In light of the update about arena ranking in Halo 5, I have one question: what happened to ranked and unranked playlists?
Don’t get me wrong, as someone who has spent a great deal of time in Halo competitive multiplayer and plans to for years to come, I really, really like the ranking system 343 has proposed. It is important to allow competitive players to know their position in comparison to all their friends and foes so that they can gauge what their true skill level is and know when they’re making progress. This also allows players to feel a great sense of satisfaction upon reaching a new rank, which I feel is essential.
However, why can’t we also have unranked playlists? Remember way back in Halo 2? You had the option to choose between playing ranked and unranked matchmaking games. I’ve always thought this to be a sorely missed feature in later Halo titles. I feel this way for a few reasons. First, you have to be willing to sacrifice your rank to let a friend play on your account, which is a hard thing for a lot of competitive players to do. This is unfortunate because if you’re a competitive player and you’re working hard to raise your rank but also manage to maintain something of a social life, you might have a friend over who says something like, “Hey, that looks cool. Can I play a round?” and you might be compelled to reply with a “No,” just to protect your rank. Sadly, this may cause some unneeded resentment, prevent a potential new Halo player from picking up the game, or cause you to switch to a different game or activity altogether to, well, be a better friend or something. Second, If you want to play some standard arena Halo without feeling the immense pressure to maintain or increase your rank, which can be really intimidating, like sweaty hands, heart pounding, crying for mom intimidating to some, you cannot. Similarly, for the above 21 crowd, you may have been drinking, or something else… And in a condition like that you might rather just want to goof off or try and pull some crazy stuff, again, without ruining your rank. Finally, if you’re feeling real competitive, and you really wanna be at peak performance from the moment you enter arena, weapons loaded and things yet to be exploded, to the moment you leave it, bloodstained and names claimed, you might want to do a warm up game or two, or test out a new strat real quick without, you guessed it, hurting your rank.
If you read all that, what do you think? Also, this is all assuming you’re in the mood for some classic arena gameplay instead of the wonderful new warzone mode.