Over the past few weeks there have been plenty of claims and theories as to how the ranking and matchmaking works. One such claim in particular that I though stood out was this:
> During your placement matches, you can quit as many games as you want and they wont count against you.
What? Seriously that can’t be true right? I mean that’s such an obvious oversight that begs to be exploited.
Well…
I put that theory to the test with Strongholds.
The control: Only complete games that were landslide 100-0 or something close to that victories.
Result: After quitting out of close to 30 matches ( which by the way didn’t count on my overall service record either.) I finally got my 10 perfect games. Which yielded this: Click to view.
As you can see, instant Onyx rank. Lol what? I can’t even…
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> > They’ve had ways of dealing with people that quit before, I can’t see how they wouldn’t this time round
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> They need to enforce a 15min matchmaking ban for quitters and afk-ers…its ridiculous
They had quit penalties in H4, which made JiP redundant. Regardless, that still wouldn’t stop people from abusing this exploit, it would just make it take a little longer.
Wow this really stupid, just curious how many medals did you have in your 10 games? Me and another friend played our 10 placement games, 9 were blow out wins much like yours, and we lost one to a player who already had a Pro ranking by 7 points. He had 353 medals and was placed Pro, I had 318 and was placed Onyx 3 a game away from Semi-Pro. This lead me to think that 9 wins + 350 Medals = Pro Placement, 9 wins 325 medals = Semi Pro. I also used my 2 day trial I got with MCC to make a second account to test this. I ended up getting 7 wins and 363 medals but was placed Onyx 1. If you had somewhere between 250-275 medals that would kind of confirm this.
Halo 3 has the best ranking system. In H3 you had to fight and be good to make to the highest rank. After Halo 3 you only need to grind the game and then you will be in the highest rank regardless of your skill.
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> Wow this really stupid, just curious how many medals did you have in your 10 games? Me and another friend played our 10 placement games, 9 were blow out wins much like yours, and we lost one to a player who already had a Pro ranking by 7 points. He had 353 medals and was placed Pro, I had 318 and was placed Onyx 3 a game away from Semi-Pro. This lead me to think that 9 wins + 350 Medals = Pro Placement, 9 wins 325 medals = Semi Pro. I also used my 2 day trial I got with MCC to make a second account to test this. I ended up getting 7 wins and 363 medals but was placed Onyx 1. If you had somewhere between 250-275 medals that would kind of confirm this.
I have not played a single game of Strongholds after this test. Currently 439 medals, I don’t think they matter for ranking.
by rank regression are you talking about the fact that you lost rank if you didn’t play it often enough or that your rank didn’t go down regardless? Because you would lose rank for quitting and losing in Halo 3.
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> I got to Onyx III and I lost 3 or 4 of the placement matches. Kinda messed up.
what’s messed up as well is that they added the new KillAssist/Death ratio and then made it so assists don’t really count towards your performance. One of my games I got maybe 6-7 kills, but like 16 assists because my teammates kept stealing all my kills and then I found I barely got a performance increase and my team won.
Placement is based mostly on who you play. How you perform seems to be more of a factor than just winning since I only won 5 out of 10 games on strongholds but was consistently put up against pros and semi pros while performing well each time (45-55% accuracy, positive kd spread, etc). So I was placed in semi pro. I think that the reason I consistently matched up against semi pros and higher was because I have a high semi pro in slayer which may bring up a global true skill/mmr just to make the matches more fair. That or the fact that my first couple of stronghold games I went 20-0.
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> Placement is based mostly on who you play. How you perform seems to be more of a factor than just winning since I only won 5 out of 10 games on strongholds but was consistently put up against pros and semi pros while performing well each time (45-55% accuracy, positive kd spread, etc). So I was placed in semi pro. I think that the reason I consistently matched up against semi pros and higher was because I have a high semi pro in slayer which may bring up a global true skill/mmr just to make the matches more fair. That or the fact that my first couple of stronghold games I went 20-0.
With that being said, you could take my test, and apply it to only completing games where you’ve won against high ranked players, and I’m sure the outcome would be even more of a joke.
haha - the only thing that will accomplish is to continuously get you matchmade against harder and harder players. I guess if you enjoy grinding multiple games against pros for a single win. Have at it.
I will take my losses. Lose some rank. And enjoy playing players roughly my skill level.
After time, I’ve discovered that’s how the ranking system works. W/L - that’s all that really matters. A few things - medals, for instance - might make minor differences, but in the end, W/L determines if you go up or down. If you’re jumping into matchmaking solo… you’re screwed. You and a handful of other randoms get set up against a team of friends who work together, so they’ll probably win, but your actual PERFORMANCE IN THE GAME is effectively meaningless.
I learned this the hard way (see the Iron next to my name over to the left). I’ll try your experiment on Strongholds, see how that works for me.
