I concede that your career average at over 45% is a bit lower than expected.
Part of the reason you are probably struggling a bit - to both win and rank up is that K and D are extremely important in objective games. Some would argue the most important bits.
You are frequently going heavily minus. Pretty much minus in every loss (looks like a strong correlation). Some by 10 or more.
Every time you die without taking out an opponent with you are gifting the opposition time with the objective.
The way you prioritise the objective at all costs is probably exposed by the wider range of ranks we are seeing in matchmaking. The higher ranked players in the opposition (who you wouldn’t normally see a lot) are predicting what you are doing and killing you. You should try to balance your game so that you have a healthier kill death ratio AND still hit the objective.
I’ve been working hard at it. When I play with my sons I have to hold the odd ball. A lot. And I’m trying to get better at when I should drop it and fight back. Getting better in that I pretty much always trade a kill with my attackers. And if I can buy some time, trade a kill, AND do some damage to another player - it makes it easier for my sons to back up and get the ball back.
All the system is doing is trying to evenly match the teams.
If they have your rank right - then the matches will be even and both sides have an equal chance of winning.
The end result of that is a tendency to 50:50 win rates.
How your team goes depends on a lot of things. How well you play. How well your team mates play. How well you all gel as a team (particularly in objective games). And all that countered against the opposition dynamic.
So yes. A lot of it is in your hands. It’s not uncommon for players to vary by plus or minus 150 points on any given day!
The system is not creating 50:50 results. It is not looking at your recent results and constructing mismatched games to force a result. It is not hand picking team mates to make sure you can’t win. And it is definitely not picking times to desync you out of contests.
If you do have a run of form and rank up you will attract tougher opponents. And the same in reverse if you go off the boil. The new level of opponent will match yours and you will settle back into a rhythm. This behaviour is kind of what you were describing in your experience - but it’s not kicking in on the back of one or two results. It’s not micromanaging you game to game. It comes in over time if you start consistently winning the tougher games.
I think the issue is one of perception. I played twice this week, the first night I went 1w-3l and deranked. The next night I played I was playing mainly ranks below me and had some high kd games. I went on a 9 game winning streak and inflated my csr by 50 points. By the end of that streak I’d gone up one rank but my opponents were all the same rank or above me and it was a serious challenge to keep a 1.0 kd rate.
Now the system seems to have elevated the competition in response to my csr/mmr increase and that’s understandable but that is then making my chances of winning less. So while the system isn’t designed to end my win streak, I will eventually be faced with challenges I can’t win and lose.
I think this effect is what gives people the perception of the system cheating them. By design though, any SBMM to an extent will always have an impact on selecting you for matches that could be unwinnable.
The idea is to settle into a “comfort zone” at a higher level. Win some, lose some.
It shouldn’t be a case of “can’t win”. Just harder to win than the ones you are currently blitzing.
And then wait for you to go up or down in form.
Perception. And frustration.
People feeling unrewarded for days or weeks where you have toiled manfully but haven’t actually improved (and therefore not ranked up).
We need an XP rank or some other reward system to sit along side the harsh reality of ranking.
The key here is that the system is always trying to make the games winnable. Just that they are equally losable as they are winnable.
I think throwing you matches that are unwinnable is exactly what a proper SBMM shouldn’t do. Not saying some games don’t end up that way (players quitting, smurfing, etc). But it’s not the system doing it. And if you ever do end up in such a game - it gets taken into account when assessing your MMR.
Ah yes, another hot take thread about a system that a majority of people don’t actually understand There is a lot more nuance to matchmaking than any of you armchair game devs know about.
What I don’t understand is why I get placed in games I’m expected to go negative quite often. Why not put me in games I’m expected to at least go even the majority of the time?
But there is so much more 343 could be doing to help.
Better communication for a one.
And the Waypoint stats are a great start. The expected kills and deaths should prove to be a great self help tool.
Once people stop trying to catastrophise them into some sort of weird conspiracy against their skill ceiling.
Being able to look up graphs of out MMR over time would be awesome. Or even see the curve itself (both informative and educational). And our KPM vs oppositions rank.
The sort of thing Menke used to do when people questioned their rank and progress in Halo 5.
The following is an example of how Josh used to explain things (circa March 2020).
Someone posted a bit upset that had lost a chunk of CSR playing against Smurfs.
