I’ve been playing Halo for nearly two years now. I’m not very good at it but I absolutely love it. The poor matchmaking is finally making me think I should look for fun elsewhere though.
I see plenty of high ranking players complaining about the matchmaking and I totally agree that it is the one thing which ruins the whole experience whichever end of the skill spectrum you are at.
From my own point of view I’m frustrated by playing game after game of FFA which ends in two minutes because there is one player who clearly outclasses everyone else. The highest rank I’ve achieved is about Gold 3 and I’m ok with that if the games i play are against opponents of a similar skill level.
The problem for me is Seasons, playing games to qualify and the ranking being reset every couple of months. All this does is ensure there is a constant supply of Onyx and platinum players who are labelled ‘unranked’, being matched with a constant supply of bronze and silver players also labelled ‘unranked’ and the game is over in an instant or people quit because they are bored with the poor opposition or aren’t good enough to compete. Why can’t qualification and ranking in one format of the game be applied across all formats, and instead of resetting the ranking, just keep it… the only people who should be unranked are those totally new to Halo 5: Guardians.
Matchmaking doesn’t use CSR to find matches. It uses a hidden MMR rating that never gets reset. So just because someone is unrsnked doesn’t mean they aren’t close to your skill level; it just means they haven’t played their qualifying matches yet.
The only time an unranked person would be an issue is if it’s their first time playing that playlist. If they’re a smurf account or just really good and never played FFA, then yeah, it would throw the matchmaking off for a couple games until it figured out those people are way above the skill level they’re currently being placed in.
Yeah, Chimera and Luke have it right, OP. One other thing I’ll add it this: if you’re getting poor quality matches (i.e. there’s a wide skill gap between players in the match), that means 1 of 2 things. There is either one or more “smurf” account in the match, where someone has deliberately fooled the system to give it a low MMR, OR there’s just a low playlist population and you’re matching high MMR players. There’s not much to be done about the latter, which I suspect is a big issue in FFA so late in H5’s lifecycle. The system can either give you games with wide skill gaps, or no games (very long or infinite wait times).
The MMR system will remember all those players skills between seasons, and take it into account when the new season starts.
Yeah, Menke mentioned that he widened the upper skill range matching so higher level players can find games. Don’t remember though if that’s still happening or if he removed that for this season.
I’m not unsympathetic to your troubles. Rankings and matchmaking are problematic (to put it mildly). But those among us with long memories know full well why mis-matches happen and know also that they are not new to Halo 5. I’ll even grudgingly admit that this game handles the problems better than any previous Halo. Not well, mind you, but better. As pointed out, the re-sets are not working in the way that you think they are. They’re not the cause of the problems. In fact, they’re there partly to discourage some of the worst unintended consequences of ranks that never re-set, such as every previous Halo had. Trust me when I say that you’d be less critical of this game if you’d experienced Halo 3 ranks and matchmaking first-hand.
You face those big bad boys till you finish your placement matches if getting beat for 10 games in a row is your issue then maybe silver is your proper placement I just started playing got put in high gold and love the absolute grind of pushing to onxy.
The thing is nobody liked the Arena Season Ranking in Halo Reach but 343 force it on us in Halo 5. Most of the Halo Community wants MM back to how it was in Halo 2 and Halo 3 with a 1-50 Level System or something close to it for competitive play.
The main people who like seasons are the ones who already get max rank in everything.
For most normal people, they’re just an annoyance and breaks the flow, especially those who aren’t able to play very often.
I say take it back to something simple like 1-50 in Halo 3, but then make seasons opt in after you already have your 50.