This is another post to bring attention to the broken multiplayer balancing. 343i Seriously need to reconsider their focus with this title. I get that Infinite is right around the corner, but you have a group of dedicated fans that enjoy the old titles, yet you pay 0 attention to those who actually want to enjoy the old multiplayer experience.
The lack of multiplayer balance correction is absurd, and I’m dumfounded that this issue is Still not rectified or even glanced at in the eyes of 343i.
To sum up what the multiplayer experience is like: You either get stomped or you stomp the other team. There is NO in-between. For me at least, this is terrible gameplay, and I’m sure a lot of other people feel the same way. I don’t want to play a social playlist where I’m forced to bring my A-game and play flawlessly, because the atrocious SBMM algorithm pits me against people 5x better than me, and my teammates are either new to the game, or simply aren’t as good. This applies the other way too, where I’m getting carried to a 50-12 victory because the other players don’t stand a chance. For some stupid reason, the competitive playlists are less sweaty than socials. How is that even possible? The SBMM should be prioritising similar skill-levels in comp playlists (as thats how competitive rank climbing works), while being more relaxed in socials (not forcing people to play the top of their game). This ‘difference in sweat’ isn’t large, but it’s noticeable. I got criticised for my stance on SBMM in my last post, as I said it shouldn’t be part of the game, but I admit I was wrong there. This does not however excuse the god-awful implementation in MCC.
There is Still no option to restrict matchmaking to solo-queue or party-queue. This is one of the larger issues with the current matchmaking. It’s very common for a team of solo-queuers to get rolled and smoked by a 4-stack in precision slayer. This is not a good way to foster a fair, yet challenging, multiplayer environment. This is, again, somehow worse in social playlists than it is in competitive.
The multiplayer ban system is not exactly brilliant either. Yeah I get trying to punish people for leaving games early, but you can’t expect people to want to play the match if they are 0-6 within the first minute of play. It’s at the point now where you can judge the outcome of the match based off the score at 30-seconds into play, which is quite frankly pathetic for an online shooter. I find myself leaving games because I simply can’t be bothered to get stomped by the enemy team for the 9th time in a row. It’s boring.
I, and countless other players do not care about new skins. We do not care about new armour pieces and back accessories that don’t even fit into the design philosophy of any halo game. We want to play a competitive shooter, that is fair, yet challenging when it needs to be. We want to have fun, but that’s very, very difficult if you aren’t allowed to have a social experience in a social playlist. The common factor with MCC multiplayer at the minute is one word: Boring. The Game is Boring 343.
The boredom can be solved with implementation of basic skill-balance features, and minor tweaks to the application of the SBMM algorithm. For the love of god just do Something about it. It’s sad to see games with such widely loved multiplayer experiences being tarnished by poor development focus.
tl;dr
Matchmaking is still unbalanced. Solutions likely lie within SBMM application and skill-balancing between teams. Early-leave penalties are meaningless when people don’t want to play half of the matches due to afforementioned imbalance issues.