I’m actually surprised that anybody still carrs for the rank. So many variables make it completely useless and non representative of your actual skill.
And TS2 failed miserably… no matter how much @Darwi is defending the papers. ^^
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The reality is that you will hit your skill ceiling.
That’s just a fact of life
Improving from there is a laborious and time consuming endeavour. But probably more satisfying!
It certainly won’t happen in a couple of games in one night.
But good luck!
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I think it’s human nature to care about such things.
No system is perfect.
And there are probably more variables than we like. Eg. Desync.
But the system grades you on your ability to win. In a team. It works because it ignores all the (mostly subjective) noise.
Add long as everyone is competing under the same conditions the system can rank you.
How did it fail?
Don’t conflate population numbers, frustration with the CSR, match making experience, existence of desync and lag etc with the ranking system.
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There is no skill ceiling. The MMR is artificially forcing one by assigning you a number that barely changes and only letting you rank up or down based on that number. You don’t go up because your skill isn’t a factor. You win 5 matches and barely move, then lose one and go back down to the point you started, because the system thinks that’s where you belong.
You have no ability to influence any of this beyond grinding nonstop and being lucky enough to only ever win while going highly positive and carrying your team every single game.
If you can’t carry Onyx lobbies, the game thinks you should never gain any CSR at all.
Ignore the multitude of variables like how searching solo is account sabotage, or how the game has constant DC’ing and frequent cheaters, or how oddball and ctf and slayer are so all so different that they aren’t adequately comparable tests of skill. It’s a bad system and nobody likes it. The game is dying and will never recover as long as this is the way it’s designed.
The reason doubles is so much better is that it’s ONLY SLAYER, which is what ranked always should have been.
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Um? I’m not really sure how to address this.
It’s kind of like the Father Christmas chat with the kids…
Except that number is a representation of your rank (vs the rest of the population).
It’s not “assigned” to you. You “earn” it by winning and losing.
It “barely” changes because of the arbitrary scale assigned to it.
And you don’t rank up and down based on THAT number. You rank up and down based on the number of the people you win or lose against.
If you want the number to go up? Start consistently beating people with a higher number.
Your skill, as in your ability to function as a team - is the factor.
No. You win five matches and barely move because you didn’t really beat anyone higher than you. The system can’t rank you up because you haven’t really proved anything.
And now you lose. So your CSR uses this opportunity to move back towards your MMR. This is frustrating. But your CSR has to go up with the win. But because you didn’t beat anyone of consequence and/or didn’t match the required KPM - your MMR didn’t move and it’s time for them to get reacquainted.
The reality is you are at your rank.
The trick is to not waste emotional energy on a handful of non-precision CSR points. A few points here or there just aren’t accurate. Concentrate on your Division / Tier. That’s much more enjoyable.
Skill ranking isn’t about grinding. That’s what XP ranks are for.
That’s a sad reflection of the population. The higher ranked players, such as yourself, are being grouped with players of lower rank to fill the teams.
But it doesn’t mean you don’t have to work as a team. Lower ranked players can go negative and still contribute. Just as higher ranked players can go positive and still let the team down.
I’m assuming you are high Diamond again?
Which means you will need to start to beat those low Onyx lobbies to move your MMR up. If you can start to go 50:50 vs said lobbies, and meet or exceed expected KPM, your MMR will go up and then your CSR can follow suit.
Your “solo” rank will always be lower than a “team” rank. It’s a team game and the major influence on rank is winning. It’s kind of the crux of the issue here.
Not the fault of the ranking system.
But at least take heart that your MMR has some protection against people quitting on you. It will slow your rank down but not lower the ceiling.
Your rank is your average of all the skill sets.
You will always have ones you prefer or are naturally better at.
But at the core of the games is the ability to beat your opponent in a 1v1.
It’s mathematically sound. And well regarded.
I don’t think I’ve seen any other system that works as well.
What would you prefer?
I don’t think TrueSkill is the problem.
We can argue about how the CSR is presented. I think that needs a lot of work. But that’s a side argument to your actual rank.
People will always have their preferred game mode. I’m with you that Slayer is the best. But the other game modes are fun. And one could argue that the objective modes are a better reflections of team work. They are certainly much more fun if you are lucky enough to be in a squad and actually communicating - which just doesn’t happen often enough.
It looks like they probably have a separate MMR for each of the games - and then your CSR aligns with an average MMR for the playlist.
It would be great if we could see all our individual MMR’s. That way you can have a Seasonal rank - but also a “best” game mode rank.
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Just take your time and read what you wrote.
“You cant rank up because you didnt beat someone with higher rank”
I can win 5 of 4 gun battles against a higher ranked opponent in a match, but it doesnt help when we lost the match.
The problem is that the team result is affecting my rank and not the True Skill rating of my personal performance. It should never happen, that when a player goes positive, his rank goes down. Its how it works in infinite, but that doesnt mean that this is the right implementation.
