what is wrong with ranked?!? I am winning like 30% of my matches and I ALMOST ALWAYS get paired with Spartans that have played less than 200 matches and go 2-20 (I am D4) It is kinda annoying this absurd pairing system. And As soon as I reach D5, this is more notorious. This doesn’t feel like ranked matchmaking at all.
How do you enjoy fixed 50% winrates? 
Maybe the game thinks that you reached your actual max potential and it doesn’t want you to go further.
Or it’s just a low population problem. There are plenty of topics complaining about the same thing.
As an example, I had 3 consecutive days of 15% win rate. (Everything was a nightmare: servers, teammate and at the end me ´cause I was so tilted and self devaluated)
And then suddenly I came back to 50/60% win rate with normal servers and fair matchmaking (full equilibrated diamonds).
I guess sometimes we experiment the combination of the game wanting us to loose and horrible server conditions.
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I lost 6 of my last qualifying games yesterday - not sure how I did in the first four as it was a few weeks ago - I also made sure I was negative in all my games.
I was ranked the same as when I nearly won all my games. In a previous reset.
I’m not sure the resets are doing it’s job.
What rank is that? I was Plat 6 highest before the last reset, now i can’t rank above Gold 6.
Low player population is now split between three ranked playlist is what’s happening.
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Low population. The matchmaker is doing the best it can with who is available.
Seeing as that is kind of the point of having a ranking system - I enjoy them very much.
What’s not as enjoyable is matching teams across a wider range of ranks. That amplifies all the team work problems if your team doesn’t “gel” and leads to blow outs.
The game never thinks that. It’s always open for you to rank up or down. That’s part of the reason of having a separate CSR and MMR system. The MMR can vacillate a bit in the background (to give you a chance to flex) while the slower moving CSR smooths and “averages” it all out.
The system finds your “max potential” as quickly as possible - but it’s up to you how far you can push it.
The game never “wants” you to lose.
It’s true that sometimes you get into a game where the odds are stacked against you. But they are your opportunities to rank up. If you are good enough.
You went in a D2 and came out a P4.
The you went 1 and 9 in your placement games.
You would have gone in with an MMR of D2. If the majority of placement games were of teams ranked below you it won’t much damage to your MMR. And with the lower population in may have struggled to find you with a lot of tougher games. Did anyone quit in those games? - you won’t change a lot of MMR in those cases either.
As for going “negative”. Remember it’s KPM and DPM. And not KD. So you may have still been getting close to your KPM (you would need to look up expected kills on waypoint). If you were dying a lot then you may not have met DPM - but that’s also a lower weighting.
So overall, yes, you didn’t do well in placing. But you may not have done that badly. And again, you may not have got the MMR sapping games you would have had if the match maker had more population to work with.
A couple of problems.
The system tries to spread the current population from Bronze to Onyx. If the drop off has mainly been in the average to below average players - that’s going to pull the population to the left. So it may be harder to rank up this season.
You can’t necessarily compare your rank from Season to Season.
And secondly there may be pockets of the population that find it hard to move. If you are P6 - normally the system would give you games vs D1-2 (or thereabouts) as a chance to rank up. But if, for whatever reason, the system can only find you teams rated P4 (too soft) or D3+ (too hard) you may find it hard to break out.
Kind of a reverse Goldilocks situation.
Personally I see it as artificially stunting your growth/climb and idk how anyone is okay with that. That’s why 1-50 is so well loved. You keep climbing, you just keep climbing. You do lose here and there due to occasional bad performance/bad match up but the growth never stagnates.
1- 50 does slow down drastically as you are nearing 40+ but you don’t ever feel you are hardstuck the way Infinite does it.
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How is it artificially stunting anything?
If someone is a D3 they should go 50:50 vs other D3’s.
Right? I mean isn’t that the literal definition a rank. You are the same skill level?
So, it would be reasonable to expect a D3 to go 60:40 vs D2 and 60:40 vs D4. Don’t quote me on the actual numbers, I don’t know. But the principle is that as a D3 you will win more vs D2, break even vs D3, and lose more vs D4.
