This update seriously broke something… It’s chalked beyond the board now. Why am I matching the like of Lucid, Ogre 2, Royal 2, Suddoth 1 and most recently Kuhlect of SSG? I’m a Platinum 5 in solo duo right now (don’t ask 
)… How does Platinum match Pro? On what planet?
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There are very few players left. Add skill based matchmaking and this is what happens
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because most high ranks onyx are cheesers who use low rank players and smurfs to boost them to onyx
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As per SPARSTE96 the likely cause is lower population. They have probably been waiting a while and then bam. You are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And while people like to blame SBMM - remember that SBMM is at least trying to give your team the fire power to fight back.
Without SBMM you are probably the best player on your team. Taking on Lucid by yourself.
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Low population. Lately i played a ranked match where our team had an average of 1000 CSR and the other team had an average of 1200 CSR. Guess the outcome of the match?
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the matchmaking system does not just put pros against other pros, for example it’ll put you on a great player’s team and you aren’t expected to really accomplish much.
There have been so many instances of pros having trash teammates its not even funny, its because the ranking can’t find another #1 in the world player so it tries its best to make fair teams even with that added difficulty put in.
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Dying game that has been abandoned. This is what it looks like.
That’s pretty much how it was playing out. It would give my team a high Onyx player to take on the pro player. But the Onyx vs pro player outcome was a lot less critical than how the Platinum/Diamond ranks performed.
In my Streets Oddball game vs Kuhlect he dropped 47 kills with under 20 deaths. Our high Onyx player wasn’t getting as many kills but he was killing Kuhlect and making him weak the whole game. Our Platinum/Diamond ranks out performed his by a mile. So no matter what Kuhlect did, it didn’t matter. We had our high Onyx player there to act as a shield wall between him and us, while we took down his 3 teammates over and over. With it being 3v1 most of the game, he didn’t really have a chance at taking on all 3 of us at one time even as low ranked as we were. He did kill our carrier, quite annoyingly and quite a few times haha. So he forced the rounds to play out to the timer, hoping his team could step up and take us on but he didn’t get ball time solo against us, so we won it.
Were it a Slayer, the outcome could have been completely different. He could have likely gotten a steak dinner out of us having 47 of his team’s 50 kills.
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This is so under rated.
There have been so many posts lately from good players lamenting how they have to carry rubbish team mates.
But it’s not so much how much they “carry” but how they “support”.
It’s so true - the old adage of how a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link.
Your weaker players going “less negative” than expected is critcial to how you go as a team.
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I feel like most of them go into games with an ego. Not in the sense that they’re thinking “I’m a god compared to these kids.” (some probably do though), but in the sense that it’s expected for the worse players to support them instead of them supporting the team.
If they stopped and thought about it, it’s a lot more useful for them to help in the lower ranked fights and plays, than to expect the lower ranked players to help with theirs. We can’t keep up. They can easily follow us around and slay our fights before we can if they want to.
So it’s a lot more useful to see someone like Lucid in a Platinum game, with 15 kills, 2 deaths and 40 assists. Than it is to see them with 40 kills, 15 deaths, 3 assists.
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The game expects some players to go positive and some to go negative.
I recently had a prolonged discussion with someone who believed everyone in their team should be going positive. I couldn’t convince them that’s it’s ok for your weaker links to go negative. That they can contribute by going less negative than expecteed. And that your better players can go positive and still be under performing.
The more supportive Onyx players quickly identify who in their team need help. They run with them. Knowing that preventing an uneccessary death is as good as getting a kill themselves. They take control of the objective if and when necessary. They communicate. They share weapons.
Because you can guarantee that the good players on the other side have identified the soft targets to go for.
You can do so much more than run around by yourself, padding your K/D, and abusing team mates for not “pulling their weight”.
A ranked matchmaking system should have people all from the same rank, plus or minus one or two levels. Eg. d5 can match with D4 up to low onyx. You play well you go up, with a significant boost for winning, you play bad relative to others and you go down.
That would be logical. I can understand that not being possible any more given population, but it never was the case. Even early in the game.
