How does CSR work can someone explain it to me?
Basically the CSR - Competitive Skill Rank - determines how good you’re and tries to pair you up with players of similar or equal skill. If I recall, you move up based solely on wins and go down on losses. Your actual performance determines how far up or down you go.
At least, that’s what I’ve gathered and seen on the forums.
First off, the categorical division/tier we’re assigned in the game doesn’t do anything other than provide us with a visual indicator of our skill in reference to those we’ve played with and against; it, itself, doesn’t really do anything other than that. How a developer decides to implement Xbox Live’s Smart Match system into their game’s matchmaking system has everything to do with who we’re getting matched up with and how long it takes to find matches. The Smart Match system factors in many things; (1) your matchmaking history over Xbox Live under your GT, (2) the amount of matchmaking experience within a particular game, (3) the skill levels you not only face and play with, but the confidence in those metric skill level’s - aka what’s their TrueSkill’s standard deviation, (4) your performances as well as your team’s outcomes continuously adjust and build your skill metric.
Our placement within one of these visible CSR divisions is based on all of those previous things as well as on how 343i has configured the divisions for particular playlists aka the metric cut-offs per division. Not to mention, the Smart Match system factors in a few additional considerations when searching for ideal matches such as our gaming Reputation, Age, and Language (possibly other things too).
Simplified:
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Xbox Live assigns you with a rudimentary skill-metric when playing a new game based on your profile’s performance history within all the online matchmaking games you’ve ever played in.
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This rudimentary metric has a wide standard deviation to allow for quick skill-based adjustments under the new game, but the more time you spend with the new game the more confident (aka narrow) that standard deviation will become.
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Skill-based matchmaking is also balanced against factors such as player Reputation, Age, and Language in order to provide an optimal experience for a player beyond what skill metrics may alone provide.
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Team based gameplay requires the system to estimate an average for the many factors going into a search process; optimizing a match-up around these averages is how the system attempts to provide competitive matches. Unfortunately, similar averages “on paper” don’t always provide a competitively balanced game.
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Your personal performances influence match outcomes and match outcomes affect your skill metric in reference to those you’re playing with and against; these metrics (yours and theirs) are also continuously developing their levels of confidence.
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It’s worth mentioning that 343i has their CSRs setup to measure your initial 10 individual performances under a new playlist before assigning your skill-metric to a visual CSR tier; after which any moving up or down within this tier is dependent on team performance and not your particular individual performance. Rest assured that your skill-metric or TrueSkill is what’s really affecting the skill-based matchmaking aka SBMM within Halo; although, it’s also influenced to some degree by our Rep, Age, and Language preference. The visual CSRs simple act as a skill-based indicator per a particular set of game-modes or a game-mode; in other words, they’re meant to present an easily relate-able method for visualizing and referencing our skill per particular playlists. It appears that 343i have setup the SWAT and FFA playlists to be less restrictive regarding the ability to place within the upper tiers and a correction is coming in the near future.
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Seasonal resets to specific playlist CSRs should allow individuals to be re-measured with more confident data.