the arena divisions system itself is fine and because it is dynamic it will get people to keep playing. by dynamic i mean the skill level you have earned isn’t permanent, you have to keep playing to keep what you have earned otherwise it will go down making you look bad.
but, we have seasons as well as divisions, because the season resets the division you have earned it gives the players a sense that they have been cheated out of there hard earned rank making to no want to play arena again because there efforts will just go to waste, this is the reason i’ve chosen to stop playing arena, well, this and skyrim has my attention …
removing seasons i expect to attract more people back to arena and possible some new people as well, i’ve spoken to quite a few people in game and they have said that they will start playing arena again if seasons where to be removed, some have even said that they quit reach because of seasons.
remove seasons along with killer whales quick fix should give us the best arena possible since there isn’t going to be a complete overhaul of reach’s ranking system to get a proper fix.
Honestly I think seasons are a great idea. It doesn’t make your efforts go to waste because you can still see the rank you got in the other seasons. If you need more than 3 months to get your desired rank chances are your not good enough and if you did get it why do you care if it tells you what season you got it. I personally think its the best ranking system bungies ever done. You can rank up, wait for the reset if you didn’t like your k/d spread or whatever, and you can showoff how good you are by getting the top rank over and over. Its also great for those ocd kids back in halo 3 who made 2nd accounts to see their rank go up. I think everyone would play it more if your arena rank showed where the cr symbol is. Its just how the halo community currently is… well imo of course.
> Honestly I think seasons are a great idea. It doesn’t make your efforts go to waste because you can still see the rank you got in the other seasons. If you need more than 3 months to get your desired rank chances are your not good enough and if you did get it why do you care if it tells you what season you got it. I personally think its the best ranking system bungies ever done. You can rank up, wait for the reset if you didn’t like your k/d spread or whatever, and you can showoff how good you are by getting the top rank over and over. I think everyone would play it more if your arena rank showed where the cr symbol is. Its just how the halo community currently is… well imo of course.
it’s not how long it takes it is that it is taken away from you, yes it shows in your service record but there is more then one season and you can see different placements in different seasons giving a very vague and useless idea of the persons skill.
no point in earning it just for it to be taken from you.
> > Honestly I think seasons are a great idea. It doesn’t make your efforts go to waste because you can still see the rank you got in the other seasons. If you need more than 3 months to get your desired rank chances are your not good enough and if you did get it why do you care if it tells you what season you got it. I personally think its the best ranking system bungies ever done. You can rank up, wait for the reset if you didn’t like your k/d spread or whatever, and you can showoff how good you are by getting the top rank over and over. I think everyone would play it more if your arena rank showed where the cr symbol is. Its just how the halo community currently is… well imo of course.
>
> it’s not how long it takes it is that it is taken away from you, yes it shows in your service record but there is more then one season and you can see different placements in different seasons giving a very vague and useless idea of the persons skill.
>
> no point in earning it just for it to be taken from you.
im not sure I know what you mean. Are you saying if you saw someone with onyx in every season he played in you would think that would be a vague way to tell if hes good or not?
> > > Honestly I think seasons are a great idea. It doesn’t make your efforts go to waste because you can still see the rank you got in the other seasons. If you need more than 3 months to get your desired rank chances are your not good enough and if you did get it why do you care if it tells you what season you got it. I personally think its the best ranking system bungies ever done. You can rank up, wait for the reset if you didn’t like your k/d spread or whatever, and you can showoff how good you are by getting the top rank over and over. I think everyone would play it more if your arena rank showed where the cr symbol is. Its just how the halo community currently is… well imo of course.
> >
> > it’s not how long it takes it is that it is taken away from you, yes it shows in your service record but there is more then one season and you can see different placements in different seasons giving a very vague and useless idea of the persons skill.
> >
> > no point in earning it just for it to be taken from you.
>
> im not sure I know what you mean. Are you saying if you saw someone with onyx in every season he played in you would think that would be a vague way to tell if hes good or not?
well, people like that who are consistent tend to make it easier but they also choose to stop playing arena because it gets taken from them, i’ve spoken to a few single digit onyx people in the first few seasons and they say they stopped playing because there hard earned division got taken away from them.
the point is, people don’t play arena because what they have earned gets taken away from them forcing them to earn it again from scratch, this results in different outcomes as well because you might be matched up against people you can easily beat and never against people better then yourself holding you back.
I’ve grown to like the seasonal layout of arena. I understand what your saying though, that your rank has to be re earned every time, and it basically gets taken away (even though its permanently engraved into your service record).
In fact, the only thing that kind of bugs me is that your rank is so hidden within a few menus, it kind of makes it feel worthless, like your achievement in rank wasn’t really you know… an achievement.
> I’ve grown to like the seasonal layout of arena. I understand what your saying though, that your rank has to be re earned every time, and it basically gets taken away (even though its permanently engraved into your service record).
>
> In fact, the only thing that kind of bugs me is that your rank is so hidden within a few menus, it kind of makes it feel worthless, like your achievement in rank wasn’t really you know… an achievement.
yea, making the divisions showing next to your name would attract more people in to arena but 343 have already stated that an overhaul like this is never going to happen and i doubt adjusting the service record will happen either.
i honestly do expect some more players to play arena if seasons were to be removed, i’ve spoken to a lot of people and asked them why they don’t play arena and the main reason that was spoken was because of seasons making them feel cheated out of there hard work.
