> The current system serves nobody’s interest. Why? Because in the long term, games are more fun when both sides competing are approximately equal. Although there is a hidden trueskill in Reach, it is not the highest priority when matching teams–time is. I would rather sit in a playlist searching for a match for an extra 2, 3, 5 minutes, or realize that there’s nobody that can compete even searching in that playlist right now, then get in matches that don’t challenge me. Only Arena offers any kind of consistent competition. In previous Halos, any ranked playlist would allow you to compete against players at or above your level. In Reach, there is only one Ranked playlist: Arena–and its typically low population creates a suboptimal experience anyways.
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> But the truth is, a game needs to have a big player base to make the strict 1-50 ranking system successful in providing a good matchmaking experience. And the fact seems to be that Reach does not have that player base. Reach’s playlist population numbers are much smaller than Halo 3’s. The question is, is it the bad matchmaking system that pushed people away, or did they just never get into the game in the first place? I don’t know, because I’d need to compare Reach’s early population numbers–which I seem to remember being told were “skewed by flawed data reporting” or something like that–to its current numbers. Which came first–the chicken or the egg? It’s the game’s creators that have the responsibility to find the answer and solve the problem, whether it was unsuccessful marketing or flawed gameplay.
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> For all the flaws in the 1-50 system (boosters, cheaters, rank elitism, etc.), the good outweighed the bad. It created intensely competitive matches that allowed players of any skill to play on an even field most of the time without looking to external sources like Gamebattles. Bring visible 1-50 back for Halo 4, or at the very least don’t let your “Competitive” playlist hoppers match players with Trueskill in the top 5% get matched with players with Trueskill in the lowest 25%. Second accounters may have been able to play a few games against lower ranked players at the beginnings or their new accounts, but now people don’t even need second accounts to play against players that they can dominate. As a result, these new players get discouraged by matchmaking that is frequently utterly uneven, and they move on to other games, which loses the company future customers and which loses the game its current and future player base.
Yeah, well said.
Just from my experiences, I would agree that the lack of proper ranking/matching had a huge impact to the population. Just under half my friend’s list stopped playing because they were just bored of stomping on guests all day. It’s not fun!
For the rest, it was the huge gameplay changes which drew them away… obviously a new game needs new elements in order to sell, but Reach took this way too far and changed the entire flow of the game. Even the player movement itself feels completely different from Halo.
Now of course the population will probably go down a bit after so many games, but the poor execution of Reach propelled this degradation forward… and that’s really sad because probably 80% of the issues were pointed out as far back as the original Beta.
The competitive community has known all along what would hold back Reach, as they truly understand the game and what it is that draws fans towards Halo. Yet here we are a year later and 343 is trapped in this position in which they do not want to drive away those who came to be accustomed to Reach. I believe that Reach at its core is a good game and could have been saved before it was even released, but it seems that Bungie just wanted to get it shipped out the door and end finish their contract as soon as possible.