Was Onyx Rank a Race?

Games Halo Infinite
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I’m working on solo/duo Onyx now and am floating around D4-D5…it’s super frustrating.

I’m thinking the ranking system may reflect more of a “race” then a “ladder”.

When I loose games, the other players are not “that” much better then me, but I get punished “that” much.

And we all know how “rewarding” to our rank the game can be for wins….

Sometimes the Onyx rank feels like it was a race to see who gets there first.

It will be interesting if they do a rank reset in season two…I won’t play any BTB or Quickplay or Battle Pass Challenges…and I propose my rank will “ plateau “ at a higher rank.

I understand 343 tried to mimic a ranking system used my chess.com, or something like that….but ranked Halo is not chess. Ranked Halo is not 1:1…so I’m not sure what they were thinking when they did this.

I’m curious other players thoughts on this theory and hope 343 gives this subject some attention.

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Well my team get completely out ranked every game without fail.

I honestly avoid ranked because of this issue, I’m not even bad but halo isnt a game you 1v4 so it’s just a lost cause.

I do feel the people who played ranked straight away had an easier time, but what does rank matter if it dojt use it for matchmaking.

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If anything it was harder to get to Onyx originally as there were less people. The higher the population of players the easier it is to breach the top 5%.

It’s never going to be easy though to be in the top 5ish% of all players.

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And probably less than that if they use standard deviations to make the divisions!

Early in the season your MMR curve will be wide and volatile. This is definitely the time you want to rank up fast. So it is a race, but just with yourself.

After a while your curve will narrow and be harder to move. It won’t lock completely (Halo 3, we’re looking at you)… but you will have to put in the time to rank up. You can take heart though, if you are good enough, the rank will come.

We don’t know for sure… but it’s probably safe to assume a H5 type system where we all get 10 placement games again.

It won’t be a hard reset though - you will go in with your current MMR. But your skill curve will be made wide again. The mean (mu) stays the same but you get a larger variance (the sigma value). This means you will be matched against a wider range of opponents - and have a curve that is volatile and easier to move.

This will definitely be the best time to rank up fast if you think you are currently a bit underdone. I would definitely make sure you are warmed and ready to go for your early season games (and cross fingers that team-mates don’t quit or let you down).

I’m not sure what you are referring to here? The same principles apply to a team game. It just takes a bit longer for the system to isolate your individual rank from the team.

eg. for 2 players 1v1 the system needs about a dozen games to rank you. For a team game 4v4 it’s closer to 50. Big team battle? That’s over a 100. It can obviously “ball park” you in a handful of games… but to accurately sort and rank it takes a bit more time.

Where it falls down from Chess is the lack of a tournament structure. Having the best players matching each other is data gold.

Halo match-making has to do with what is available from the server at the time. For the best players / teams this will be winning streaks against lower ranked teams - which is pretty useless for the system.

And in the case of Infinite where you get a token amount of CSR for such wins - probably detrimental to the user experience.

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