So after reading about how season ranks are going to work in Halo Infinite, I feel it’s a smart system, but also needs a bit of tuning to hit the “sweet spot”.
For instance, to start, NO challenge should focus on the individual. Halo is, and should be focused on a team based game. CoD and other games biggest failures IMO is introducing reasons for players to be selfish, and play in ways that is counter to the actual purpose of the given match.
Having people fighting over weapons, or camping spawns, is not healthy for the actual gameplay.
So my first recommendation is simple:
REMOVE all challenges that are designed for the individual and instead…
Make ALL challenges team based.
This would look like the following:
Current: “Get 15 kills with the BR”
New: “Have your team get 45 kills with the BR”.
My second recommendation is simply to give players a means to continually be rewarded for their playtime. Weekly, seasonal, and daily challenges are all fine. But there should be a reward system in place just for playing the game. Playing the objective, getting kills, getting medals, etc. should all give some amount of progress towards being rewarded. Basing this on personal medals would be a easy way to promote playing the game, while giving very little reason for players to just try and find ways to AFK and try to abuse the system.
Personally, I would agree that such a system shouldn’t offer a fast way to get rewarded, but it should be SOMETHING. Enough to feel rewarded for playing, but not such a high rate that people would find much reason to try and abuse the system to AFK farm ranks. I think MOBA’s and other similar games would be a good baseline to figure out a system that essentially is rewarding player time in the game.
In general, its a balancing act. You don’t want to make the system feel like “Well, I did my challenges for the day, so no point in playing any more.”. But also want to avoid “Well if I don’t play for 8 hours every day I’m falling behind.”