I have not kept up with this entire thread but from the little bit I have gone through I can attest as someone who use to care about my rank, I stopped caring. As stated earlier this game has so many other variables baked in that your rank seems pointless and doesn’t represent your actual skill. Also, as others have stated I got tired of personally doing well in matches only for my team to lose and I drop CSR, its just not worth the hassle when you look at the bigger picture and how the systems gives and takes CSR.
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once again, all rambling and incoherent misinformation that nobody is buying
Here’s how it actually works.
Each game type has its own MMR that you earn. To rank up, you have to win matches while your MMR is higher than your rank/CSR. Winning with your MMR way higher than your CSR makes your rank go up 15 points every win, if its well over. Losing only makes it go down if your MMR is close to your CSR (within 100-200 points), and only then if you did very poorly to boot (very low kills, high deaths). People are doing this all wrong. The goal shouldn’t be to lower your MMR to get easier matches, it should be to INCREASE MMR to make the matches count. With a very high MMR, every win gets you good CSR gains and every loss is minimal impact. You’re not facing any harder opponents once your MMR hits about the 1500 mark, so you just have to grind.
The issue is that there are multiple gametypes in Open and Solo/Duo, so you have to work on all of them, and if you happen to get Oddball and lose when you have a lower MMR in oddball, you take a huge hit in your CSR. Its the major gatekeeping issue in the playlist, that you have to suffer through gametypes you’re not always as good at, or that are nearly impossible to win searching solo.
No other information is relevant.
Edit: None of the insistence that personal skill matters comes into play, when your teammates are going negative 16 and absolutely tanking any chance you have of winning.
A system can’t analyse every single incident that happens in a game. Apart from being impossible - the data foot print would be astronomical.
So you won that gun battle - but why? How much did other player’s contribute. Are you accountable for a team-mate’s death because you could have helped them but didn’t? How far down the rabbit hole would you need to go to micro-dissect everyone’s personal contribution to the victory.
Much simpler to reduce the variable noise and just concentrate on the important factor. Did you win. And by doing that, over time, they can assign you a rank that has remarkable predictive properties going forward (ie. it’s an accurate assessment).
Your rank is a measure of your team skill.
It’s how the system works.
Some people may be held back a bit because they lack team skills… and other’s elevated because their team skills are better than their individual skills.
Again. That’s how team sports are played.
I’ve played a lot of team sports in my life (mainly cricket and Aussie rules footy). And trust me - the team players are the most valued.
It’s better to think of it as your performance affecting the team result.
Oh God no. Can you imagine everyone camping and protecting their KD? Like, we never touched the Oddball, and I may have only gone 4 & 2 - but at least I’m positive. So rank me up.
If you do a bit of reading about ranking systems - eg. Chess and Tennis. You can see that people have been toying with different ranking systems for a long time.
And Microsoft were very up front in their TrueSkill discussions that memory footprint and processing time were important considerations in developing this system.
And remember. It’s a team game. The objective is to win the game. Your personal performance, over time, is reflected in your contribution to the team. Play better and win more. It can be frustrating in a game by game basis (and even more if you are going to micro analyse every 1v1) - but it will all come out in the wash.
And besides. Your KPM is here to help you. If you are really winning those 1v1 it will be reflected in your KPM and that will help bolster your MMR. You just won’t notice it on a game by game basis.
I guess it’s human nature to want to be immediately rewarded for doing something good. Which is where an XP rank would fit in nicely. As for having a more volatile skill ranking system we would all be happy to take the rewards - but I’m sure we would also be very unhappy with the punishments.
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I’m not selling anything.
I’m just trying to understand and explain how the system works.
It’s you that’s selling the snake oil - like nobody has a skill ceiling.
And I ramble? 
But yes. To rank up you need to get your MMR above your CSR.
You CSR just chases the left hand edge of your MMR.
If you play well enough to get your MMR up, the CSR has no choice but to follow.
Yep. Pretty much what I’ve been saying for five plus years.
If you want to rank up you want to attract the tougher games and then win them (or at least go 50:50 in them).
And your KPM appears to be graded against MMR as well. So a high KPM against lower ranked opponents isn’t going to help you rank up.
You will always have game modes you aren’t favoured in.
You can get a (fairly indirect) idea from your KPM in those modes how the system has you graded. My KPM is much higher in Strongholds than CTF for example.
But remember it’s averaged out. So an individual game isn’t going to cost your CSR that much.
But if you are keen to rank up - then identifying the two or three modes that may be dragging your CSR down is a great start to fixing things. Especially if you have a mode you quit on (physically or mentally).
Josh Menke used to say that the system has some compensation for a loss where a player lets you down - and/or protected you when you “carried”. He never went into specifics - but I suspect it was to do with the KPM. It makes sense to work with stats you are already tracking. And it would be very easy to normalise everyone’s stats against the outlier.