So instead it will continue to match based on average team MMR and fix your progress up the ranks to where it thinks you should be. It has decided where your skill level is from day one, and it will fix your matches and the rewards you get in order to get you there. What a pointless and anti-competitive system.
Agree.
Except that you should only go up if you beat someone ranked above you. The system is stabbing in the dark otherwise.
Yep. But back then it was purely friends squadding up.
And then, a bit later, squads trying to manipulate the system and grind CSR.
It’s tricky because Halo has always been about playing with mates. But this is the reason we can’t have nice things - and now 343 have started the process of limiting said squads (or soon at least).
But for now - it’s all about the low population.
Wait? What… no. Matching team MMR is still the best way to match teams. Of course it’s better with a lower range of players.
You want them to match regardless of MMR?
Pretty much. TrueSkill2 can ballpark your rank in a handful of games. It takes just under 50 to be super confident - but there isn’t a lot of change overall.
And let’s face it. Most people have been playing the game long enough that things aren’t going to change overnight.
You can get a bit rank locked towards the end of the season… but that’s where the new placement matches come in. You get a wider MMR to play with. If you really have improved it should be a cinch to come out the otherside with a higher rank.
No. You end up where you are based on your skill. Pure and simple. You beat who you did and you end up there as a result.
What?
It finds your rank and then gives you matches above and below your skill level.
If you aren’t moving it’s because you are losing the former and winning the latter.
It’s up to you to improve and rank up.
How?
You are given your rank and it’s entirely on you to get better and rank up.
Are you not getting games vs teams ranked a bit above you? What’s your W/L against those teams specifically? How is your KPM and DPM holding up against those tougher teams? What have you done specifically to improve your game?
If you aren’t doing better against the better teams (both as a team and as an individual) how do you expect the system to rank you up?
Eh, this one is iffy imo
I feel like you should go up if you’re repeatedly beating people at your rank too.
You should only maintain for beating lower ranks.
If you’re beating people at your rank, it’s clear that you need to be bumped up for a challenging experience.
If you’re let’s say D2 but beating D3 to D5 regularly then you should be climbing rather quickly instead of a set maximum per game. Until you’re ranked where you should be. Where your W/L and K/D ratio are balanced.
Unless you really put 120% effort in to make it positive and back to back Ws. If you’re anked properly that’s what it should take to rank up from there.
It probably does. In a way.
For a start the shape of your curve matters. You can have the same mean or CSR (three standard deviations below the mean) but the curves of different widths can see you rank up with a win.
And then my personal opinion is that it’s also based around “form”. It’s a metric that’s been mentioned as part of the global part of your MMR. If you are winning more than you are losing then you tend to be given more of the harder matches to see if you have improved enough to rank up.
If you are 50:50 at your current rank then the match maker isn’t as keen to stretch your games.
And I suspect this is where your KPM metric comes into play. If your KPM at your current skill level goes up then that’s a good indication that you need harder matches to test against. Or if you really are excelling at this rank then your KPM, albeit a weighting, will increase in influence to the point that your MMR does go up and start to give you tougher games.
But also keep in mind that there is not a lot of point ranking you up just on the basis of winning a few more games at your current level if you can’t actually beat the teams ranked above you. You are just setting the player up to fail.
And do you rank someone down for losing games at their current level even though they keep beating those below them? You would have to make it a two way street.
And we do know that people end up in a (frustrating) pattern where their CSR oscillates around their MMR. Going up a few points at a time over successive wins before dropping back on the next loss. Maybe this is actually your wish in reality?
Your CSR is fixed. 15 per game. But your MMR is free to jump. Especially post placement when it is wide and volatile… If you are a D2 beating D5’s at this stage then your MMR will go up very quickly.
Followed by your CSR at 15 point baby steps 
It’s a bit slower later, when your MMR is narrow and more resistant to change. But in this case it’s unlikely a D2 will start magically beating D5 regularly (and with a solid KPM to boot). It’s more likely you will start beating D3 and then slowly move up.
Don’t agree. The starting point should be if you are beating people at your rank. Then you go up. If you can’t beat people at the next level you go back down.
Team matching is what is causing these big skews in rank. It should be tightly matched to the individuals visible rank, nothing to do with the team. That way the team MMR works out anyway in a mature population. As it is it will pull in two Onyx 1700s and two D1s because the team average works. That is massively flawed.
