Ranked is Broken as Long as Objective Players are Punished

Games Halo Infinite
1

The ranked system is still a broken mess. I can’t be the only one that notices how much it punishes objective focused players and how much it emphasizes being the slayer each match.

So sure, winning is the core of what matters…but if you score 3 flags and go negative you shouldn’t be punished because you did the most important overall job.

I slay out. I rarely actually score the objective or get much obj time. My friend that I play ranked with (and the only reason I even play ranked) is a very good objective player but not a strong slayer. We have good synergy, a good teamshot, etc.

I went up a whole tier in Diamond and he barely moved at all after winning several games in a row. That’s not right. We weren’t playing any slayer games, and they FORCE objective gametypes constantly. Yet they give people no credit for playing the gametype appropriately and getting hill time, or oddball time, or flag carries. They only give people credit for going positive and being on the winning team.

It’s not right. It’s not fair.

14 Likes
2

You are completely right.

I feel that the only thing that will work is to give everybody the same CSR gain for a win/loss, since it’s teamwork that is important. The slayers, the people sacrificing themself to give the carrier some crucial extra time, etc. are also important to protect the flag carrier. But how do you calculate all of that? That i why i think they should just give everybody in the team the same gain/loss. How much you gain or lose you can make dependend on how well that match went. A 5-0 flag win against should give you more gain (or more loss for the losing team) then a close 2-1 win, etc.

5 Likes
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In my view the rank attached to you individually should reflect individual performance, with a bonus for winning or an offsetting negative for losing. I just went 14-6 in a slayer, and ranked down by 2-3 CSR. I outperformed my teammates and the other team who were all similar ranks. I couldn’t have done any more. Logic would dictate that I should have impressed the system by outperforming my peers and ranked up based on my individual performance, albeit pulled back by the team losing the game. But I ranked down and my killer slayer game was completely ignored.

If I was in a 4 stacked team with people I could rely on I would rank up much quicker. But that isn’t the case, I get completely random teams all the time. But the key factor in my ranking is if the team wins? Well fair enough, if it was ranking the teams. It isn’t though, it is ranking the individual supposedly. But then on the other hand when your team wins and you played a vital role, capping flags, oddball or even just getting angles and holding down areas it isn’t deemed relevant, you have to be the slayer. I just don’t think this system knows what it wants. Is it the win or the individual skill? And why is the win/loss so binary. If you play solo you are completely screwed over by it. I cant control my teammates, you pick them. So either the system needs to pick them better or it needs to give credit where it is due.

Couple that with it completely ignoring objective play in an objective game type and you get a toxic grind with full stacked parties/doubles dumping on randoms. And the population does not support the solo queue any more without bad pings. Not forgetting the oh so familiar pitch of the oddball by an onyx player to their teammate because they are ‘too good to hold the ball’. Which would be fine if game gave credit for ball time, but it doesn’t. So you just got screwed over. Toxic. Just an fyi to any onyx 2000s who want to slay the whole game while everyone else holds the ball… I’m not naive any more, I will leave it exactly where you threw it.

I just don’t think CSR rank as a solo player is a relevant metric. Maybe MMR, but we can’t see that anyway. But I want to play Br starts sometimes so I put on ranked. Albeit completely ignoring the rank it tells me I am.

4

Yeah. I think a system that actively encourages you to play objectives, without being to forceful, will greatly benefit the game in the long run.

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As a proud player of the objective I feel the frustration.

But at the heart of it… isn’t every game a Slayer match?

The basic tactic is to outnumber the opposition (sending them to await respawn) and then push the objective.

The quintessential defining skill of Halo will always be winning the 1v1.

It’s a team game… and what you have here is balanced eco-system. You are doing the hard lifting in the 1v1 to let them have fun playing the objective.

The same thing happens when I play with my sons (who are much better players than me).