And keep in mind that you could lose or gain 30 CSR per match in those days…
I’m sure if we had this level of communication / feedback then people would be;
a) A lot less frustrated with the system.
b) Less likely to invent weird reasons to explain their lack of progress.
c) Higher ranked as they would focus on the right things.
Very true but it feels a lot like the community consensus hovers around wanting the old 1-50 system back… Shouldnt player feedback be favored over pure “nuance”?
I think the six divisions has merit in that they have context for the population as a whole. Each division is one standard deviation from the mean. So you can instantly ball park the % of people that should be in each one.
Someone else suggested having 1 to 117. That would be a nice touch.
Anything to take away the toxic grind for a handful of CSR points.
There was like a 2 hour or so interview of tashi by I believe LVT, and he ends up bringing up the ranking system. Lvt is streaming the interview, so he has the chat open.
Tashi - “what do you guys think about 1-50?”
Lvt - immediate nope “1-50 is bad”
Tashi - “Idk man. I see 1-50 brought up A LOT”
Lvt - points out pro players saying 1-50 is bad
Tashi - seems to also be reading the live chat, and his eyes get wide as he’s reading replies " there seems to be A LOT of people that want the 1-50 ranking system back man"
Only the top percentil players don’t like 1-50. They like standing out with that big csr number, or liked the champ top 200, meanwhile the bigger part of the fan base never liked it…let alone liked rank resets. Always enjoyed the journey of starting at 1, and get as far as possible in each ranked playlist, all the while having many other options to play different social playlists.
Why not go back to 1-50…and just slightly change the color of the outer ring and numbers as the hidden rank goes up every certain amount of ranks and cap it at a good spot? So many people don’t like the current ranking system. They settled for it, deal with it, come to the forums to vent over it…almost NO ONE likes it. Even the 1 guy on the forums that may seem like he likes it…still would change it if he had the power to do so. Thats not a sign of liking it but more a sign of accepting it because there ain’t much else that can be done about it besides trying to understand the method to the madness.
But yea after i watched that interview, it really made me think maybe 343 is actually considering to go back? Until my buddy was like
I think it depends on the context of what 1-50 you are referring to.
Good players liked the 1-50 in Halo 2. The ranking system behind it was more of an ELO sort. It was very slow and created a lot of uneven games (especially early) but you did have to be good to get to 50. Very good.
TBH it wasn’t a very good ranking system. We definitely don’t want to go back there.
Good players didn’t like the 1-50 in Halo 3. Mainly because of the hidden levels. You only had to be Diamond 3 level to get to 50. So there was definitely no reward for effort overall. You could be getting anyone from me (scraped into D3 in Season 1) to Lucid.
This is probably true. But it’s definitely gone too far. We now have people playing in toxic manners to eke out a couple of extra points.
It’s not good.
It’s interesting reading some of Josh Menke’s comments about Champs. I don’t think he liked that concept very much. He was often rather disparaging about them.
The resets were actually a welcome relief after Halo 3.
People used to have to reset themselves by starting (or buying) another account. Once you got rank locked it was a very tedious climb out otherwise.
There was a big poll on Waypoint asking if people wanted to have their rank hidden behind an artificial grind (like Halo 3) or just told to you straight up.
The vote was, apparently (I didn’t see it), overwhelming to be told the truth.
Agree we need more playlists.
But that’s a different argument than the ranking system itself.
I do like the six divisions. It has a nice symmetry with the population curve.
I would increase the tiers to 10 in each division. Bronze 1 to Onyx 10. And then you essentially have a 1-60 system.
You could then have the Onyx tiers symbols like 41-50 in Halo 2!
The CSR system isn’t great.
But you do realise that 1-50 isn’t going to change TrueSkill. You are still going to have to beat teams ranked above you to rank up. You are still going to be judged on KPM and DPM.
And I think one of the biggest problem going back to 1-50 is going to be nostalgia. The MMR is based on a curve 0-1800. So a 50 is going to be around the 1765 mark (more Halo 2). That’s going to annoy the -yoink- out of everyone expecting to hit their 50 like in Halo 3.
A big enormous part of the misconception you may be having in terms of the rankings and playlist and bringing up someone like Lucid, is that in a game like halo 3, it had the tournament setting playlist called MLG. That’s where the best players went to actually…idk how else to describe it beyond…proving themselves to be as good as they are. The playlist played very different than the standard playlist. Settings were different. BmS was different. Damage was different. Motion trackers was off, shield recharge was different. So the best players would undoubtedly play that playlist, while the bigger part of the player base, got to play their favored playlists. They never cared about esports in the first place. Happy to be 50. Happy to be 25. Just happy to play wth they wanted tbh. Let those guys have the esports playlist. Its awesome they had their own slice of the game without others losing theirs.
