I wanted to start a topic explaining why I think competitive halo will continue to drift and shrink to a smaller community based on the way the games have been progressing thus far, so lets look at Halo 4,specifically, matchmaking.
1.Rank system problems. Halo 2 made competitive halo a huge community, the game out of the box was competitive, and the MLG settings were almost an exact match to the hardcore playlist in matchmaking.
**Simplify, not complicate.**The reason why Halo 2’s rank system was so successful at making a large skill based community was its simplified rank system. Winning was all that mattered, individual performance did not effect your rank. This creates a mentality focused on team work and winning, which is all that matters in tournament play. While its nice to be able to track your individual K/D & assists, it shouldn’t influence your rank. That type of system like in Halo 3 and Halo Reach encouraged people to worry more about their stats than winning the game, which in turn creates a large group of people who aren’t teamwork oriented, dropping the skill of the community.
2.Hidden true skill. While this may provide some level of competition, it is not nearly as competitive as a win/loss based system. The main reason for this is on a true skill system, it takes your win/loss & K/D Average to find the same types of players to match you to. Once you have played so many games you become locked into a system that only matches you to players of EQUAL skill. Now it becomes very difficult to match to players with more skill than yourself, making it that much harder to improve and become a better player. With in win/loss based rank system, it becomes more about winning consistency, which in turn means the more you win, the more the skill of the players starts to increase. It acts as an increasing exponential factor without having to program it in(like Reach).
343’s Argument
3.Removing visible rank to remove cheaters.While this may sound all well and good to those worried about cheaters, the fact of the matter is that the percentage of players who cheat compared to the entire community is FRACTIONAL at most. The same is true for those who sell accounts. On the subject of selling accounts, who cares? Players who buy high level accounts but don’t have the skill will quickly lose the rank, or never play on the account at all in fear of losing it. All high level players expect some sort of cheating, regardless of a rank system, if there is a way to cheat, people will cheat. Any game where there is measured progression, even if its not a FPS, people cheat. Take a look at Borderlands 2 or even Skyrim for that matter. There a glitches to power level your character extremely fast which many people do simply because they can, and they aren’t competing against ANYONE.
**4. Halo going mainstream.**I think one of the main reasons why 343 industries is shying away from a traditional halo rank system is money. Halo 4 is now more similar to every other shooter than ever before. Custom load outs, sprint by default, ordinance drops(strike packages), etc. But what do these huge FPS franchises have besides all that fun stuff? LEADER BOARDS, a way to measure yourself against everyone else. Hell, even zombies in Black Op’s has a leader board. 343 is overlooking one of the most important aspects to the reason why Halo was so successful before, and why other shooters are now.
I should note I don’t think the competitive community will actually DIE, but it will largely separate the competitive scene from the rest of the players, leaving most players to only use outside avenues such as game battles to improve.
Don’t get my wrong, 343 has fixed a lot of issues with the game in Halo 4 and everything looks great, except for the RANK SYSTEM. If this doesn’t change, all you will get is massive player base of 10 year olds who want to play zombiez. Give us our intense, competitive, skill IMPROVING rank system back, or reactivate the Halo 2 servers and give us the competitive experience we want.