A champ for being over 1800 would be somewhat generic - but it’s at least a start for recognising the elite.
And I think we all would love to see them battle for the top spot.
But the problem with any ranking system is that it’s tough to sort out the minutia of ranking order at the top end if the player’s aren’t actually playing each other regularly. It’s hard enough to make those judgements within a server population, let alone across time zones.
I would love to see some sort of tournament structure. Or at least a round robin system (like my proposal for champ point leaderboards).
On weekends you could open up a private lobby just for players ranked over 1800. Then either have some sort of scoring or knockout system to allow those players to compete against each other for the #1 spot.
Maybe everyone gets scored on their top ten games?
The very last weekend of each season could just be for 1800+ players who have scored enough points in the preliminary rounds?
It’s the best way unlock anyone’s rank that may have become a bit “locked” (although it never gets as bad as H3 did).
I’m not too sure about this. My friends and I tested this after the last reset.
I was currently a D1
My Friends were D5, D3, D1, and and Platinums.
Paying Open as a 4 stack we won the majority of our games and we all mostly went positive aside from 1 or two games at most. It was just a really good day!
Before reset I was a D1. After placement matches I was a Plat 5.
The D5 placed D4, even though he did the worst out of all of us. Always bottom frag with lowest KDA. We all thought for sure he would place D1 or Plat 6.
The D3 placed D1.
The other D1 placed Plat 6.
This same thing happened to all of my friends.
Needless to say, a Gold before reset will still place a Gold after reset even if they slay out and win every game. After this some of them actually quit and went to other games.
Saying the Gatekeeping isn’t real, or the reset should let people place higher is just not true. At least with my ENTIRE group of friends.
Just so you’re aware, when you “rank-in” (aka initially earn your rank) you’ll receive a CSR that’s set appropriately 100 points back of your current MMR.
So if you were at a Diamond 1 rank in MMR you’d be given a Platinum 5 in CSR at the moment of rank-in.
People consistently come away from placement “feeling” they did badly.
I think it’s because you tend to get a few more “tougher” matches than you expect.
And it’s just anecdotal - but I think the ante is upped on personal performance in those early placement games. I don’t know if they specifically change the weighting or it’s just that the weighting has more influence when your MMR is wide and volatile.
But we have plenty of examples of people who lose more games than they expected to - but still come out with a stable MMR (similar to what they went in with).
Hopefully people start making use of the expected stats on Waypoint. This will give you a better gauge of how you actually perfomed.
As mentioned by eLantern - you come out of placement with a CSR below your MMR. Typically a couple of tiers below.
But it can be more. In the example MMR posted by A_Blues-Fan a couple of days ago (post 91 on this thread) you can see the player’s starting CSR was around 1300 - while their MMR was much closer to 1500.
It took about 20 games for the CSR to come up and meet their MMR.
The Gatekeeping isn’t real.
The reset does give you the chance to place higher. But it’s not to the same extent as unlocking the rank in Halo 3. The current MMR retains it’s ability to move up and down the scale - so it’s not as critical as past Halo games.
The “modern” reset is more about encouraging return play and refreshing the population curve (reigning in the grinders and allowing 343 to tweak the the algorithm to keep an even spread of ranks).
It looks to me like your entire group has placed pretty much as expected. I imagine their mean MMR is the same as last season. You just need to play a few more games for your curve to narrow and allow your CSR to step up to the plate.