I also outlined there would be some symbolizing of the ranks beyond 50, without the number just going up if there were to be a new rendition.
Problem here…is infinite has nothing to offer. The difference in settings between the tournament settings not only doesn’t differ enough, but its missing ALL the staple playlists anyone would even care about…and if they tried to add any…low and behold…SOMETHINGS gotta go…what a magnificent UI right?..
A player had different avenues to reach rank 50 in, different playlist without some rotational garbage getting in the way. That playlist stayed there even if it only had 100 or less players in it while the other thousands played what they wanted.
Some people did get rank locked, but in 2022, I’d imagine stuff like that should be correctable?
Do I think this is even a possibility though? Dear god no. I can’t imagine what will get messed up in the process of trying to do that…its missing staple playlists…the settings I already spoke on…etc.
Would it be nice though? It does seem like a lot of people liked 1-50 man. Slice whatever underneath you gotta do, crunch whatever hidden math, algorithms, what have you. Whatever would make it work, and I imagine that would create some kinda shift.
And that last bit you wrote…something just feels wrong about the match making in infinite if I can hop onto an older halo and have the matches I did right off the bat meanwhile threads and threads of complaints revolving around infinite, the match maker, player selection, etc etc keep popping up so often…that you’ve basically called them all conspiracy theories. (Not a joke on you at all, but more like just showing…that wow…there’s quite a bit of these players coming in and saying what they’re saying time and time again no?)
Yea you play harder matches to rank up. You aren’t supposed to go in matches with enormous leaps of skill after winning a few instead of making the process gradual…and shouldn’t get the weird player selection in the lobbies a lot of people describe…nor be playing in matches with insane crappy ping rate…not when I’ve just played an old game and had absolutely none of those problems, in a game that should have less of an active player base than a halo thats literally in it’s first year tho.
I can’t vouch for Halo 3… but I know that similar playlists in later games were very poorly supported.
Josh used to comment that being “champ” in those lists wasn’t very good as the population was so low.
Like BR starts, no radar, different weapon rotations, set objective spawns (not random), and a different melee weighting?
Obviously not as different as the MLG one you described.
We all want more playlists. Particularly ranked ones. But I’m not sure we need social, soft ranked, and hard ranked divisions.
It might just be me… but if you are only going to rank people accurately up to Diamond 3 and then just call everyone after that Onyx - you might as well not have any displayed rank. And you already have that in Social.
Which is cool. I would also like to see H2 like symbols return.
The colours or symbols are a cool idea.
Anything but the open ended 1-1800+ we have now.
If you choose 1-50 as your scale. Just stick with it. Max of 50. How many people are we talking as CSR over 1800? Not many. Your MMR can be open ended for matching purposes - but you take away the toxic grind for CSR points.
However, f you are talking a Halo 3 spread of ranks with colours then that’s a bit redundant. If you are going to have 1-50 and then, say ten, colours. You may as well just make it 1-60.
Hopefully they sort the UI out and add a game browser. Smaller playlists would be much more sustainable if you could preference them in your selection as opposed to having to sit there watching a little wheel spin.
Yep. And one of those ways is to reset the sigma value of your MMR curve (but not it’s mean). The only problem with this is that it makes your MMR jump around a bit (which is what you want). So you have to hide your CSR for a handful of games.
It’s just the scale of your MMR. You don’t have to change TrueSkill2 or TrueMatch at all.
If you want a full spread of 1-50 you just divide your CSR value by around 36.
If you want Halo 3 you divide by 26 and stop at 50.
The same for 1-100, 1-117, Bronze to Onyx, Kitten to Unicorn. It’s just a different expression of the scale.
Low population.
I played Halo 5 right up to the release of Infinite.
The last 12 months or so were wider and wider ranking in teams. As the population dwindled. As a Platinum player I was increasingly playing with and against Silver and Onyx players.
It’s awesome you got a couple of great games. I’m jelly. But it was only two games.
They just aren’t very convincing.
A ranking system can’t rank you up if you aren’t beating teams rated above you consistently.
How does a loss after a couple wins describe anything but what you would expect with a match making system trying to match teams?
