I’ve noticed in ranked arena for me personally I can win 6 games in a row and barely progress through the rank. But when I lose a single game it basically drops me half a rank. What is causing this? It doesn’t do this to me in doubles. Just seems counter productive to be honest. Thanks in advance.
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CSR and MMR are different. Your actual rating is your hidden MMR. CSR creeps up slowly while your MMR likely remains unchanged and when you finally lose the CSR will yeet itself back to where you’re basically “supposed” to be. Its not a very good system and honestly they should just drop the entire CSR thing.
Only reason I can really think of why they do it this way is that MMR realistically doesn’t move much so I guess they feel people will not get the sense of “progress” so they add a layer on top that does move a lot for that. Also, there’s probably the possibility that if you can see your MMR directly people would probably find a way to exploit it more than they do now.
Winning 6 games in a row is very impressive. Unfortunately, that one game you lost might have the biggest impact on your MMR.
That’s like asking how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop… 1…2…Crunch, the world will never know.
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It just confuses me because when I play ranked doubles it hands me xp for wins no problem (like a quarter of a rank In one game) and doesn’t take as much away if I lose. I appreciate a grind in ranked as earning your standing makes sense. However when it gets to the point that it’ll take 20-30 + wins to make it through one tier in diamond it’s a little ridiculous.
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This happens because you have just won six games vs teams ranked the same or below you. And probably with matched or below expectation on the numbers of kills (ie. KPM).
The system gives you a little bit of CSR to reward your win - but because you haven’t demonstrated an increase in skill your MMR isn’t going up.
The most you can lose is 15 points. Which is less than one third of a rank.
And this is because your CSR is well above your MMR and it’s desperate to get back there.
You are on a different part of your ranking journey here. Your CSR is probably still below or near your MMR.
It’s definitely frustrating.
And the reality is that your rank fluctuates. With form and in different game modes (you have different MMRs for each one). And that jars with people’s expectations of a gradual, never ending, climb.
And then the CSR is designed to go up with each win and down with each loss - which isn’t necessarily how the MMR behaves - so you get this pattern of creeping up and stepping back.
But it’s only a handful of points. You are oscillating up and down a dozen or so. And that’s fine given the precision of the system. That difference of points is just not that important. But people have an unhealthy expectation and attachment to every single one of them.
343 want to keep the MMR a bit volatile. So that it can quickly adjust to form. To prevent rank locking (lest we forget Halo 3). And so that they can fight against Smurfing.
But I doubt people would cope with their rank jumping up and down so much.
So we need a CSR.
But just not the one we have. The 1-1800 scale lacks precision. So we need a reduced scale. Maybe 1 to 100.
And it needs to be capped. It doesn’t need to be open ended (which just further promotes toxic grinding behaviours).
I think it’s the opposite. It moves more than you would think.
The graphs of MMR over time that Josh Menke used to produce for players showed it jumping back and forth. It definitely wasn’t linear.
It’s definitely not the static ELO ratings they use in Chess for example.
I think the CSR is inherently more exploitable.
I would love it to be changed.
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Not necessarily.
It could very well have been an expected loss against much tougher opposition.
And the player may well have met or exceeded their KPM in that game.
The big CSR drop only tells us that their CSR is higher than their MMR. It doesn’t tell us what their MMR actually did. It could very well have stayed the same. It may have even increased!
Maybe we need a metric like licks per minute…
Different part of your ranking journey.
In Doubles your MMR is above your CSR. And your CSR resists moving away from your MMR.
Once you get to the point where your MMR and CSR are pretty much the same - you have reached your skill plateau.
Ranking up from here now needs an increase in skill. You need to beat the teams ranked above you, stop losing to teams ranked below you, and match the better player’s in terms of KPM and DPM.
That’s not an easy task.
Simply “grinding” out the wins isn’t going to get you there.
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And I think people get a little bit “seduced” by a few wins.
Let’s look a rather contrived scenario of the next 30 games you play;
Say the match maker serves you up 30 games. Ten vs opponents a bit weaker than you. Ten vs similarly skilled opponents. And ten against opponents a bit stronger than you. All mixed up.
And let’s say you are in a good space gaming wise. You are showing a bit of form.
So you nail the games vs the weaker opponents. They give you CSR but not MMR. And even though you smash your KPM targets it doesn’t help much because your MMR is already higher than your opponents.