So I think the key is to make sure you are performing as expected, and even more so in a loss. That should buffer your MMR from drops.
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there is no skill ceiling
get better, stop sucking at the game, rank up
That’s how it should be. But the system hits a wall at the third part by giving you teammates that are dog awful albatrosses around your neck you can’t ever seem to carry enough over time to see any worthwhile gains
you’re right, its so much better to go negative 20 and lose 15 CSR because you were the only one picking up the oddball
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This is a bird’s and the bee’s thing.
Ones of the harsh truths of real life.
Sorry little Johnny. No matter how hard you try. You aren’t ever going to the Super Bowl. Except as as spectator.
Skill curves. Fascinating subject actually. Worth reading up on.
Everyone eventually hits their plateau phase.
The reality is you’ve just hit the flat part of your curve.
You are no longer good enough to beat the team on your own. And or you have exhausted your skills at bringing the team together.
There will be matches out of your control of course. That happens. And you’ll get wins because your opponents may the same fate.
But overall you stop ranking up because you have peaked. You can still rank up of course. At least a little bit. But it’s going to take time and effort to incorporate new skills into you repertoire.
The harsh reality is that not everybody can be Onyx. And certainly not pro level. No matter how you hard you try.
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I can’t imagine a scenario where I would be satisfied with being awful on purpose.
No, the only barrier is the system putting bad players on teams to bring down their chance of winning
No one is being awful on purpose. Or at least I hope not.
But players will reach their skill plateau based on their natural skill, effort, and time constraints.
What you are saying, essentially, is that eventually you will be going toe to toe with Lucid.
The barrier is your skill level.
The teams are allocated according to everyone’s skill level.
To win more consistently someone has to have improved and now be “under rated”.
I am just suggesting you are now “rated”.
Im not talking about bring rewarded each match. Im looking on halotracker W/L of the last 25 matches and realize that there are much more periods with much lower win percentage than 50% as such higher of 50%
You are refering real life Sport. Well i played soccer when i was young. There is a huge difference between real life sport where you practice together. Its not the same like playing a shooter. We are not esports player.
A lot of other game used True Skill, but their implementation how it was used, was very clever. True Skill was hidden in ranked. They never showed your TS rank, but it was used to match up in ranked. In front was a XP counter. You got XP for kills, assists, ring capture and so on. Each member of the winning team got an extra + of XP.
Much less hatred.
You will have fluctuations. Form. Luck. etc.
But overall it should balance out.
It’s not about esports or professional sports.
It’s about functioning in a team. As a team.
I can’t imagine any game, particularly one with an objective, going well with four lone wolves just doing their thing.
There are things that you can control that help the team work together.
There’s an old maxim; “A champion team will always beat a team of champions”.
And your MMR is “hidden” in Infinite.
The confusion is your CSR maybe? I’m not sure why they chose the same scale this time (and in H5).
But I do think we should be able to access our MMRs online. Even just as a trend over time.
We definitely need that. And then people can stop trying to grind their skill rank (which doesn’t work).
It should be coming Nov 8.
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I think the logic is just broken… its taking social and ranked together… so what happens is you will have a plat 5 that is an onyx player and match you up with other players that aren’t onyx but are plat 5… as an example…
The logic needs to be playlist specific removing social altogether. go back to Halo 2/3 days.
And what happens with the rank like gold, platinum? If the rank remains then the XP counter cant solve the problem with that actual ranking system.
You are right, i cant control what the team is doing. Its out of my control which team mates i get. A team that is build of random players, can never behave like a champion team. Its an illusion if you think that 4 random player magicaly are a champion team.
I think it could work with a team up option at the end of the match.
Another shooter tried an experimental mode. It worked this way: as soon that 8 player joined the lobby, the system build 2 Teams of 4, the slayer match started. At the end of the match the lobby remained, if no one quit, the system evaluated the performance of each player and build new team combination. It tried to build even skilled teams and it worked. This gamemode was always good populated.
There are a lot of other matchmaking system implementation out there.
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What bugs me most is his reaction, and the outlook of the people who designed this system, is “just carry better, just be a better teammate, it’s a team game”.
Evidently when the system puts a -15 player on your team, you are just meant to get 16 more kills than usual by yourself to make up the difference. I don’t know how that looks or sounds like a balanced matchmaking system to anyone that understands competitive fps games.
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I just recently got back into playing FPS games but I swear back in the days of Halo 3 and older COD games it was easier to rank up because it felt like it focused more on how I did individually and not so much as a team, I could be wrong but I know I was always maxed out on my level. With Halo Infinite it really does seem like no matter how well you do that if your team loses then you get shafted. Granted I know I’m not as good as I use to be since I don’t have as much time to dedicate to playing and getting better but the ranking up process in this game is a real struggle and I do not like the response of “Just carry harder,” you can do everything right but you can’t stop a bad teammate from running into 3v1 gunfights constantly, there is only so much you can do.
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