Credit to Katastrophe of the Beyond Entertainment forums.
The following post is not mine.
> In this day and age, when it comes to the multiplayer experience of gaming, a ranking system is a must if not simply to ensure that all matchmaking games are fair, balanced, and thus fun for all involved. In non-ranked matchmaking, games are often lop-sided and more often than not, at least one individual spends the game getting destroyed - something that isn’t fun for anyone. Ranking systems, however, prose a problem to Frank O’Connor at 343 Industries because he does not want to see people cheat, boost/sell accounts, or harass people - things that he believes a ranking system promotes and encourages. To this, I say that players will always harass other players unless you remove all forms of stat collecting and display, whether it’s your KD ratio or your win percentage. For this reason, a ranking system that is designed to prevent all cheating and boosting, is only beneficial to the game as a whole. In the following post, I hope to outline a ranking system that I believe is better than any system so far seen in the Halo series because of how well it ranks and matches players, it’s depth and how far one can enjoy it and narrow down their actual skill level, and the fact that it simply cannot be cheated in anyway.
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> Part I - The Service Record
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> Below, you’ll find a (rough) example of how the Halo 5 service record should be presented, and what information this system would display on it. Note that I’m using Halo 4 character models and StarCraft 2 images simply as place holders. I am, by no means, a graphic artist. If someone would like to design better visuals, please contact me. That said, your service record should show a great deal of information:
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> - Standards such as your Gamertag, Emblem, Spartan Model, Service Tag, etc.
> - Your Global Rating. This three or four digit number (which will be explained later) is your actual rating. Think of this as Halo 2 or 3’s 1-50 rank. Your ‘Global Rating’ (as well as the listed K/D and Win% beneath it) is actually the average of your top three playlists. Which brings us to…
> - Your top three playlists. Here you’ll see your rating for each playlist, as well as the playlist specific K/D and Win% ratios. Also shown is your playlist’s league, but we’ll talk more about that later.
> - Extra information that could be added (either globally or playlist specific) would be ‘Most Played Win’, your KA/D, etc.
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> Visual mockup.
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> Part II - Rating Explained
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> So what exactly is this three or four digit number I’m talking about? This system is based on an existing system that was originally designed for 1v1 (specifically Chess) games but has since been adopted and used in many games and in many ways, most notable being League of Legends. I am, of course, talking about the ELO system. Unlike the typical Halo 2/3 1-50 system which is progressive, having players start at the lowest rank and climb their way up, the ELO system actually starts players off at a middle rating (1200) and allows them to move up and down based on the population’s general skill level. In a progressive 1-50 system, you expect there to be the same number of 1s as there are 50s with the majority of people being Rank 25, forming a bell curve, and that’s just not the case. This ELO system, however, does that. It’s important to note that there is no ‘minimum’ or ‘maximum’ rank. The single best player will have the single highest ELO and not be lumped into just ’50’. While this number is the most precise measurement of your skill, it’s not by any means the only measurement. It’s simply the rubric from which all your other ranks and placements are derived from.
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> Part III - How ELO Works
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> The benefits of the ELO system over a standard progressive 1-50 system don’t seem that great at first. It’s really when you look into the math of the system that you see it’s benefits. Now, I won’t bore you with all those details (although if you’re interested, the wikipedia page has quite a bit) so let’s just look at some of the key problems with a 1-50 system.
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> First, it’s restricted to only 50 ranks. In Halo 3, I don’t think anyone who had a 50 would argue that there was a different just in the rank of 50. For example, I had several 50s - does that mean that I’m just as good as Roy or the Ogres? The beauty of that ELO system is that with a midrange point of 1200, the average ratings fall between 600 and 2400 - that’s 1800 different ranks and an accuracy of 0.05% between you and the person one rating point above and below you. But it doesn’t end there, because as I previously said, there is no minimum or maximum rank. If that doesn’t appeal to you, I don’t know what will.
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> Second, the way people are grouped into leagues changes from season to season, based on the current population’s actual ratings. The 1-50 system is designed to become a bell curve - mostly people ranked 25, and an equal number of 1s and 50s. However, that was obviously not the case because no one was actually a ‘1’, but there were people who should have been when you compare their skill level to the pros. In fact, from my experience, most people seemed to float around 40-45 in Halo 3 which, if you’re going for a bell curve, means that the max rank in Halo 3 should have been closer to 80 or 90. So this system is designed to look at each previous season’s minimum and maximum and rescale the boundaries for each league based on those numbers to ensure that ‘Gold League’ is always the middle ground. If the average player is reaching a rank of 1400 instead of floating around 1200, the system will scale up to accommodate this.
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> Third, the system only looks at two things when a game is whoever: who won, and how does their rank match against the other team’s. Unlike Halo 3, the system does not look at your teammate’s past win/lose ratio to determine how much or how little you should rank up - it cares only about who won the game, and the difference between your rating, but I’ll discuss this in painful amounts of detail later. For now, know that if you were given a bad teammate and they dragged you down, your opponent’s will be of equally low rating and, therefore, your loss penalty will be minimized. However, if you pull an underdog, you’ll rank up faster.
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> And last, the myth of rank locking will be dispelled. In Halo 3, often times the change to your rank was so small that even repeated changes went unnoticed in the scale of 1-50. With this rating system, using a four digit number, you WILL notice a change after EVERY game, no questions asked. You will see immediate change in your rating on a game-to-game basis.
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