It’s not smurfing when I’m worse at the game, I can’t use kbm on my main with them as the game treats me like a fairly high ranking Onyx player despite me being like a D1 level kbm player.
I get it, no hate here…
It was confirmed via a tweet by a developer for the game. Can’t remember his name.
But as someone who played a lot of Halo 3, with various ability friends and admittedly made many new accounts it was very obviously on social. That’s why all the montage people used new accounts to do it and couldn’t use their mains. I made a Fiesta montage with a new account as on the new account I was hitting Killtrocity and above clips regularly.
It’s just been refined for modern games to do a better job.
Every game is a 1 v 7 as far as I’m concerned 
I play solo but the teammates I keep getting going .5 kd, who won’t play as a team or communicate, have convinced me.
I played with friends much less skilled than me in halo 3, some of them the same friends I am playing with now in Infinite.
I don’t remember ever hearing from them “when I play with you, I get matched against very different players than when I play by myself”. And yet, if anything, my friends are closer in skill to me now than back in 2007-2010, as they’ve gotten better and I’ve not.
That was not a thing in halo 2, 3, Reach, or Halo 4. The first time I ever heard that was Halo 5, and it eventually led to us just playing the MCC instead of Halo 5. It will probably eventually lead to us playing the MCC instead of Halo Infinite.
I don’t think I believe Halo 3 had SBMM in social just because a developer you can’t remember in a tweet you can’t find said halo 3 had SBMM in social. However, even if that was the case, it was implemented so loosely that it didn’t immediately ruin the experience for my friends when we played.
The current implementation of SBMM in social is way too strict precisely because of the jarring experience it gives to players playing together of varying skill levels. There’s no difference in feel between playing social and ranked if you play with a group of players of different skill tiers. That’s bad. And that’s absolutely not how halo 2 or 3 social played. Not by a long shot. And it’s not how anything in Reach played.
I don’t see any numbers in that menu, no matter what tab i look at.
But lets just for argument say that that would be true. Then those numbers clearly don’t match actual skill if they keep producing very one-sided matches. So it may be nice that it would average some abstract numbers, but as long as those numbers don’t correctly portray actual skill, it does not average actual skill. There the problem lies then.
Halo 3 used TrueSkill. It is also mentioned by Microsoft on their page about Trueskill: " TrueSkill has been used to rank and match players in many different games, from Halo 3 to Forza Motorsport 7."
Halo 2 didn’t have SBMM, but was used to develop TrueSkill, so that game did already collect skill information.
Yes, it used TrueSkilll in ranked.
The social experience played nothing like ranked in halo 2 or 3. That’s now been changed/undone in halo 5 and Infinite; the social experience has been lost.
Yeah it was less tight in Halo 3 but it existed, in every Halo game after H3 too. H5 was the tightest of the bunch in my opinion.
You don’t have to believe me, but it doesn’t change facts.
Older Halo games were skill by playlist so you’d effectively have to become a hidden 70 in every social playlist to play the most hardcore players. Modern games is a hidden value for all playlists as there’s a clear pattern to player skill across multiple playlists so now you have one rank overall, not one per playlist. That’s why now if you play a new playlist it is already sbmm in place which wasn’t the case in Halo 3.
I’m not going to waste my time looking for a tweet for you, but I want you to know it exists so you can find it for yourself if you wish. It existed and I’m just stating a fact, it’s not my opinion.
And I’m stating a fact that the experience social provided in halo 2 and 3, and the entire experience of Reach, has been lost due to how SBMM is implemented here in Halo Infinite.
My opinion is that such a loss is both unnecessary and bad for the game.
It is still looser in social than it is in ranked by a large margin.
I think this is true when playing solo, though even there I’d argue SBMM is unnecessarily strong and does not properly differentiate ranked/social into two distinct experiences.
But in a party with large skill differences between players? Ranked and social feel the same.
I’ve actually seen this too, but it’s not always there. I almost feel like this is a bug. Even in games I see it, I’ve taken screenshots for my Teammates to see and it’s not in their game.
It’s hard for numbers to match ‘actual skill’ because how you’re playing one game doesn’t mean that’s how you play. MMR can get very close to your AVERAGE skill, and you’ll fluctuate around that. If 2 or more players happen to have a bad game, get distracted, etc, the SBMM is chalked.
I agree with this statement right here. ONLY difference is weapon starts. SBMM feels exactly the same to me. If there is a difference, I haven’t seen nor felt it. I’ve been tracking it for myself on halotracker after matches. It’s not perfect, because it’s not the ‘hidden’ mmr, but I go by their rank.
One of the largest differences between ranked and social is that ranked balances individual skill and team skill whereas social widens the individual skill and balances team skill with wider individual parameters. Ultimately they still want the games to be fairly close to 50/50 but they’ll pick from a larger player pool.
That’s why sometimes we get the pro + 3 noobs Vs 4 average players scenario. If you are going to search with worse players then everyone else will almost always be better than them and worse than you. The same was true of Halo 3, the system was just worse at getting it right back then and also had to factor in the fact MMR took longer to calculate and was per playlists so lots more random factors making the games more “unbalanced” making it feel more social.
I’d say they are different, I don’t play serious in social and I have a 1.6+ k/d in every playlist. Ranked I play extremely serious and I have a 1.2 k/d.
This is why Social is going in the wrong direction IMO. It’s discouraging you from playing with friends. If a D6 plays with a D1, the D1 will almost always struggle to break even. Even though they’re an above average player. If they play on their own, they’re MUCH more likely to have a good game.
I’m a 1.2 in Quick Play, 1.29 in Ranked, I play with the same team in both, and put about the same effort into both.
I don’t really think average k/d is a good representation because it just means that your MMR should probably be higher than it currently is to tune you closer to that 1.0k/d
That’s all well and good for those two players, but what about the enemy team? For players to do well, someone has to be punished.
I kind of get it, can suck to be really good at the game and not feel the effects of that, struggling to break even every game even if you’re in the top 20% of all players, but also when you do play worse players it isn’t fun for anyone.
Example, I have a friend that’s a D1, by no means bad at the game. He has a sub 1 k/d because he plays alot with higher ranked friends. He’s constantly the punching bag. It wears on a person mentally 
To be fair I think they need to adjust the diamond ratings. Being Diamond 1 puts you in the top 45%-ish of players so you could be D1 and only be slightly above average.