except maybe for Action Sack and Multi Team.
Finally, they NEED to either implement social playlists in H4, or simply scrap CSR altogether for a few of the existing playlists. I play this game a lot more than some of my close friends and family who play it, and I’m considerably better than most of them. They never want to play with me when I’m on my profile because I face a higher level of competition than they can handle and it’s no fun for anyone to keep getting dominated.
I could really only play splitscreen as a guest so that we don’t always play against higher skilled players and so that they don’t rank higher than their actual skill dictates they should, and that’s just not right. Having CSR in every playlist punishes people who want to play MM with friends who aren’t as good as they are and that sucks.
Also, while I do enjoy good competitive games in Halo most of the time, it gets really frustrating when you get several lobbies in a row of players who dominate you that haven’t worked up to their actual rank yet. There are other times when I just want to play for fun and take off my try hard pants so to speak, and that means I have to go to a different playlist where my rank is lower so I don’t face difficult competition.
I hope they learn from this mistake and make sure to have a good in-game ranking system in Halo 5 from day 1.