My point is, it is jumping the gun. The player should be playing to get to their peak, earning it, not being picked up and placed there by the system. It’s fundamentally anti-competitive to give completely different rewards to players who played equally as wel in a certain match. The result might be the same in the end, but the journey is being ruined.
I question the validity of damage and kpm based skill ranking. There are many more facets to being a good player than being a super aggressive slayer, which are ignored. But regardless, the journey is anticompetitive. The game has decided where you will be before you hve earned the right, and it is giving you a leg up.
Your CSR gains and losses are entirely fixed by the algorithm. That is anti-competitive. If one player gains 15 CSR for a win and another gains 1 having got similar stats, it is anti competitive. The journey is equally as important as the end result. And this game, and trueskill in general, completely ignores that. Which in gaming is a very big mistake. Because the journey is why people play
Explained mostly above. The game decides who ranks up and down based on MMR, not the results of the game. That is a fundamentally anti-competitive system.
My suggested system is simplistic, but it does the same thing. You actually have a journey and have to work your way through the ranks legitimately, rather than being jumped through the ranks without trying. You should have to earn things with results, not have some hidden system propping you up.
I dislike MMR, and trueskill is the worst thing that has ever happened to online competitive shooters. It has made gaming in to some sort of sport. Gaming is not a sport, and treating it like one is where these people are going wrong.
The starting point should be a W/L of 50:50 at your rank.
If you are doing better than that (plus or minus a decent KPM) then yeah - you deserve to rank up. Or at least deserve the chance to play better sides and rank up.
As I alluded to in the other post - the danger of ranking up on the basis of simply winning at your level is that you are setting yourself up to fail at the next hurdle. Which is not very satisfying. People are already losing their mind with the CSR jumps now.
Probably - but there are two issues at stake here.
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That puts a huge strain on the population - which is aleady struggling. There just aren’t enough players available to make this happen.
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In regards to squads of friends - it’s probably a bit unfair. If you choose to be the lower ranked player, destined to go negative, that’s up to you. That shouldn’t be forced on a random player on the other team.
But unfortunately it’s being forced on both teams at the moment.
It’s only flawed if, overall, it’s not producing 50:50 games.
Is it? Your skill is your skill. We are not FPS naive. Of course there are maps to get used to. Weapons to get to grips with. But the basics are layed bare pretty quickly.
Players are at their peak. What is there to earn?
Other than genuine improvement that is.
And there is room to move. I recently put a bit of effort in and went from P6 up to D2. Over the course of three or four weeks. I then had a period where I couldn’t play much (working interstate, camping trips, family committments) - and I dropped back to P6. Then I got another run at it - and over the course of a week or two I got back to D2 (but quite as high as before).
I am not locked into my rank.
Except my true skill ceiling around D2/3. That’s going to be super tough to sustain.
It’s a mindset.
Your MMR is being subjected to the same algorithm. There is nothing anti-competitive about it.
And the CSR may jump around a bit differently.
But the journey is the same. It’s just hard to compare one step on each other’s journey.
As far as I know there isn’t a damage metric?
And KPM makes sense. It reflects your ability to go 1v1 vs a rank of opponent. It’s much different to KD, KDA, or K-D etc.
Remember they ran all the metrics against the data - and the only ones that improved the predictions were KPM and (to a lesser extent) DPM.
All those other things, like damage, assists, medals etc. are all important. Obviously. But those actions are already reflected in the win.
The evidence is quite clear. If you rank someone up on any other metric, eg. time holding the ball, you just end up losing all your games and ranking back down. Which is not fun for anybody.
Your CSR at the end of the game doesn’t look at your stats.
It’s the result, the relative quality of the opponent (which is different for everyone on your team), and where your MMR is in relation to your CSR.
It’s poorly explained by 343, I’ll give you that. But it’s not anti-competitive.
The simplest solution would be to only show your CSR change each match. Problem solved (or at least swept under the rug).
Your MMR is your rank. Your CSR is just a little pointer that kind of averages it out (remember that your MMR is a range of probable ranks - and is a moving target).
There is no journey.
