People who don’t want SBMM want an easy match. It isn’t easy for the other team. You’re playing against actual people.
Be considerate.
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This has been the case the whole way through the history of gaming
-you start out bad
-you get destroyed and swear a lot
-a 12 year old calls you a noob
-you play more, you skill level improves
-you progressively see your performances getting better on the scoreboard
-You feel good, which encourages you to keep playing
-You play until you are well above average
-You become the 12 year old calling other people noobs
Or at least that’s how I remember it. That was rewarding. I could see on the scoreboard that I was getting better. Now that is all gone in favour of protecting new players. I for one do not like it, where’s the journey?
I just think social and ranked are very similar now, so what’s the point? If it is done like this then why not merge them and have a bigger population. I want to put on music, lean back and play social. But instead I am forced to sweat because if I don’t I will lose and then my ranked MMR goes down…. What?
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My suggestion is to balance by player as closely as possible and not team MMR. It makes more sense for an Onyx and Bronze to play another Onyx and Bronze than for them to play two Platinum players. The Onyx players will always be doing the lion share of the heavy lifting but the bronze player will have a much easier time in a 1v1 if they come up against another Bronze player. If they are constantly trying to fight Plat players they will always lose.
I would absolutely hate that to be honest. I’m fine with it in custom games but I like Halo because it’s an even playing field in terms of damage, health, weapons. I just want fairly evenly matched games in all playlists regularly. So rather than changing the rules of the game, I’d just want to change the opponents.
Maths isn’t my strong point.
But if you are D6 / Onyx you are in the top 3% of players.
Approximately 9 out 10 games will be against an entire team ranked below that player (with an average skill around Gold 6 / Platinum 1).
That’s a lot of chill.
About 1 out of 10 games will give you at least one opponent worthy of your consideration.
Not too sweaty!
Only 0.5% of games will have two opponents ranked at least as good as you.
That may hurt.
A bit.
And if we want to take our turn at taking a stomping, which is only fair, there’s a massive 0.0106% of games that feature three or more players of your calibre or above.
And if that’s not scary enough… reverse the situation for someone in the bottom 3% of the class. Or someone dipping their toes into Halo for the first time.
But that’s ok, they just need to get gud. And fast.
And yes, we also need to allow for the three random team-mates - which could skew the numbers a bit. But generally you are going in with your buddies to chill. And if one or more of them are actually as good or better than you - that’s even chiller.
In my experience it never ends well.
It’s never a clean kill between them. They usually spend so much time missing each other that someone else swoops in and cleans them up an an afterthought
I didn’t think it would work either - but it worked well for our weekly H5 nights.
I think I’ve mentioned it before - we had a script that kept track of how many kills you were from the leader and upped your shields accordingly. eg. 120% if you were 3 behind. 150% when 6 behind, and so on.
The other thing we did was get a few maps and add some OS in the middle. Only certain players (the designated damage sponges) could use them.
The lower ranked players loved it. They felt like they had a chance to fight back. And I think their Halo skills actually improved because skirmishes no longer ended before they had a chance to do something.
The higher ranked players tolerated it better than I expected. One even commented that he ran away from a pair of damage sponges because of their extra shielding!
And the thing was, overall the good players still won. They just had to work for it!
In Halo Infinite we’re going one better. We’ve already pre-designed some scripts that will check your K/D on spawn and allocate an OS if your K/D is less than one. Specifically for (1 - K/D)*60 seconds. We could also use that K/D to alter damage, health, or even load outs!
Pending actual Forge release and seeing our options of course.
And as we get the hang of scripting we plan to go even further by adding weightings to overall team scores. So if your team is struggling overall everyone gets a bit of a bonus.
The idea is that whatever combination of players go onto each team - the game stays close and competitive regardless of the individual effort.
The downside, for the good players, is that the muscle memory for ‘x’ number of shots for the kill or pre-melee go out the door. It’s a competitive ranked mindset that can be a bit of a nuisance to shake. But seeing as the general vibe of our Halo nights is to show off it didn’t take long. More people get killed because they lingered too long on the tea-bagging than in any actual dogfight.
If you want more of genuine Halo feel - we were looking at a game type that scores on K/D. Specifically your K/D times 10. So killing someone with a K/D of 0.25 is worth 25 pts. Someone with a K/D of 2.5 is worth 250 pts. The game should pretty much self regulate itself for an “even” match.
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Like i said, because they just want to stump way weaker players. Remember that you are playing against other players, so waht is ‘casual’ for you is playing against impossible odds for the other. With a good functioning SBMM (it’s not functioning correctly) everybody has about as sweaty games. But that’s not good enough for a part of the entitled very skilled players who believe that they should be allowed to absolutely crush other players over and over again (‘playing casual’), while those other players therefore have no chance whatsoever.
I have no problem with people having alt accounts just because they want to grind more challenges or completing the battle pass another time when already completed on their main account, or because they want to play against people their own skill, but don’t have to worry about their stats on their main account.
The problem is that too often that is simply not the case. They just smurf with an account they have deliberately gave bad stats just so they face bad oppononents and therefore can just completely stomp the enemy team for some clips or to improve the stats for a friend who is on their own account. This in my opinion is simply a form of cheating (and it is definitely griefing), because you are deliberately trying to go around the matchmaking system. (on top of that the deliberately throwing matches before to create those bad stats is already griefing, because you are deliberately throwing matches with that). 343 should just outright ban those smurfaccounts ánd their main account when they find out they are doing this. It is nothing else then deliberately destroying the fun for others.
Again: just a normal alt account where you consistently play more casual is not a problem at all (thats also why i think the MMR between ranked and social should be seperated, so you can already do that on your main account), but smurfing just to get unbalanced matches is destroying the game and is definitely griefing and perhaps even outright cheating.
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It’s the combination of a heightened sense of entitlement with a complete lack of empathy for their fellow players that gets me.
Git gud. It’s that simple