OP, your flirting with notions of skill and mics. Your post is just suggesting that tone though and we are on the internet, so a modification and re-wording/clarification as to what exactly your saying will do a world of good.
With that said, those with mics and skillful, in my experience, has almost always lead to two categories of people depending on conditions (tired for example): skillful minded players or want to have a conversation players.
In my limited online experience, I’ve found skillful minded players more often then not throughout my eleven years with Halo and that includes most of Reach matchmaking.
I do agree that separate teams need and should be paired together, such allows people to find a possible median when it comes to matchmaking, but here’s my issue:
I can’t say for sure whether this is true, but I’ve contemplated how Halo: Combat Evolved PC, Halo 2 console, and Halo 3 had the capabilities of finding similar skilled players, depending on the circumstances and what changed that brought broad end spectrum players in Reach. While this boils down to implementation that I have not looked at on the coding level, if Halo 4 quotes are any indication of previous search related criteria, then all Halo games to date calculate odds based on statistical numbers like kills, deaths, ratios, gametypes played and what percentages, etc…
So how did that change Reach so much? Boosting is a possible reason. With skewed results, the system may have determined most players followed a 5-10 degree level difference because of having a 4.0 k/d spread due to playing infection all day. Or maybe its a 2.50 k/d in the MLG playlist. The truth of the matter is Truskill is present as the matchmaking setup, which means it follows the same rules, guidelines, and principles of strict and non-strict matchmaking scenarios.
Most of the playlists I’ve had the pleasure of playing, follow non-strict protocols like this. Which means pulling players who, for lack of a better phrase, almost ten different levels on a 1-50 scale, together. IF that is the case, then Arena should be the playlist where all strict material is utilized. After playing in Arena for multiple seasons, I can tell you it followed strict protocols. Almost every match I played in there was, or near, my overall k/d of 1.44. Almost all of my matches included players who were handy with power weapons, and with the DMR. Almost all of my matches featured players who were gold or Onyx status and when I was ranked? Top 5% Gold was the highest I got when I, consecutively, ran into Onyx users.
How this relates to this thread is fairly simple: mic settings, whether plugged in or not, could be a factor above. But without being in a specific playlist, may not be brought into account. Personally, that is fine by me, as long as it eventually gets fixed and appropriate that teams of players will find the ideal matchmaking setup, connection-wise, with similarly skilled players. The issue here is Reach introduced the fastest search times in the history of the Halo franchise. Bungie’s last farewell statistics showed that Reach easily destroyed the amount of matches found and played in just, what? Nine or ten months after being launched? And if it hadn’t overrun the stat, that it was going to? People are going to expect that standard from now on.
Either way, we’ll see what 343 does.