Rank, something to fight for.

Games Other Halo
1

I see a lot of back and forth about rankings in Halo. Some people believe that a ranking system based on a team performance in a team game is wrong. That’s Yoinking stupid. When your favorite basketball player scored 40 points and his team loses on the newspaper it still says “(Insert Player Name)'s 40 not enough to win.” If you get 30 kills and your team loses too bad.

1-50 ranks give us something to fight for while playing the game. I played a game of team slayer today with some buddies and we got annoyed that only 2/4 people on the other team were actually playing. The game ended up being 10 minute of us finding where the other team was hiding because their teammates gave up and just walked away from the controller.

You wouldn’t do that if your visible numbered rank was on the line. You sit in front of your display and you finish the game out hoping you can pull a W out of your behind. You hold in that pee for another 5 minutes, you tell your mom/wife/domestic partner (whatever floats your boat) that you need a minute because there is a reward if you win and a consequence if you lose. Without ranks you walk away from the game and when you come back you still ended up getting credits.

Ranks give you a reason to come back and play for 3 years until the next halo comes out, because you hope that you can turn that 10 into a 15, that 25 into a 30, that 47 into a 50, it is something you can invest your time in because you can see constant change based on wins and losses.

Ranking the game 1-50 may not be the almighty best way to evaluate a players skill, but it will keep me from playing my sister who at her best in halo still can’t move and shoot at the same damn time.

P.S. I used basketball as an example because it has a similar amount of active players at the same time, and whether it be 35 points or 35 kills, a loss is a loss and a win is a win.

2

We need the 1-50 to make it’s return.

Keeping it team performance based it a must to encourage people to work together instead of promoting their own stats.

3

Preach.

4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2QH9fpJSgw

5

1-50 Ranking gave me the benefit of playing people of my skill level. Level 50 was something I played day in and day out for. it also seperated me from level 20s who are still grasping the concept of map control, call outs, teamwork, and individual skill.

Unlike Reach or other games where I go into, lets say GoW, and I never play Gears but i decide I want to try online. I go into a game and I match against some high levels, and I get wrecked, every single game I just get dominated on, because everyone is better than I am, and there’s really no chance that I’ll have the patience to keep getting destroyed until I get better. On the other hand if I’m really good and I keep matching against lesser skilled players, where is the fun in that for me? Every game just being simple and dull because there isn’t any competition playing against lesser skilled players game after game.

There needs to be a balance in player skill and a credit system and join in progress just won’t cut it. With those 2 things involved it just breaks the flow of a competitive and social gameplay for everybody.

In Halo 4 add the credit system but add what made halo last this long. 1-50 system to keep balance for those who are skilled and experienced with halo, and those who only play multiplayer with their friends that come over or those who just don’t have time to get better at the game who can only play for 20 - 30 mins every so often.

6

When it comes to balancing players Halo 2 did it best. We need something like this.

Competitive Playlists - Halo 2’s Ranking System (or whatever the TrueSkill equivalent is)

Overall (this includes everything you do from Campaign to Matchmaking) - Reach’s cR System

Caters to both “Casual” and “Competitive” players.

7

I don’t know if you guys are aware of BPR. To me it’s pretty much the same as the Halo 3 rank. The only problem is you can’t see your BPR in-game, sadly.

“Battle Proficiency Rating (BPR) is a number between 1 and 100 representing a players overall skill in Halo: Reachs Multiplayer mode. This rating tracks your Kills, Wins, Assists, Deaths, and Betrayals across all matches played. You must play at least 10 Invasion, Arena or Competitive games for this number to be calculated.”

8

> I don’t know if you guys are aware of BPR. To me it’s pretty much the same as the Halo 3 rank. The only problem is you can’t see your BPR in-game, sadly.
>
> “Battle Proficiency Rating (BPR) is a number between 1 and 100 representing a players overall skill in Halo: Reachs Multiplayer mode. This rating tracks your Kills, Wins, Assists, Deaths, and Betrayals across all matches played. You must play at least 10 Invasion, Arena or Competitive games for this number to be calculated.”

If the BPR is like a truskill or ranking system, then why do I match against lesser skilled players 9 times out of 10? After 50 or so games I’d like a challenge.

9

> I don’t know if you guys are aware of BPR. To me it’s pretty much the same as the Halo 3 rank. The only problem is you can’t see your BPR in-game, sadly.
>
> “Battle Proficiency Rating (BPR) is a number between 1 and 100 representing a players overall skill in Halo: Reachs Multiplayer mode. This rating tracks your Kills, Wins, Assists, Deaths, and Betrayals across all matches played. You must play at least 10 Invasion, Arena or Competitive games for this number to be calculated.”

BPR is a terrible self promoting system that’s easily exploitable.

10

> We need the 1-50 to make it’s return.
>
> Keeping it team performance based it a must to encourage people to work together instead of promoting their own stats.

11

1-50 till i die.

12

I support the OP.

WE NEED THIS AGAIN!

13

> I support the OP.
>
> WE NEED THIS AGAIN!

That’s my favorite link in the world. My Facebook picture was the 1-50 emblems for a while :stuck_out_tongue:

14

> > I support the OP.
> >
> > WE NEED THIS AGAIN!
>
> That’s my favorite link in the world. My Facebook picture was the 1-50 emblems for a while :stuck_out_tongue:

Lol thanks, and this one is good as well Halp 3 ranking explinations.

