It’s not that I don’t like a challenge. It’s just that the CSR system caps you at 1700 out of placement matches, which is still 100 shy of the 1800 CSR minimum required for Champion division. It’s cool and all to make it more competitive, and I understand that this was done to correct the abuse of people playing early just to hammer out their easy and early champion rank simply by being one of the first 200 to complete their placement matches, but this is quite punishing for people who don’t have all the time in the world to rank up. Even once the season is underway, it is fun to just be able to go beast mode (mid-season mind you, not just by being one of the first 200) and hit champion in your placement matches simply by being good. The new standards for champion force you to GRIND in addition to being good. In other words, you could be ranked onyx and be considerably better than a champion player, but not be champion merely because you are an adult now and don’t have time to grind your CSR from 1700 up to 2200 (the standard for champ roughly by mid-season I’m guessing) by winning like 50 games that you don’t have time for in a season. The addition of this necessity to grind in addition to being good is kind of annoying.
Again, I understand people abused the previous system, but it wasn’t a big deal, it’s not like they were going to keep their Champion with a CSR of 1500 anyway… It’s just kind of frustrating to know that we now need to grind too. You could be every bit as good as someone else with a positive W/L ratio in Onyx, even better, and never get champ even though they make it, because they will be able to build their CSR on a day-to-day basis faster than you (by virtue of playing more games than you and getting a bigger positive win/loss spread) even though you could clobber them in game.
To me, this need to “grind” rather than just be a skilled player, defeats the point of seeing who is really the best in terms of “pure skill” even more than having the 200 fakers hop in right off the bat only to be kicked out of Champ in a day or two does. Just my $0.02.
I think these changes to the placement match system are a big mistake and are honestly quite punishing to players who are actually quite good (good enough to get Champ) who just don’t have all day to play anymore. It kind of defeats the point of the system being based just off skill and adds a level of almost XP like progression to it (as long as you can go positive W/L in Onyx). I don’t like it… we already have a Spartan Rank system for that, and I truly believe for reasons I have explained above that the CSR system for Halo 5 is deeply flawed, and that this update was a step in the wrong direction, rather than a step in the right direction.