When I first heard that Halo 4 was going to have the ability to join players into a match in progress I was initially excited because I had lost too many games because my teammates had quit or lagged out on me. I thought this would solve the problem. It doesn’t. I played a match today, and have played several in the past, where I join a game and one team is getting destroyed, The game I played this morning had red team with a score of 340 and Blue team (the team I joined) with a score of 140. Clearly Blue team was getting decimated. It should be a safe bet that the player who left the game left because they were losing and or doing bad. I went six and six during the duration of my playtime so my complaint is not that the other team was way better than me, we were clearly evenly matched which is exactly want I want, my complaint is that I was put in a game with no chance of winning at all. Since trueskill uses only victories to determine your skill ( I think it could be easily improved but it’s what we have right now) this causes my trueskill to be rated lower than it should be. I can imagine that this has happened to everybody at least once and most people multiple times. This hurts the matchmaking system as a whole because people will have a lower ranking than they should.
TL;DR: The join mid-match ability in Halo 4 causes the community as a whole to suffer because it can skew players trueskill rankings.
I’d have to say I kind of stand in the middle on this subject. I wouldn’t be upset if they decided to get rid of it, on the other hand it is nice to have a backup if a teammate quits in a close match.
The one issue I do have with mid game joining is that it happens WAY TO OFTEN. There are some sessions where the ratio of new/already-started games might be 50/50. That is way too much, even for players who like the concept. They need to come up with a new system such as keeping track of how many in progress games you’re entered into, or track of the amount of games you quit and use that as a determining factor on how often you are put in a mid match game.
> I’d have to say I kind of stand in the middle on this subject. I wouldn’t be upset if they decided to get rid of it, on the other hand it is nice to have a backup if a teammate quits in a close match.
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> The one issue I do have with mid game joining is that it happens WAY TO OFTEN. There are some sessions where the ratio of new/already-started games might be 50/50. That is way too much, even for players who like the concept. They need to come up with a new system such as keeping track of how many in progress games you’re entered into, or track of the amount of games you quit and use that as a determining factor on how often you are put in a mid match game.
It sounded like a good feature on paper but in practice, it’s a huge issue imo. For one, I feel it promotes quitting since hey, they can just get a replacement.
When I would play regularly, what would end happening is almost entire games went by before getting any replacements. I would much rather wait for a full game of players to form before it starting. I’d rather take the risk of a random player quitting than have to be thrown into uneven games that remain uneven for an extended period of time.