Overall it balances out as around 50:50.
The system isn’t locking you into 50:50. You are by your own skill level.
The only way to have a higher (or lower) W/L is to have a disproportionate number of games vs higher or lower ranked teams. Which isn’t fun for everyone. And would probably slow your ranking down.
Remember H3 was TrueSkill. So pretty much the same thing.
Except for the hidden 20 levels. Everybody loved those. Until you realised you couldn’t tell a D3 from an Onyx 2000+.
The climb was completely artificial.
TrueSkill knew your actual ranking 1-80 within 20 to 30 games. But your “climb” was slowed down by Bungie.
Part of that was Bungie stuffing up. The kappa value (or whatever they call it in TrueSkill) was too low in Halo 3. So if you took too long to get to 50 you could become rank locked. That artificially stopped you from ranking up (or down). But if you started a new account you could rank up to your new skill level very quickly.
It’s not a problem now because we have a CSR for the more volatile MMR to hide behind, plus the Seasonal resets.
And don’t get me wrong.
The charm of 1 to 50 was that it was slower. People happily played for days (or even weeks) to go up or down one level. And that’s a more natural reflection of how people’s skill changes over time.
Now we have a system 1 to 1800+ and people lose their mind over 5 points in one match.
And the open ended system just encourages a toxic grind upwards.
Not saying we should go back to 1-50. But maybe 1-100. Or make each of the current divisions ten tiers (for effectively 1-60). Just drop the scale and cap the maximum value.
False
True
False. Having a full team is the only way to get a win % well above 50%. It’s the only way you can’t get a gold 4 on your team when you’re Diamond+
Even if you have a team of 3, the system gives you the worst teammate it can find to “balance” your team CSR vs other team (makes games look good on paper)
How is it false?
The system finds your rank as accurately as it can and then matches team’s to be close in skill.
The natural result of that is a 50:50 win rate.
Why would it need to manipulate the system by forcing wins or losses?
Having a full team is always the best way to “rank up”.
It’s a team game.
Virtually every guide ever written on how to rank up starts by saying to organise your own team and not rely on randoms.
But you will only win above % for a while - and then when you are appropriately ranked you will settle into a 50:50 win rate. Unless you are the, or close to the, best side on the server - then most, if not all, of your games will be against lower squads. Your CSR will grind up - but not your MMR.
The system doesn’t want to put the G4 there. But low population forces it’s hand.
The balance is on your MMR. Plus weightings against your squad of 3.
And it’s not whether the games look good on paper or not - it’s how they look in the data bank. The games may not be matched 50:50 like it would prefer (low population) - but as long as the 60:40 matches actually go 60:40 then the rankings / matching is working the best it can.
Your squad may well be better than their “best three”. But that’s not the point of the game is it? It’s their 4 vs your 4. And if that means an anchor is applied to your squad to bring you down to their level that’s what match making is supposed to do. The fourth player isn’t there to force you to lose - they are there to bring the expected result as close to 50:50 as they can make it.
Ranked matches are designed to ensure everyone wins roughly 50% of their matches. The long term success that you’ll have with ranking is by ensuring you keep playing.
That’s the whole deal isn’t it? As ranked systems go, the more effective one isn’t always the best experience.
This is Halo anyway, it shouldn’t try to emulate the ranked systems that govern other types of shooters.
In fact, I’ll go ahead and say Halo got all messed up specifically because it decided to start emulating systems from other games, so a revert to 1- 50 would be much better, even if it isn’t inherently “accurate”. I wouldn’t mind a compromise like a 1- 100, but the whole Tiering and MMR system isn’t working for Halo atm, at least that’s how I feel.
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TrueSkill grew out of Bungie’s ELO type system for Halo 2.
TrueSkill2 was honed on millions of data points from Halo 5.
It really is Halo.
It’s about balancing precision with accuracy.