The danger in letting the “objective” player rank up is two fold…

  1. When they play on their own (without your counter balance) they get thrashed.

  2. If they actually ranked up - so would the quality of your opposition. They will be exposed in terms of 1v1 (it’s hard to do the objective while you are waiting to respawn) and you won’t slay out as easily. You will lose games and both of you will rank down.

And this is what Microsoft found when developing TrueSkill2. After analysing assists, objective scores, medals, etc… if you ranked players up on those criteria they ended up on long losing streaks.

We need that XP rank. You can then weight it to objective scores!

They do. In terms of CSR.

Your CSR gain or loss is independent of performance in that game. It doesn’t matter who got the kills or who held the flag.

It’s all on the result (win/loss), your rank difference to the opposition, and your MMR vs CSR.

I think they have run into trouble with this in the past. How do you determine a close game? I’ve certainly been in some 5-0 games that were fiercely contested… and some 3-2 ones that were actually a cakewalk.

You lost. So your CSR goes down.

The 14-6 may work differently on your MMR. If it was a solid kpm vs equal or better opposition it may push your MMR up (which can then pull your CSR up on the next game). But if you were the big fish in the small pond and just killed a bunch of lower ranked players (as expected) then things won’t change.

It’s the win.

With a small weighting for kpm (and to a lesser extent dpm).

The idea is that over time your skill in all facets of the game come out in the wash.

Your CSR is pretty much your MMR (in all but a handful of cases)

It just oscillates a bit back and forth.

It makes sense for the weakest link to hold the ball. While the better players set up in defensive positions.

I certainly expect my sons to throw the ball to me.

But that’s not an excuse to just die.

Said Onyx player should be just as upset with you if you die holding the ball and not helping to fight back.

It’s all about the win.

Hopefully they can come up with something.

The XP rank is the obvious one.

Some better recognition post game would be great. MVP. Objective medals. etc.

Artificially boosting the skill rank of the player isn’t the answer though. It’s not fair on the player who will get smashed on their own - or on the rest of the team who would then have to take on stronger opposition and carry even harder.

And I know this from my own experience playing with my sons. We can function as a team if I play my role and let them focus on slaying. But I also know that I don’t deserve to rank up to their level on this basis. Our opponents are weighted down because of my ranking - which keeps the games competitive.

If I play one on one with my sons I win about 20 to 25% of the 1v1’s. Which surprise, surprise, is pretty much what the TrueSkill2 model predicts given that we are about a division apart in skill.

6

That would explain why i was a gold(even though i don’t care about rank all that much) in s1 meanwhile my friends were diamond and onyx i was the guy who went for the objective while they covered me and barely got kills for it

I was always confused on how i was the lowest by a ton now i know lol

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I don’t think the way they use KPM has ever been fully explained.

We know from the discussion paper it’s a weighting of some sort.

The way Menke used to talk about it - it was about attaining a certain KPM vs the rank you aspired to. Something around the 1.5 to 1.7 KPM mark.

People used to post in threads complaining why they weren’t Onyx. Menke would look up their KPM vs and then feed back that their KPM vs Diamond 3 was 1.5 (hence their level) and against Onyx it dropped off to 0.2 (hence why it wasn’t their level).

It’s not about going 20 and 5 vs a bunch of lower ranked players. It’s about holding your own vs the rank you want to be. Getting 12 kills in an 8 minute game is 1.5 KPM. It’s not a lot… unless you are out of your depth skill wise.

The problem is that people have become fixated on raw K, K/D, or K-D. Thanks to 343 and their awesome communication. So we end up with all this toxic and selfish play.

If you are playing the objective properly you should still be able to rack up enough kills and avoid enough deaths to rank up appropriately. eg. if you are playing oddball and you are killing people to get the oddball, and then dropping the oddball and fighting back against the people trying to take it… you will rank up with everyone else.

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It isn’t all about the win. Because if you win, and held the oddball for 2 minutes but went negative then you will barely rank up at all (+1-2 CSR), because the game expects you to have a high kpm and kdr. So it isn’t just the win. You need to win and be the top slayer to rank up, which in an objective mode is just a confused approach.

