So there have been a fair few topics recently in the Reach/Matchmaing forums regarding problems with quitters/boosters/unbalanced matchmaking and generally the decline of the population in Reach, and I have a few suggestions as to how to protect the community/environment in matchmaking in Halo 4 so as to prevent these problems from reccuring:
- Don’t record an overall K/D ratio
- instead make it playlist specific, thereby eliminating the incentive for people to exploit objective games for the sole purpose of boosting K/D, reducing the number of people quitting matches as a direct result
- Include, and keep a Casual/Social playlist
- where stats, such as K/D are not recorded beyond individual games. This will allow the poopulation of casual gamers to remain in the game for a much longer period as you will not get anywhere near the number of more experienced players targetting them with spawn-killing and map-lockdown, as they will have no incentive due to having no record of it.
- No voting for maps
- possibly a touchy subject, and maybe not to everyone’s tastes, but by doing this you avoid one major issue - people being forced to replay the same maps over and over again and thereby getting bored. Every Halo there are 1 or 2 maps which are easy to exploit (Sword Base!!!), and so they get overwhelmingly voted for again and again, not because they are the best, but because people are gambling that they will be the ones to lock it down and so rack up a massive K/D increase. This just leads to people being forced to play the same boring game over and over again, and ends up with people rage quitting before the map even starts. By randomising it you ensure that all the maps get a look in, and that people gameplay experiences remain fresh/varied.
I really think that if you take these three steps, then the overall community will be far more robust and longer-lasting then was/is the case with Reach.