Josh Menke, formerly of 343i, popped up on Gaf to give some insight behind H5’s matchmaking. It’s worth a read.
From NeoGaf:
> I’m not w/ 343 anymore, so I just have some “outsider” comments I can make.
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> First, at a match level, the matchmaking looks good. I’ve seen a lot of really close matches, and heard from you folks that you’re having a lot of close ones.
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> Yeah, you do get some noobs on your teams sometimes, and lose because of it. But this happens randomly to everyone. The other team will get baddies just as often as you do. If it really just is bad luck, it’ll wash out as you play more.
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> Condescending Soapbox: In my experience, just being able to kill better than anyone on your team doesn’t make you a winner in a “team” game. Getting the rest of your team to play their best together (no matter how bad that is) is part of that winning skill. Though I agree it’s probably impossible to do without voice.
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> Now, onto ranking. I totally understand the comments about personal performance vs. team performance, and losing more points than it feels you deserve.
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> It’s actually a lot harder than just giving a few more points to the top performers if you want to have a simple ranking system without:
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> huge and easy to use exploits
> encouraging players to compete against their own teammates (stealing kills, etc)
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> Both of those would have a huge negative impact on the game, and design is often about compromising on a bunch of points. No system is perfect.
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> Trust me (or don’t?) I’ve tried it. I’ve tried a ton of different systems on both real players, real data, and simulated data.
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> I could probably come up with some really complex systems that did an OK job at this, but at that point players would have no idea what was going on with the rankings, and lose confidence in them. At least this way, you know players with high ranks have eventually won their way to them.
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> Also, think of it this way. Imagine you have a team of Pros. Imagine each of them is much better than most of you will ever be (sorry!). But, imagine that part of their main strategy is to feed most of their kills to one player, resulting in him having the best spread and and the rest having a lot of assists. A system too focused on personal performance would end up giving you some really weird rankings where that player is far ahead of the rest of his team, despite them all actually being really close in skill.
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> My personal feeling on ranking systems is to try and have them fit the game. If this was a more casual BTB with lots of solo folks running around and having little impact on the win, then I like systems that are more personal (like BTB CSR in H4). But I like the team-focus for arena.
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> I know it sucks when those individual experiences happen, but they will wash out if you truly deserve the higher ranks and play enough games to remove the randomness.
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> So, anyways, I’m enjoying the posts. It’s good stuff. I’ll lurk around some more.
Good read. I actually really like the new ranking system. It actually encourages teamwork just a bit more; even when playing with random people everyone’s working toward the same goal, they’re on the same page, and you have some reason not to just leave the weaker players on your team out to dry while you damage control your stats. I’d imagine personal glory will stay in Rumble Pit where it belongs.
My only real issue is there always seems to be one person AFK on my team every game, but that probably has more to with XP farming than rank, obviously. I’d also rather have 1-50 come back, but that’s really just visual personal preference.
Well I feel it should be a bit of both. If I go 20-2 and we still lose then why do I get a performance decrease? I tried my hardest to win yet I still get punished. Also it’s very hard to get your skill ranking up as yesterday my friends and I pulled a 10 win streak where I went from Onyx 1 to Onyx 2. After that we lost two straight games in a row where I still went Positive but I lost so much competetive ranking that it set me back to Onyx 1. Really frustrating sometimes.
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> My only real issue is there always seems to be one person AFK on my team every game, but that probably has more to with XP farming than rank, obviously. I’d also rather have 1-50 come back, but that’s really just visual personal preference.
Funny, I’ve noticed the amount of AFK-ers was a bit high. I really hope the finished game has an idle boot system. It’s been a problem since Reach.
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> Well I feel it should be a bit of both. If I go 20-2 and we still lose then why do I get a performance decrease? I tried my hardest to win yet I still get punished. Also it’s very hard to get your skill ranking up as yesterday my friends and I pulled a 10 win streak where I went from Onyx 1 to Onyx 2. After that we lost two straight games in a row where I still went Positive but I lost so much competetive ranking that it set me back to Onyx 1. Really frustrating sometimes.
I think that playing with a team is the root of Halo. It has always been that way going back to H2. When you go in solo, and rely on randoms, you are consciously making that decision to take that risk. If you want to go in solo, there are playlists for that. Granted, your friends aren’t always around when you want to play team slayer, but I don’t think that is grounds for opening the ranking system to potential exploits.
That was a cool read, I can definitely see where he’s coming from on the ranking system. While I do think that W/L should be a major factor, I also feel that we should be able to rank up a tiny bit if our individual performance was outstanding, and likewise be able to rank down a tiny bit if our individual performance was awful. And then a great individual performance coupled with a win would result in a greater rank increase, while a poor individual performance with a loss would result in a greater rank decrease.
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> That was a cool read, I can definitely see where he’s coming from on the ranking system. While I do think that W/L should be a major factor, I also feel that we should be able to rank up a tiny bit if our individual performance was outstanding, and likewise be able to rank down a tiny bit if our individual performance was awful. And then a great individual performance coupled with a win would result in a greater rank increase, while a poor individual performance with a loss would result in a greater rank decrease.
Yeah, it’s a real difficult balancing act. It gives you good appreciation for what these guys have to design around. I don’t envy them at all.
It’s a tough call. I think individual performance award definitely hamper the team based aspect of Halo. It’s certainly something that has gotten lost over the past couple of games. But I totally hear you. It stinks to do great (individually) but still lose a match and get penalized for it. It’s been a gripe since H3 with EXP. The popular mantra back then was to not go in with randoms into team playlists. I know this can’t always be the case, but I think that responsibility you take when you make that choice.