> In fact, the only thing that kind of bugs me is that your rank is so hidden within a few menus, it kind of makes it feel worthless, like your achievement in rank wasn’t really you know… an achievement.
It isn’t easy to see and on top of that only 3 seasons are shown, so if you are rated in the current season, you’ll only see the prior 2 seasons and the rest are gone for some reason.
They should display all seasons below your armor (where they currently show # of daily and weekly challenges completed) so you can quickly highlight each person in the pregame lobby and see their history. Not that they would change this now…
Without seasons, a new player would never be able to reach Onyx division. They just wouldn’t be able to catch up because the people that have been there since the start could have thousands more games than them.
> Without seasons, a new player would never be able to reach Onyx division. They just wouldn’t be able to catch up because the people that have been there since the start could have thousands more games than them.
arena isn’t about time played, it’s about who you win and loose to.
Bungie’s “official response” to this is that if the Onyx players quit (or really any closely-ranked group in particular), it will “become impossible to rank up as there is nobody of higher skill to beat.”
Not sure if the expectation of a large group quitting all at once is in any way realistic, but I’m guessing 343 is just going by this. If you want to convince them to make non-resetting ranks, you will probably first have to convince them that this won’t happen.
Dunno how you would do that but I hope the extra info helps in some way.
> Bungie’s “official response” to this is that if the Onyx players quit (or really any closely-ranked group in particular), it will “become impossible to rank up as there is nobody of higher skill to beat.”
ironic?
seasons is causing this already though, lengthening the seasons did stem this but it still pushed people away because of the sense of being cheated.
> Not sure if the expectation of a large group quitting all at once is in any way realistic, but I’m guessing 343 is just going by this. If you want to convince them to make non-resetting ranks, you will probably first have to convince them that this won’t happen.
>
> Dunno how you would do that but I hope the extra info helps in some way.
large groups of people is realistic but only when new games are released that takes there fancy, other then that, large groups of people quitting isn’t really realistic, people will quit but usually because they get bored or want to play other games, if a big group suddenly goes then something must be wrong with the system to push them away so strongly.
the only thing i can think of is the feeling of being cheated, remove this feeling that is brought to the game by seasons then players might feel more inclined to play arena to prove there skill but my fear is that the amount of damage already done might not be reversible to some extent.
> Bungie’s “official response” to this is that if the Onyx players quit (or really any closely-ranked group in particular), it will “become impossible to rank up as there is nobody of higher skill to beat.”
>
> Not sure if the expectation of a large group quitting all at once is in any way realistic, but I’m guessing 343 is just going by this. If you want to convince them to make non-resetting ranks, you will probably first have to convince them that this won’t happen.
>
> Dunno how you would do that but I hope the extra info helps in some way.
Haha, I wasn’t aware Bungie ever made that official response, although I remember spewing it as my opinion all over Optimatch.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a large group all at once (that was more of a drastic example), even small amounts of people quitting can upset the normal distribution of the skill curve. Remember Halo 3’s 1-50 distributions that would show when you selected the playlists? Literally none of them were even close to a normal distribution, which would not work with the Arena system at all.
The ideal system is one where your TrueSkill doesn’t reset after each season, but you can’t see your new Division until you play the requisite amount of games. Only players who had played the right amount of games would be counted in the population distribution for Division allocation purposes, but players would retain their TrueSkill for matching purposes. Once they had played enough games, they would be added to the distribution pool.
This solves both the problem of really good players beating up on lesser skilled players at the beginning of each season, as well as retaining the incentive to continue playing The Arena playlist (although a global visible symbol would be better, but that’s not happening).
> > Without seasons, a new player would never be able to reach Onyx division. They just wouldn’t be able to catch up because the people that have been there since the start could have thousands more games than them.
>
> arena isn’t about time played, it’s about who you win and loose to.
The more games you have won, the higher your trueskill will be. If I have a 50% W/L with 2,000 games in Arena, a new player with an 80% W/L just isn’t going to catch up to me until months and months have passed.
Another thing: Trueskill does not take into account who you play against. The only statistic it uses is the result of the game.
> The ideal system is one where your TrueSkill doesn’t reset after each season, but you can’t see your new Division until you play the requisite amount of games. Only players who had played the right amount of games would be counted in the population distribution for Division allocation purposes, but players would retain their TrueSkill for matching purposes. Once they had played enough games, they would be added to the distribution pool.
>
> This solves both the problem of really good players beating up on lesser skilled players at the beginning of each season, as well as retaining the incentive to continue playing The Arena playlist (although a global visible symbol would be better, but that’s not happening).
Pretty sure they already did something like that for Season 10 (possibly by accident).
Just looking at the leaderboards on Halotracker, you can see a number of players have Onyx with an impossibly low amount of games played.
> Another thing: Trueskill does not take into account who you play against. The only statistic it uses is the result of the game.
Incorrect. One of the best things about TrueSkill is that it quickly converges (compared to other systems) to your actual skill level by adjusting based on the relationship between your TrueSKill and the TrueSkill of your opponent(s).
Also, it would definitely appear that some form of TrueSkill has been carried over to Season 10, but it’s very unclear as to what this exactly entails. Any clarification from 343 would be great (but unexpected).
I think a better alternative would be to keep Seasons but not reset TrueSkill at the start of each new Season. That would prevent people from indefinitely sitting on their rank while also permanently keeping games competitive and balanced all Season long.