UNFAIR, INEFFECTIVE, IMMUTABLE SLAYER MATCHMAKING

Games Other Halo
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*Original post. Click at your own discretion.

Prefatory remarks: Every time I play slayer, no matter when, how long, my rank, 80% of my games I spend losing because 1 person quit. Then, after 10+ games of grueling loses, I begin quitting, however, I won’t be the first to. The second, third, and fourth quitters should never lose CSR. Moreover, if a 3-member team beats a 4-member team, the CSR award should be double for each member of the winning team.
The halo 5 multiplayer is in a state of decay.
I’ve been playing halo 5 since its release, focusing on multiplayer only since summer 2016, around the same time there was a personal tragedy. Halo 5 multiplayer slayer is, in my opinion, as well as most console gamers’ opinions, the most mechanically sound combat FPS ever. MECHANICALLY - as in, hit-boxes, player speed and motion, damage per hit per location, and aesthetics.
Now, the slayer matchmaking, however, is the most unfair, irascible, and unwilling to change feature of any game. Since I have time to kill, I decided to experiment, you know, science. I adjusted ALL the variables associated with a slayer game. Each round of experiments involved playing through or quitting early and team or solo. I logged in enough time to reach level 150. Most of the information gleaned will seem like complaints. They aren’t. They are gaping holes in the algorithm which I subsequently observed at least 200 times. I won’t share this information as it may hurt the fragile ego of the highly paid exec whose responsibility is to maintain an evolving system.
It is my conclusion that whatever metric is used for assigning members to a team of solos is not serviceable. I have a few working models that I created while not thinking. The principles that govern this selection are not developed by an engaged consumer, but by some autocratic body opposed to change, and like a third world apparatus it refuses to adapt, adopt, evolve.
My biggest problem: MOST players quit because other players quit, but the first player quits because they see how little parity there is. Banning doesn’t work. It never has. The current system selects a team of 2 “good” and 2 “less good” and away we go. This bad. It should be 4 “good” vs 4 that could be “good.” Focused, balanced, or expanded produce the same outcome win/loss. They are silly. Send them back to the son of the exec from whom all of these “ideas” come.
There is more. Much more. I’ll save it for when I switch to PS and post on their forum

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Same as it ever was.

The only observation I can add to this is that Halo multiplayer continues to work in exactly the same way that it has always worked. What you are describing (with the exception of how quitting is handled) is identical to the experience I had with Halo 3. The game that looked at that steaming pile of inequity and ineptitude and tried to change things was Halo 4. They used a very different skill assessment tool (one that worked much better, imo) and they took away visible ranks because they believed that it drove a considerable amount of undesirable behavior in Halo 3. They believed rightly, and now we can see just how right they were with the return of visible ranks in this game.

Maybe there’s a way to have the motivational aspects of visible ranks without the quitting and rank-manipulation that they also bring, but if there is then I can’t figure out how it would work. And moreover, the absence of visible ranks is no guarantee of balanced matches - it just makes it harder to fully and quickly understand just how unbalanced they really are, and I think that makes people more likely to keep trying than to quit. More fool them.

Win/Loss skill assessment is not good enough. I would argue that it isn’t accurate, and others would contradict me, and since I’m no statistician I would have to stand down on that argument. But I still believe to the core of my being that they’re flawed. What’s worse is that they’re unsatisfying. No one wants to rank down because of bad teammates, and no one wants to rank up because they got carried. The results of either scenario should right themselves over time, but just because the system finds accuracy eventually doesn’t mean we don’t spend a lot of time with an inaccurate rank playing in a lot of matches with huge score gaps and almost nothing that resembles fun.

Are any of these flaws you’ve observed attributable to low population, or do you think they’re exclusively the result of skill assessment and matchmaking flaws?

Oh, and why would you post observations about Halo matchmaking on a PlayStation forum? Or does PS not mean what I think it means?