And it does make sense for the lowest ranked player to hold the ball in order to have the best chance of winning the game. But that player will get no reward for that win, because they weren’t the slayer. They will get a +1-2 CSR. So why on earth would anybody play that role? That is just minimising your gains when you win and maximising your losses when you lose, because if you also play objective role but your team loses your CSR tanks because you didn’t have a good slaying performance.

There is no benefit to being the objective player. So I will not pick up an oddball thrown to me any more. I’ve learnt my lesson on that. My message to those onyx players who do this. If you are in the best position to pick it up then do it yourself.

9

What if you were the reason your team lost?
Doing personally well in a match isn’t always in the best interest of the team overall.
I don’t know what you did with the team, and neither can the game.
Therefore, if you lost the match, there’s a chance that something you did in the match which benefitted you on a personal score level, was a detriment to the performance of the team.

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In objective that makes sense. But in a slayer having a +8 kdr is most definitely helping the team. In fact there is no way that is not helping the team. There is no ambiguity there in my view.

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On paper and as a number only, sure.
However, how you actually get the +8 kdr can be a detriment to the rest of the team. Your playstyle could very well be incompatible with your team mates and while you do well, the others’ performance suffer while they could potentially work well together.

I mean, if you don’t participate in team fights and only come in for a clean up, the enemy team could get three kills, you could clean up two or three before you die.
The result being that even if one of them survive, they’ve netted 4 points while you’ve netted up to 3 points.
You’re not in the lead, your team mates are potentially negative in K/D and you’ve gone positive, when you could’ve done more in the team fight if you had gone more with them.

As I said, you doing good could be at the expense of team performance. You doing personally good does not exclude you from being the potentially weak link in the chain.

1 Like
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Sure, that’s a possibility. But I would say that would be the minority of cases. Usually when somebody goes 5-15 it isn’t because their teammates were at fault. And usually when somebody goes highly positive they had a good impact on their teams performance in slayer.

So for me, ranking down in those scenarios only makes sense if you treat the team as an entity. But since ranked is supposed to be measuring individual skill, why is it punishing you disproportionately when your teammates let you down?

People always say impact of teammates comes out in the wash, but as a solo player I do not believe that is the case at all. The best way to rank up is to team up, which just is not how an individual ranking system should be in my opinion.

1 Like
13

You nailed it. Ranked treats you as a team but your personal K/D performance has a huge impact when you win or lose an objective match.
As an example, match lost strongholds, player A 20 capture, 10 kills / 20 deaths, player B 10 capture, 20 kills / 10 deaths.
Player A has lost more CSR than player B. Happens very often. And this is a problem. To minimize the CSR lost, people are trying to stay positive instead to go for the objective.

14

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

If you cannot kill - you cannot safely play the objective. The most sure-fire way to play the objective is to kill so hard that you deny the enemy team the chance to play the objective. Respawning takes 8 seconds. getting to your destination takes 8-10 seconds. Each kill has cumulative value. If you manage to stagger your foe’s spawns - and you naturally will because you are not killing them all at once, you may buy up to 64 seconds of downtime for your team (because, if your team can’t handle one guy at a time, or one guy every couple of seconds after the other, with a 3-1 advantage they probably suck.) which is huge.

The point of objective is denial. If they cannot touch your objective, you will win. You are the better team.

You are not a hero for holding the ball or capturing the flag and never firing a shot. You are a liability, because if you’re not firing a shot, then you’re demanding your team fight in your stead, when you could - and should, turn around and shoot.

Because if you can’t fight well, and you progress to a higher elo, you will be a bigger and bigger liability.

You are kept at a lower rank to protect yourself and your would-be teammates.

So instead of complaining about not being rewarded for playing the objective, play the objective right. You know what you SHOULD complain about?

The forced 50% win/loss ratio and the fact that the player pool is so narrow now, that you’re likely to get players below your elo, who cannot fight alongside you equally and will cost you the game.