15

> I support the OP.
>
> WE NEED THIS AGAIN!

It sounds sad, but I look at those ranks and I can remember the feelings of elation and excitement I got every time I leveled in to a new color. I remember before the first rank reset when a level 13+ was quite difficult to achieve, and I reached that magic 16 with the horns. Then I remember getting a 27 with the fancy blue. Then I was the envy of my friends with a red 30, and then the amazing level 36 (the level 16’s older brother). I also enjoyed being in a level 50 clan before clans were removed to stop circle boosting.

I loved those ranks. I like the H3 ranking system, but I was sorely disappointed when I saw that they were just plain numbers.

16

Bring on the boosters, derankers and second account wannabes!

I would like a private 1-50 so a player could only see his/her own rank, that would reduce the occurrence of the afformentioned issues. Whats the point earning a rank to have it undermined by people who want to cheat.

“h0wz mUcH d1D uR 50 Co$t!?!??”

17

RANKED LOVE

1-50 <3

also EXP / EXP per playlist

18

> Bring on the boosters, derankers and second account wannabes!
>
> I would like a private 1-50 so a player could only see his/her own rank, that would reduce the occurrence of the afformentioned issues. Whats the point earning a rank to have it undermined by people who want to cheat.
>
> “h0wz mUcH d1D uR 50 Co$t!?!??”

All of the issues you raised there can easily be ironed out with the banhammer. Bungie made deranking harder by banning accounts that quit game after game. Systems could be put in place that prevent you from matching the same players/teams more than 3 times, to prevent circle boosting. Second accounts wouldn’t be necessary if the TrueSkill system was tweaked so that people weren’t so easily “rank locked”. And the boosting exploit could be patched by limiting the amount of levels someone could gain in a day (perhaps to 10). This would make boosting/selling accounts such hard and arduous work that it wouldn’t be profitable or worth the time.

1-50 has far more positives than negatives. It just needs a sturdy banhammer and some common sense applied to it.

19

> > Bring on the boosters, derankers and second account wannabes!
> >
> > I would like a private 1-50 so a player could only see his/her own rank, that would reduce the occurrence of the afformentioned issues. Whats the point earning a rank to have it undermined by people who want to cheat.
> >
> > “h0wz mUcH d1D uR 50 Co$t!?!??”
>
> All of the issues you raised there can easily be ironed out with the banhammer. Bungie made deranking harder by banning accounts that quit game after game. Systems could be put in place that prevent you from matching the same players/teams more than 3 times, to prevent circle boosting. Second accounts wouldn’t be necessary if the TrueSkill system was tweaked so that people weren’t so easily “rank locked”. And the boosting exploit could be patched by limiting the amount of levels someone could gain in a day (perhaps to 10). This would make boosting/selling accounts such hard and arduous work that it wouldn’t be profitable or worth the time.
>
> 1-50 has far more positives than negatives. It just needs a sturdy banhammer and some common sense applied to it.

The only thing I think really needs to be addressed within these concerns is people who DDOS or “Host Boot” (Sadly this is a Microsoft issue though :().
Circle boosting, De-rankers, and self matching aren’t huge issues. Besides most good players achieve the highest level, and play on it consistently with out losing their level regardless of all these “issues”.
Not to mention I had a lot of fun going into ranked playlists and playingagainst my friends consistently all the time. It made me work better with my team mates, and against my friends creating awesome amounts of cohesion.

20

I really enjoyed this post and the fact that instead of praising the 1-50 ranking system entirely, you were willing to admit it had its faults, because it wasn’t perfect; but it was a damn sight better than the new aged ranking systems.

I find them all very ‘politically correct’. Everyone plays together, there are no ranks so nobody feels diminished in any way and everything you earn goes towards the capitalist agenda of feeding the armoury economy. Obviously that is just me being sardonic, but there is some truth to it all. The fact is, Halo 3’s system, however broken, worked at its core. The fact that your team was only as strong as its weakest player and therefore working to cancel that player out by helping him as much as possible was the only way to win meant that team play was promoted. You play with a team of 40+ players and they wanted to win.

The other issue with Reach and modern ranking systems is that it is entirely based on self-preservation. In Halo 2 and 3 everyone had the same common goal, winning; whereas in Reach some people were going for specific commendations, some people were just messing around trying to have fun and only a few were trying to achieve the goal, because in the end, winning or losing meant nothing.

The fact is, the core of a good team-focused game is giving players a common goal to strive to and new games seem to shy away from that, because if you penalise the majority of players, they will complain, where the minority will seek to better themselves based on that penalty.

There were issues with Halo 3 though. At the end of its online cycle, if you were a new player coming in, it would have been nearly impossible to rank up, since there were so many second account Generals and Brigadiers going in and stomping people to boost accounts. It got pretty absurd. But if 343 can work their way around those issues somehow, it could be a near-perfect experience.

Back in the day, when video games were a niche market, they were hard, no hand-holding, no tutorials (for the most part) and as competitive gaming erupted - no forgiveness when it game to losing; what 343 and other game developers need to realise is that sometimes, you’ve got to go back to go forward and they really need to study past Halo titles to realise what the fans are missing and why it’s important.