My experience playing Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer has been amazing, but over the last few months, I have noticed a few things that I think could be improved. This post serves as a document detailing some of the issues that I think this game has, and also provides a few possible solutions that could hopefully serve as a starting point for determining how to find a lasting fix. Note: images were added as plaintext links to circumvent embedded image restrictions.
Issues
AFKs, CSRs, and related W/L statistics
People leaving a game mid-match can and do significantly sway the outcome of a match, especially in objective game types. 30.097% of my entire Team Arena game history ended with unbalanced teams in terms of player count. AFKs and people leaving mid-match can spoil the game for the remaining players, and the game does a good job of discouraging this behavior. However, the game only directly penalizes the player who quit, and leaves those still remaining to be defeated and suffer a drop in CSR even though they were at a huge disadvantage. To show this, I have written a script to go through my Team Arena game history and determine the W/L for when a team is down a player, and when we end the game with the same number of players.
My W/L for equal player count on both teams: 1.215
W/L for disadvantaged team: 0.148
My W/L overall: 0.894
Obviously, this shows a drastic difference in performance when a player leaves. It determines the result of the game in the vast majority of cases. That is a problem if it affects CSRs.
CSRs don’t always reflect skill
Playing a lot is a sure-fire way to increase your CSR (at least at the gold-platinum-diamond level), and this doesn’t necessarily reflect your actual skill level. On a large scale, the CSRs do sort players by skill, with the pros at champion, and the newest Spartan recruits at bronze. However, it’s the grey area in the middle that makes the biggest difference to the majority of players, especially the ones that keep coming back. In my experience, some games among people of the same CSRs are amazing matches, however, a significant number of other times, I have been eviscerated by people of equal or even significantly lower CSR. For instance, today in Team Arena as a Platinum 6 I was on multiple occasions destroyed by a team of only low golds, and in one case shut out in a game of Strongholds.
The ranking period for arena playlists do not seem to be well connected to personal performance. As an example, in some seasons I have played all ten ranking games with the same other person, and we have had almost identical K/Ds and medal counts, only to get vastly different CSRs (gold vs silver). On a smaller scale, the change in CSRs between games doesn’t seem to be directly based on skill shown during the game. In Slayer, the CSR difference is not correlated with KDA: i.imgur.com/lPeWiNb.png. There is no clear trend between CSR change and KDA, contrary to what I would expect.
Changes in CSR have a big impact on matchmaking and game success
When a player moves up or down in CSR, it can vastly affect matchmaking and the recent W/L rate. For instance, here is a graphic showing my wins and losses over the past 20 games, on a pretty good day for me, and on search preference focused: i.imgur.com/Gk5wvNL.png.
Right in the middle (between games 10 and 11), a clear shift is visible. This corresponds directly to when my friend who I was playing with transitioned from Platinum 6 to Diamond 1. I was about 1/8 of a CSR level behind him at Platinum 6 after game 10, but as you can see from the graphic, after the CSR change the games went downhill rapidly and I ended the day at Platinum 4. This shows the clear impact of CSR on matchmaking, and how minute changes in CSR make a big difference to getting fun games that match well based on skill, where both teams have a fighting chance. If the transition between platinum and diamond had been because of our raw skill, then the increase in game difficulty would have been welcome. However, we went into those games with an overall season W/L of almost exactly one, and it was only because of how much we played that we graduated to diamond and were penalized in matchmaking quality as a result. This meant that we were punished because of the number of games we played. This seems unfair and unintended, as playing more should not be a detriment.
Possible Solutions
These are meant to serve as a starting point for a larger conversation. Please interpret these simply as ideas about how to improve on an already incredible experience and understand that I have only deductive reasoning available to understand how the CSR and matchmaking system actually work.
Moving Towards Better Skill-Based Matchmaking
As it stands currently, the game seems to base matchmaking fairly directly off of CSR. I propose that the biggest influence on how players are matched should be recent performance. This could be in the form of the recent W/L or KDA of a player in comparison to how well their opponents are doing. Having a more short-term statistic can make a big difference. This would also serve to balance better against local fluctuations in player performance, which are many times due to being one of the first games in a day or one of the later games. Overall, the end goal of the matchmaker should be to make the last 20 games have a W/L equal to 1.0.
Forming a Better System for CSR Change Between Games
While obviously the biggest influence on CSR difference between games is whether you won or lost, and I think this should stay as it is, there is a lot of room for improvement. The magnitude of CSR difference should be related to how well you did on your team, or based on how you did overall. This would actually make a big difference in how a player feels about their CSR and their performance after a match, and would go a long way into making players feel more invested in what their CSR is as they think that they have a possibility to change it. As a minor detail, it would be helpful if the PGCR showed the difference in CSR under the progress bar. It might also be helpful if the contributions to CSR were itemized and shown under a separate tab, clearly allowing the player to understand what they could be doing better and what they did well at, independent of their teammates.
Reducing the Impact of Games with AFKs
This is quite simple. If one team loses a game while down a player, it should not affect their CSR or other skill statistics, as it is not their fault and not reflective of their skill. I am not advocating for reducing the negative effects of quitting on the quitters. I do think that the game does as much as it can to discourage that behavior; the only other thing that can be done is to mitigate the results when it happens.
Please Have Mercy
The game would greatly benefit from a system that would shut a game down if one team is greatly outclassed, a mercy rule. This would serve to reduce the amount of time where you fight while not even having a chance at winning. It probably should be based on score differential, and could be disabled for very-high CSR games (onyx/champion). Since the mercy rule matches were by mistake and did not create an equal playing field, once a game is ended due to the mercy rule, no players on either team should get any change in CSR. This would do volumes to reduce the frustration of players who are being completely outclassed.