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Rip and tear, that’s my motto

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My question is: why there is no more ranked playlist?

The unique explanation i find is they are afraid of splitting the community and doing it more difficult to find a match.

but i really believe that, for example, doing the tactical slayer or lone wolves ranked ones is not going to avoid their allegiance players but it would attract who wanna play ranked slayer.

Has 343 mentioned any news about other ranked lists?

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Why would it be?

And it absolutely could be. Even better, the other team members neglecting the poor performance of the player and letting it be without helping or changing anything ensures that the performance isn’t likely to improve.

Or their high score could be a result of someone else’s performance which result in a bad score; baiting, weakening,

The team is an entity, and the ranking system can’t look at a player after a few matches and say they’re of a specific skill, because skill ranking is relative and performance fluctuate.

In a team game, your skill as a solo player is part of how well you can work with random people, of all sorts. Wether you win or lose is in part if you’re a detriment or an asset to the team regardless of your performance, if you neglect or help struggling players.

On the other hand, any skill ranking system will suffer when there isn’t an active player base. Matchings of players deteriorate when there’s not a big pool to choose from, and then you can end up in scenarios where you outrank the opponents, but they outrank your team mates. The mathematical algorithm dictate that losing to lower ranked players will bite a larger chunk from you.
The game may even expect your team to win due to your experience as you have a higher calculated skill, you’d lead the team to victory, not through hard carrying, but communication and strategy.

The only constant when playing solo, is you. So yes, when you’ve played 500 matches, 200 or even 100 matches, the one match with a poor matchup will be a drop in the ocean for your calculated skill, same with the one where you were carried and went -10. Those impact the average extremely little, if at all.

People forget what a nightmare Reach’s Ranked arena was before they went back to W/L only.
Personal stats was what was tracked in a team playlist. The majority of players were so problematic and the playlist a dumpster fire that they scrapped the skill calculation system and went entirely with W/L.

The issue here isn’t the ranking system, it’s the lack of playlists.

A few changes should be made.

Implement a 1v1 and FFA list for proper “individual” skill.

Have two separate Team playlists.
One for full teams, evaluating the team composition. Changing a player would mean it’s a new team. Both fir 4v4 and 2v2.
One “Solo” Team playlist, no partying up.

Here you have a large selection of different ways to determine your skill as a player.

But there isn’t a healthy amount of players to support that amount of playlists.
Players aren’t prepared to play ranked.

2 Likes
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They said on Twitter somewhere they plan on doing ranked doubles and ffa at some point

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Because extremely poor individual performance is generally not caused by other people. It may be a contributing factor and the main cause in some scenarios, but I think that is clearly less frequent than somebody just performing poorly themselves.

What the ranking system should do is recognise when a poor team is dragging down another players good performance. It happens all too frequently where one member of the team is playing their heart out against people ranked way above them with a really good score and still they lose tons of CSR because the ‘better’ player in their team underperforms.

And for me the key bit of your point that is the crux of my point is that you say ‘random’ people. That is only the case for a solo queuer. A solo queuer gets the negatives of having random teammates while others are lucky enough to have a squad good to go every game. The squad obviously work together better and win more games than their individual skill would warrant. And that is exactly my point. It is ranking the team primarily, not the player. Which is why it is not a reliable gauge of skill for individual players. Which is why in my opinion having a binary win/loss barrier is problematic.

It doesn’t average out when you play with a squad though. Which makes it significantly easier to rank up as a team. Which means it is not a measure of individual skill.

I completely agree on the playlist problem due to lack of players, and hey, it is just something that we have to cope with unfortunately.

Anyway, most of what I’m complaining about is only a problem because the solo/duos playlist has so few players. And what can we do I guess. Just getting so frustrated playing ranked in open.

20

If we assume that everyone in a match is evenly matched according to their CSR, because everyone in the match got matched together, right? Then it could very well be another “incompatible” player’s fault that they’re not performing to their standard.
That is not something you should forget, actions you take affect others.