And because you;re “in form” you also nail your games vs similar opponents. They also give you CSR but not MMR. Well, at least not a lot of MMR. Unless your KPM is well above expected.
But anyway… you end up with 20 wins that tend to drive your CSR up above your MMR.
Now we get to the harder games. On a not so good day you would be expected to lose most, if not all, of those games. But it’s a good day today - so you win four of them. These games will give you CSR and MMR!
But to rank up you need to show the system that you can hold your own at that level. You need to win 50% of them. And you should be meeting your KPM at that level.
So you can see that you can easily win 24 or so games out of the 30 and not necessarily put a lot of pressure on the system to rank you up. Your CSR is going up in all of those games… but has to drop back to square one in the other half a dozen.
It all comes down to which of those games you lost.
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See, I beat out teams that have higher mmr all the time and get little to nothing to show for it. So what’s the point in trying to grind it out if it’s not going to present advancements. It’s like there’s no reward for doing good and winning multiple games in a row. Then when you lose one game (still going positive but lack of a good team) its takes everything I just earned away and then some. It’s like I’m hard stuck even though I’m performing well personally and winning more games than losing.
I know you have just explained it to me which I appreciate but what I’m seeing on my side just doesn’t make sense.
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If you beat them all the time - you will rank up.
As long as you aren’t losing any to teams ranked below you to drag you back down.
It would be great if we could access the info on Waypoint. A simple graph of MMR over time would be very informative for players.
And the question is… are you beating teams ranked above you at least 50% of the time. And in those games are you meeting expected kills and deaths.
It helps. But you need to win multiple games vs the better teams.
Which suggests you aren’t consistently beating the better teams because your CSR is going up but your MMR doesn’t appear to be.
And going “positive” doesn’t help. You don’t rank up on KD. And besides your KD in the last 25 games is just on 1.0 - so that means you are probably going negative in a lot of games.
Your weighting for personal performance is KPM and DPM. Check on your Waypoint stats and see if you are meeting expected kills and deaths. If you want to rank up you need to be at least meeting those. Preferably exceeding them.
Again. It comes down to which games you win or lose. They are critical.
And performing well personally is your KPM and DPM. Have you looked at how you are going in those specifically?
And finally… the often forgotten aspect is that you have an MMR for each game mode - and your CSR chases your MMR average. You may be held back by a particularly bad game mode. Have a look at your W/L by mode to see which one you need to work harder at.
You know Darwhi, if your spent as much time submitting messages to 343 about how to improve Infinite’s ranked system as you do trying to justify it being terrible to random forum goers, we might have ended up with fun ranked playlists in Infinite after this post launch year.
But instead everyone hates it, and you just try and give more details that don’t super dissuade most of the reasons people hate it 
. No offense, I do think you’re swell lol
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Which is fine.
And I wish the context of the discussion was more along the lines of how we can improve it.
The CSR for example. So much could be done to make it better.
And some sort of specific ranked XP - with Military titles tied to your rank…
Dreams.
But the problem is that people don’t seem to understand what we have and why. And I think you need to appreciate that before you can push for changes / improvement.
What we have is a bunch of people disgruntled with the reality of their rank - who think that they should just automatically be Onyx because they happened to win a bunch of games last night.
That’s not how ranking systems work.
We have people getting frustrated when they aren’t “rewarded” for a high KD or holding the Oddball for half an hour.
All because 343 don’t communicate or explain.
Why do we waste loading screens with the same tired hints and tips? Use them to clear up misconceptions.
If people actually knew how CSR was allocated they wouldn’t be half as upset that their team mate gained a bit more than they did.
Or worried that 343 are manipulating their win rates to lock them into a lower rank, using all sorts of nefarious means (including desync), to force them into buying more stuff in the shop.
Which is just silly.
And all this just detracts from the real issues we should be discussing - like how do we improve the CSR system. How do we encourage people to keep playing once they have hit their target rank. What stats should we be displaying and using to educate people to play better. And so on.
Just saying you hate the system and it sucks is kind of redundant. It’s a lot of moving parts. Some work better than others - so why would you throw it all out and start again? And if you are going to replace it - what with? How are you going to make it better? Is it going to be faster? More accurate? How exactly are you going to make it more “fun”?
I am happy to continue trying to set the record straight and defend the good bits about what we already have. And maybe one day I’ll get the discussion thread I am looking for.
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And while I have anyone’s attention;
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Keep TrueSkill2 in the background to work out people’s skill. It’s the best part of the system. It’s fast and accurate.
