Specifically, in the SWAT playlist. Now, I consider myself to be an average player. I’m definitely not the best SWAT player out there, but at least I’m not the worst. Now I assume what made all the other players doing this, started doing it for similar reasons that I had. For me it started when I loaded up Halo 5 and noticed that the season had restarted. I thought oh cool, I’ll go ahead and rank in in SWAT. I queued into a session of SWAT, got loaded in, and then it happened… total and utter annihilation… now, I don’t mean that the other team was better than myself and the “randoms” that I was matched with. I mean, it was one gamer that came in Rambo style and destroyed our team. The other people on the other team had, maybe two kills each… it was all just one gamer. Finally, after about a minute and a half of spawning, taking two steps and dying over and over again, the match was over. Just for fun I looked to see who had cause our randomly selected team such devastation. Now, I can’t remember the Gamertag of this infamous gamer, but I know it started with Twitch. Anyway, I clicked on Mr. Twitch’s info and it showed his rating as Champion with a perky little 1 nestled neatly inside of the emblem thing. I’m no pro, but I’m pretty sure that means that he’s rated #1 in the world… I chuckled and felt honored that the Halo Gods deemed me a worthy opponent for Mr. Twitch here. Well, good thing that’s over with, I waited in queue to be selected for another match, the player emblems got loaded up and I recognized one of them… it was Mr. Twitch’s emblem… Oh crap, well hopefully he’s on my team, I thought. Once the game was loaded up, sure enough, he was on the opposite team. I made my initial charge hoping for at least one single kill and POP! somebody killed me from behind? Twitch… seriously? How did he get behind me when the game just loaded up, suddenly I spawned with all of my teammates together and POP! POP! POP! POP! We were all dead again… for some reason I was reminded of the old Halo 2 days, with flying tanks operated my hackers. Another game ended and this time I backed out of the lobby hoping to be rid of this Mr. Twitch for good. I even went outside to smoke a cigarette for good measure, just to make sure that he was in another game. So I come back in and got queued up, and there it was… with all the other gamers it was Mr. Twitches emblem… I remember thinking to myself, there was no way that could be him, I mean, everybody has access to that emblem at some point, could be anybody. Game started and it was him, of course on the other team. Now everybody knows that if you don’t moved your character at all during a match you’ll be kicked with a soft ban. Well that was something I didn’t have to worry about during that match because I didn’t even have time to spawn. I just sat my controller down until the game ended, didn’t seem even worth trying at this point.
By this point I just decided I was only being matched against somebody of such high caliber, because I was being ranked. For some reason, I was being made to prove I was not Champion material. I mean, jeez, you could have just asked, I would have told you that I’m not. I decided to just suffer through seven more matches to get ranked and then hopefully he’ll be up in his Champion world, and I’ll be down here in the regular people world. Five of the last seven games, Mr. Twitch dominated. The two that he somehow didn’t get in was all onyx and I still got wrecked. I’ve been onyx ranked once, but that was with a full team, working together, voice communication. Mostly now, I play solo, so my rating is usually at platinum 4 to diamond 2. So basically, ten games of total annihilation. Then finally I get to be ranked and play against people of my own rating. I’m thinking I just played ten games and got destroyed, my swat kd was about -6.5, so I should rank in mid platinum. Nope. Onyx. Why onyx? Played a couple games, got destroyed. But in all of this loss I noticed that you were not locked to a tier any more. Maybe I got rated in at onyx, but since the Halo Gods seem to be doped up on hey-ron, I’ll just rank myself. Or technically de-rank myself.
Now I just started purposefully playing poorly. At first it was easy, I die over and over and I lose. I even started making my own challenges, every pistol match I had to empty every bullet except the last one and see how many “Last shot” kills I could get. The answer was 9, it’s harder than you think. Before I knew it, I was ranked Gold 1 and actually played a match proper like and I felt like Mr. Twitch did, and you know what? It felt good to just annihilate! The only problem was that if I keep winning like that, I’m gonna rank back up and I actually like winning, so in order to win, I gotta keep loosing! This is when I noticed what was really going on here in the Gold rating level of the Halo universe. Every single match that I play, somebody is dying on purpose. So now it seems that the Halo universe, has become a place of de-rank. I mean, come on, who has ever gotten angry because they won? It actually has happened. I get 26 kills and 4 deaths and I get angry messages from my teammates who are trying to lose on purpose! I even find myself getting angry when I’m trying to level back down and somebody on my team does extremely well and I win. lol! So this is the secret war going on. I do feel bad for the legitimate Gold guys, caught in the middle of the de-rank war. But I gotta say, I have actually had more fun doing this, than I every had since buying Halo 5!
On a side note, I am a very casual player. I don’t know how rankings systems work specifically, but I imagine that they’re supposed to match against similar skill levels. So before you all start getting angry about me and the thousands of other players de-ranking, think about why we are doing it. A game is not fun when you’re matched against somebody leagues ahead of you, you’re essentially throwing ants to an anteater, or rabbits to a lion. I don’t even understand how or why a champion is allowed to even match with a platinum rated gamer. I do know that in other games the higher ranked players are not allowed to pair with lower level player, I guess to avoid the high level player from being thrown into a low level game. But that’s exactly what was happening here. Though, I’m not saying that Mr. Twitch purposefully matched with low ranked gamers just to dominate. It’s probably the system couldn’t find him or her a match at his skill level so they bumped him down a tier or two… or ten. There was nothing he or she could do besides dominate. But for me and my team, we felt cheated. Robbed of a legitimate game and rank. At least, hopefully my rank is low enough that I’ll never have to match against Mr. Twitch again, because ultimately, that is my goal while playing this game.