TL;DR - its long. you didn’t understand a thing. if you don’t read it. don’t post. thank you. if you did read it, and it help clear things up for you you’re welcome.
this is a thread about the reasoning for the ranking system in halo4 and the MM system in halo4, how they are not the same and why they have been done the way they have. it involves actually thinking.
you are right, the visible ranking system in 4 IS progressive, but the invisible system that matches players is skill based. i’m now going to explain the basics of this as i do not know the exact system that 343i have built for this. (15.50 is when they mention this)
by not showing you skill based rating it deters from behaviour such as hacking, boosting and de-ranking providing a more enjoyable environment, allowing less skilled social players to enjoy the ‘unlock stuff cause you’re awesome’ illusion and the more competitive players a competitive environment by matching them with equally skilled players, whereby they have to work for their win, which is what they enjoy.
the flaws with any skill based system are that they are based on statistics, these are easily manipulated with small amounts of data because variables show up more extreme in small data sets than large ones.
So at launch skill based matching will be inaccurate as regardless of individual skill, players will have little or no data with which to sort them, its only when enough people have played enough games (takes about a week or two) that the system starts working efficiently as there is a suitably sized data set to sort people with.
The initial anomalies (an anomaly is a datum that is exaggeratedly different from the main data set, ridiculously high skill players) stop being anomalies and settle at the high end of the data set.
Meanwhile the majority of players settle into the mid range of the data and the genuinely bad players settle near the lower end of the data.
new players will quickly be moved up the data set at this point as there is plenty of data to compare them to when calculating their skill rating.
a graph of this would look like thisthe far left being rank 1 the far right being 50, the middle being 25, and the height of the line at any given point is the number of people at that numerical rating. the peak of the graph will realistically not be 25, but that is the general form of a skill based ranking system.
but to make finding games easier the closer you are to the ends of the curve (high or low) the larger the skill bracket you are matched with and the easier it is to change rank because of the low numbers of comparable data making your data easier to classify as rank 48, or rank 49 for example.
this nature of the general distribution curve does mean it is easy to get to the mid ranges of the ranking system but increasingly hard to advance past them and bad games at high ranking will have more noticeable effects on your rank than they do in the mid range.