Of course players can have crap matches for whatever reason, but you should never count out the possibility that a team mate who does good on paper can be the cause of an overall loss.
As I mentioned, Reach’s initial ranking system was based on personal performance, that lead to matches not being played to win, but to personally rack up as many kills as possible, -Yoink!- be your team mates. Basically, it was a FFA with certain players you shouldn’t kill. If that system worked, why was it changed to a W/L system?

The weakest link isn’t always the player with the worst stats.

Okay, any suggestions on how to go about with that, not looking at the stats as they are?
What if the player with the most death, enabled the team two kills for each death?
How do you check a poor performing player’s contribution to the team and the impact they have allowing better performing players to really perform well?
A good performing player can be the cause of a loss, or another player performing poorly. Likewise, a poorly performing player can cause a win, or enable another player to get glowing stats.
In what way would you account for that?

The question here is if the ranking system is working as intended if the outranking team’s win takes a huge chunk of CSR from the higher ranked players.
See, normally, the game would expect the outranking team to win, and usually in ranking systems, getting beaten, and being expected to be beaten doesn’t chew up a huge chunk of your Rating, if at all any.
That’s not logical. Either there’s a hidden value you can’t see used for the evaluation, or it’s not an entirely truthful statement. Alternatively their system’s broke.

And I already elaborated on that in my post with the playlist part.

Incidentally, if you really play to win, no one is stopping you from getting a team or two together, right?
Maybe you are a far better individual player when you play in a team you know?

Nothing here says you as a player wouldn’t be better as an individual while playing in a squad than going solo, while the squad even further boost your stats.
Psychology plays a part in there too you know.

Actually, W/L is sufficient if everyone went in solo. As I said, the only single constant is you.
With enough players to sustain a healthy pool of players, you’ll accumulate enough games to give you a good indication of where you are skill rating wise. You will contribute to wins and losses in those games, and with enough wins and losses over a period of time the algorithm will have found your spot.
If you win a lot against players rated the same as you, you’ll climb.
Start losing a lot, and you’ll sink down, at some point if you do not improve and start winning more, you’ll hover in place with your rating.

Using personal stats to determine rank just brings us back to the release days of Reach.
Implementing anything else with W/L complicates the system further and can either not do enough according to the players, or do too much where the result of the match isn’t worth it so players play egoistically, i.e Reach release days. It opens door for possible manipulation, unwanted behaviour or unforeseen results ( glitches / bugs ).

Any issue you have with rating a player’s skill, in the current environment, is due to a lack of players playing during your play time. There’s no fixing the algorithm for that, you can’t sidestep it.

Which means the CSR you get then isn’t a measurement of individual skill to begin with?
Or, if winning is the goal, one can see a part of the individual skill being to get a squad together to play with.
Skill isn’t merely shooting things in the game.

Bugnie dropped the ball with Ranked in Reach, one playlist crashed with the use of personal stats to determine “individual skill”.
Reach wasn’t a great “competitive game” in the eyes of the competitive Halo player either considering random sprat patterns and unqueal spawns.

Another thing which isn’t in favour of ranked either is that there’s been a wedge driven in between ranked and social, where Ranked is seen as something “bad”, and there’s an expectation that it should play differently too with different rules.
In the early days of Halo 3, Ranked and Social were essentially the same, just that ranked had a number to go with it, that went up or down.

Ranked should be more desirable for players to play, and share the same ruleset as social.
Imagine getting a Credit prize based on your rank at the end of a Season? The higher the rank the better the prize. Put in different Rank Playlists according to what I said, along with a differentiation between objectives and slayer, along with BTB and all the other playlists like Tactical, Fiesta etc.
Ranked has a stigma, and it needs to go away, unless i343 works to improve its reputation its not going to get better.

That’s what I believe could be done to improve the situation for Ranked. Stop pretending its some exclusive place for specific few rules and throw the bunch of them in there, attach credit rewards and encourage players to play ranked.