The reality is that you have a rank. It may fluctuate a bit. But there is a hard ceiling. And improving on that is nigh on impossible.
I am a D3 at best. Maybe if I quit my job I could push higher. But the reality is that it will take a huge effort - and hours and hours of work to improve.
What you want is an XP rank to grind.
If you want to rank up your actual skill. Just do it. Beat the teams ranked above you and the system will rank you up. Nothing is hidden. You can even get an idea of your KPM via Waypoint now (expected kills).
As I said I pulled my finger out and journeyed my way from P6 to D2. That was my journey. It took just under 2 weeks. But my reality is that my journey has pretty much come to a close.
Um. Sorry to tell you this, but…
It would help if we got a statistic from 343 that would show percentage of the ranks. For example: 200 player bronze 1, 700 silver 2 and so on. This would us an idea of the spread
My point is that there is no progression. They are jumping you to your end point as fast as they possible can. Artificially. That ruins the experience, and also creates confusion and annoyance at disparity between visible rewards in each game. Players should play on a level playing field to rank up. Some will hit their ceiling sooner than others, but at least there is no manipulation by the system to make it happen faster.
Ranked should be a journey. You rank up until you can’t rank up any more.
If it isn’t based on purely your results, on an even playing field, in a ranked setting then it is anti-competitive. And there is no journey. You start at the same point but people with a higher MMR are in a super car while others are in a Toyota Yaris. That journey is not the same. You would still get to your destination in either, but one person is forced through the ranks by the system.
I wouldn’t call one paper that isn’t even focussed on halo clear evidence. Kpm is vital and does help indicate skill, but it should not be the sole focus of ranked. It encourages toxic gameplay.
… it isn’t based on your stats in the game. It is calculated based on your opponents quality vs yours. You just said it. That is about as anti competitive as it gets?? It is ignoring your actual performance and artificially working out what it thinks is a fair reward, independent of what your performance in that game.
This is a fundamental difference in opinion. There should be a journey. It’s a game. There should be a goal and a journey to get there. You should get to the same end result but you should have to actually work through the ranks fairy to get there.
??? e-sports always have and always will be a fringe offshoot of the core purpose of gaming, to have fun. Treating every video game player like they are in an esports league will ruin gaming, it has already done irreversible damage.
I just don’t think your skill level can be that progression.
You are at your end point. Or pretty close. And delaying that behind an imposed grind - that’s artificial.
I get what you want. And that’s why I keep pushing for an XP rank weighted to wins and performance. You can grind the Hell out of that. And reward with military ranks etc.
Yep. I get the idea behind the CSR. But 343 need to do some work on it.
You play and the system uses your performance vs the other players on the field to work out your probable rank.
Magic yes. Manipulation no.
There is a journey. It’s just much quicker than you want it to be.
Everyone starts with the exact same MMR curve.
You are in control on how it changes.
But your performance dictates which keys your are handed.
The system tightens faster for those who play consistently. If you are inconsistent then the system needs more time. A longer journey I guess.
But your destination is still your skill ceiling.
No. I agree.
But at this stage that one “paper” is all we’ve got. And it was Halo based (it used millions of data points from Halo 5).
The key is to look at what makes KPM different from all those other metrics. It’s specifically that it reflects 1v1 ability. And that’s the key skill in every variant of Halo.
And those other metrics aren’t ignored. They are part of the win. But they don’t add any predictive ability above the win. At least not to the point that they justify the increased data footprint they would need.
And don’t forge that some of them were actually negative influences! I don’t think they have specifically mentioned which ones - but I suspect assists and/or KDA (which tend to suggest you are starting to struggle to match your opponents in a 1v1).
The baseline is that there isn’t any point ranking people up on a metric that is only going to get them killed in harder games.
The best way to encourage non-toxic gameplay would be to only use the result of the game.
Yes? It’s the core part of the system.
Your probably rank is adjusted according to the probably rank of who you just played.
That’s how ELO type systems work.
It’s not ignoring your actual performance - that’s what literally defines if you won/lost.
The reward is far from artificial. It’s mathematically sound.
And once again, your performance directly influences the result of the game.
I’m with you on this.
I just don’t think it should be your skill rank.
XP for the win.