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Change the scale of the CSR. I think 1 to 117 sounds great. I don’t mind if you keep the divisions (they just describe the shape of the population curve). But close off the CSR with a maximum value - we need to stop toxic grinding for CSR. Ideally you would wait a period of time and then recalibrate the whole population (maybe you could do it once a week).
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Encourage people to keep playing by awarding points for wins at your current division. Assign military ranks to those points. That way you can earn a title for the season, eg. Diamond 3 General, Three Star.
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Have leader boards for each division. Global and regional. Make a fuss. Give out rewards. Just keep people playing throughout the Season.
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Give us access to ranking data via our Waypoint Stats. We need to be able to see our MMR over time for each game mode and playlist. It would also be great to see plots of KPM vs opponent MMR. If we want people to play the games in the correct manner - show them how they efforts are being rewarded. There would be much less suspicion and mistrust in the system if we could actually see it in action.
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Or simply leave the CSR idea, keep division and just communicate with MMR in ranked: like giving the μ-average and (or not) the σ of your bell curve and let it be « secret » in social.
Could it be this simple? Wink wink
Darwhi has been doing a great job all year of helping others understand what’s happening with their rank, and has posted a ton of great ideas all year for improvement to the experience. You all should get his thoughts some time.
Modern ranked experiences and fun should not be mutually exclusive. Surely there’s a way to get SBMM and CSR to do it’s job and not constantly upset the majority of players who discuss it
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I would love it if we could see those values. At least graphed over time.
But they would be frustrating if that was your displayed rank.
343 seem to have left the MMR relatively volatile. It is allowed to jump around more than you expect. I don’t know if sigma is left wide - but the equivalent of the k-value is still high (it’s the x-axis braking system).
This lets the MMR respond to fluctuations in form. And it’s how they deal with Smurfs. But people lose their mind when their CSR drops by 15 points. How are they going to cope when their MMR swings by 2 to 3 times that.
You need the CSR to smooth the journey.
I’ll try and find some old pictures of the MMR vs time that 343 used to post here on Waypoint. In the good old days.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-A25qxCYJ9C5dxZURkbw-XNgsAc3Hyqx/view?usp=sharing
Rarely is. Wink.
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I don’t understand people that say a UI bar or number going up motivates them to play the game/“grind.”
I play the game to win, and try to outplay and outshoot the other team and team work…and because I like the gameplay. I could care less about a bar or number going up. If you need a progress bar to play the game/grind you must not really like the actual game that much? Not trying to hate…I just don’t get it.
I mean, sure they could probably be doing something better with CSR…but I’ll never really care that much about rank or a bar or a number anyway. I play the game to play the game. And I play ranked because I like to play it competitively…oh and because Halo is a joke without BR spawns. 
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I just had to turn off my Xbox in disgust at the ranked playlist. I am a completely average player (making me the vast majority of players of the game). I prefer ranked (for many years) over other playlists, perhaps 5-1 in terms of playtime. The incredible number of quitters and inactive players in ranked in untenable, and the penalty and reward for skewed player counts is at best completely mind boggling, and at worst, completely unfair. My recent last hour and a half featured if I recall correctly two games with a full player count to the end. If I am on the side with more players, then I get a full reward. If I am on the player side with the inactive or immediate quitters, then I have two choices: stick around and get my -Yoink!- kicked for 10 minutes of garbage play so that my rank only gets minimally impacted, or quit as well to do better things and have my rank get absolutely hammered. So there are two points here: the ranking impact of quitters on both sides, and the lack of punishment for quitters/inactives. A ranking drop for those who care so little that they treat ranked in this way has no effect, and is not an effective punishment, but for those who have enough playing 2 or 3 vs 4 and quit as well in response to avoid a pointless garbage game, the ranking drop because of someone else’s selfish choice is stupid. What 343 should to do is use the ban hammer very hard on quitters/inactives, but there seems to be no desire by them to get rid of poor sportsmanlike players. So then they lose players like me, who are leaving the game, truly, as in its getting to the point that I am seeing little path forward in playing anymore. I have better things to do than play in an unfair game, and playing 4 vs 3 or 3 vs 4 is about as unfair as it gets.
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Agree, just moved to warzone and haven’t played Infinite in a while. Infinite at this point is just toxic, you can also feel it in the voice chat at every game. No go for me. I’ll come back for the winter update, but don’t think much will change