> Both sections will both have the exact same game modes!
> Competitive will be based on some sort of ranking system, for now, let’s say Halo 3’s 1-50 ranking system. (I know it’s already been announced that Halo 3s ranking system WON’T be returning.) But this way, rank isn’t determined by the amount of time you play but on how well you do each game.
But has any such system actually worked in the past? It’s very easy to recall how we (generalizing) all hated (exaggerating) Halo Reach’s arena system but can you recall how well received Halo 3’s system is? For all the praise it’s getting now (rose colored glasses) it was a terrible system back in it’s day. On the one hand it was an excruciating crawl through obtuse trueskill values that gave you a rank-up or didn’t by the whim of an unknown god. On the other hand it fed the community a whole helping of -Yoink- through rank-boosters, second accounters, and just plain simple -Yoink–hatslooking for a little extra “replay value” out of what they took as a rather round-about MMO leveling scheme.
It was complete crap, which is why Bungie made such a point in Reach of splitting the system into arena ranks and global so that A. people would know what they did and why their rank was the way it was without trueskill and B. that people would take that system as an incentive program in and of itself (see MMO leveling) because that honey-roasted pile of -Yoink- was given over to a separate leveling system.
And it was still crap because it wasn’t just the implementation that was wrong, it was the basis of the whole -Yoinking!- endeavor. Under no circumstance can a simple rank be made to stand for how good of a player you are in a population of millions because in no way can you make the descriptive statistics you have here (kills, deaths, wins, ect.) predictive because for each and every one of those data points you haven’t controlled for the variables. (ex. players, map, gametype, spawning, movement, and the luck that goes into all of it.)
Thus winning against DoucheXxXSniper 1337 and company three to two in a game of CTF means nothing when compared with how well you’ll do against Titanic Fartz and his merry band of BTB enthusiasts because without controls you have no basis of comparison. You just have records which concern only those people you’ve played in those few matches you’ve played them in. Skill, as a direct result, is a terrible quality to try to measure. The probability that you’ll win against any given player in any given gametype cannot be taken by what you can observe in a video game unless you adhere to the strictest of protocols, and I doubt many people want to endure the Tournament From Hell just to have math tell them what they can figure out for themselves through direct observation.
So we should look at something else, such a personality (which is simply a measure of what you tend to do more frequently than other things, which you find out just by looking at one’s own history. IE. descriptive stats, IE. your in-game stats, IE. what we have.) so you can guess not how well a player will do but what they’ll do. That has real value to it, which is a long way coming from what we’ve had in any previous Halo game.