How does getting a couple of bad team mates prove that 343 is manipulating teams?
How does applying your past KPM to calculate an “expected” score become a conspiracy to prevent players ranking up?
When did we start attracting posters that think that 343 is using personal desync to sabotage players?
Yep.
Definitely.
But the match maker is struggling to create those matches consistently. Especially when dealing with squads.
A few months ago the complaints were more that the matches were too even. Players were winning runs of matches and getting frustrated they weren’t ranking up fast enough. That they were grinding CSR and then losing it all on a closely fought loss.
Low pop = wider ranges of rank.
How “crappy” those players are seems to depend on the result.
And anecdotally I feel that it also depends on the game mode. Objective games such as CTF really do expose you if your team doesn’t gel.
But now in infinite, its become the only playlist though? Doubles finally getting added but…its 2v2…hows this work out? Its just another reason population has fallen so much.
Halo 3, the most popular halo had the soft ranked (default settings ranked playlist, and hard ranked (mlg) and that games in the history books of the goat of halo. I don’t see an argument there. Am i interpreting the soft and hard rank comment right though? Is that what you meant?
And when it comes to rankings, d 3 and onyx +…simply adjust it. Thats not even a big deal. Again i outlined that one in my OP. 50 is as iconic as the BR itself. Might sound silly, but…we see just how dear these things are to the halo fan.
I’m just saying. Let them have their cake homie.
I’m sure I’d get nothing but those matches bro. I searched on expanded yet got the most balanced games. I didn’t even realize it was on expanded at first. I could only handle 2 games man. I have c19 right now. I feel horrible. I played really good though. Beat 1500s and 1600s as the d2 of my first match with 3 onyx players where I had as much damage as the top player of my team, better stats overall, 2nd on scoreboard. Second game i also place second on scoreboard with that very close loss. It was fun bro. Really dang fun man. Im definitely gonna play more and see how often i get weird match ups compared to balanced ones.
Its not that they’re saying its being like manipulated by some evil dude behind a computer though. I think its more like they’re trying to point out a flaw in the match maker.
Just how low is the population man? Check it out dude. The matches I had in 5, were ranked slayer. Highest populated playlist. It HAS to be because most people can’t stand having to play objective when they’re not in the mood for it bro. I’m convinced that has taken a toll on population, AND its the MLG playlist of infinite.
It doesn’t matter if you yourself appreciate objective now or not. I think most of us love a great ctf match when we want it. When we dont though…well…we’re stuck with that and oddball? Time to hop off.
When a player is playing a game mode they don’t like, it’s probably easy for them to tilt too bro. Frustrated for more than 1 reason, and lose focus and will to even try and win in a game mode they wish they didn’t have to play because its the only ranked playlist.
Dude. The algorithm is assuming your expected kills and deaths by calculating the MMR of the enemy you’re versing and comparing your past outcomes against similar MMR opponents.
When you have never versed a certain MMR enemy before and are about to verse them things become more assumptive than predictive, using assumed MMR to lean towards higher performance than terrible performance (benefit of the doubt).
The more you play the less assumptive your MMR becomes. You’re just being given the truth from HaloDotAPI platforms (HaloTracker etc) while also being locked in a social experience which does not cast the widest possible net for MMR matchmaking, instead it holds loose MMR requirements .
(TrueMatch Machine Learning spreads this net to non-existent when nobody is playing the game BTW… but more on that when the community learns it may be the next thing to put to the flames while screaming “rabble rabble rabble”)
ALL THAT SAID - I would love for Social lobbies to be 100% non-MMR based and only connection based; the only thing the matchmaking system should do is prevent you from versing a team you lost against more than 3 times in a row. Would be interesting to see how everyone feels.
I think you are going in the right direction with this.
however one of the issues that i see is that the system actually pits you against people of much higher skill.
you cant argue that it makes it fair by pitting me against a pro
I don’t care what anyone says, that is exactly what it does.
Every time I win a few and my CSR starts to go up little by little (its a grind since every win is like +4 CSR and every loss is like -12), I get something insane like a GOLD 4 on my team
A GOLD 4
I was a D6 until a few hours ago when this nightmare train began to derail. I lost like 7 games in a row deranking like crazy because the matches were so off kilter
Its artificially manipulated gatekeeping to prevent people right at the cusp of Onyx from getting it
There is a lot more nuance to matchmaking than any of you armchair game devs know about.