The scale of the CSR is arbitrary. 1 to 50 was accurate - but probably not as precise as you would like. A high 45 would probably beat a low 45 more often than you would like.
The current 1-2000 or so is more accurate - but starts to lose precision. You can’t say with hand on heart that someone who is 1305 is definitely better than someone who is 1300. And you can’t really compare a 1305 to another 1305 on another server, let alone on the other side of the world.
I would think 1-100 would be a good compromise. Maybe, as someone else once suggested, 1-117.
The MMR system does work. And keep in mind it is the backbone of 1-50 from Halo 3 onwards.
It’s essentially the CSR system we are arguing about. Whether that is simply scaled to the MMR (like the 1-50 of Halo 3) or chasing on the same scale (Halo Infinite).
The beauty of the Tiering is that it divides the population into a standard deviation of the population. You can instantly keep track of how many people should be in each tier. And it’s structured so that each tier has a 25% chance of beating someone a tier above. ie. A P3 should go 25:75 vs a D3.
If we assume the MMR is working as intended (and 343 would have all the retrospective data to back that up).
What can we do about the CSR?
- Change the scale. 1-1800+ doesn’t work.
- Cap it at a maximum level (open ended = toxic grind).
- Add in an incentive to keep playing.
For point 3 I would have some sort of championship point for each win at a ranking level. You could then table those points each season. Add in a military rank along the lines of Halo 3 would work perfectly.
Eg. to be a Season 2 General you need 100 wins at Onyx rank (vs an Onyx level team).
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I was ranked around P4 in all the resets and improved that rank up to D3/2 before I stopped playing.
I think my point is that I did go in with an MMR of D2 - on a reset after a rest I don’t think it should do that. Should a rank reset not give you a clean state?
The issue here is I lost 9 games (thank you for looking) watched people die/sat in the middle of map/didn’t participate/got a lower KPM against lesser opponents and more DPM yet it still ranked me the same as when I went with more wins higher kPM and Lower DPM.
This tells me that the system has already decided my fate due to the amount of games I’ve played overall.
Which makes the reset pointless
——- and again making me feel that they should delete the CSR system and leave the MMR running in the background.
343 need to represent our progression in a better and more relevant way.
If 343 released active player and who is actually playing showing the skill of players similar to the charts you could see in game back in Halo 3. You would see why. - and probably stop playing ranked.
Pointless looking at rank when most players have left. Theoretically - (not talking about your good self) Saying that you are a diamond/Onyx now has no weight compared to the first 3 months of season 1.
The system is trying to re-rank you as fast as it can.
It makes sense to assume you will be at your previous rank.
It just widens the sigma value (width of your curve) to be volatile again - so that it gives your MMR a bit of breathing room in case you are going better or worse.
The MMR has a weighting for time away for the game - so it would have lowered your expected rank a bit anyway.
It predicts your fate.
The problem here is that it may not have been able to serve up the games it needed to fully test you. A lot of people are struggling to get those potentially winnable games just above your rank that you need to move up.
If all nine of your losses were to teams ranked below you then the system can’t do a lot to rank you down.
It’s not ideal. Not by a long shot. But again - if this is the case it’s the low population that’s the issue.
In your case. In this situation. Yes. It probably was.
There are plenty of issues with the CSR system. And I’ve posted heaps about that.
But remember the reset is all about the MMR. The CSR here is just an innocent bystander.
And the role of the CSR is to allow the MMR to be volatile than it would otherwise be. This allows it to respond better to fluctuations in form through the season and stop it locking down like it used to in Halo 3.
Hell yes.
A CSR with a smaller scale and a maximum value.
Some sort of reward for wins at your current rank (eg. A military type rank ala Halo 3 tied to wins).
Your Season’s rank can only be a reflection of the available population.
If you only let Onyx players from Season 2 through to Season 3 they would still be sorted Bronze to Onyx.
So to that extent you can’t really compare ranks from Season to Season. Sometimes they will be easier. Sometimes harder.
Certainly in this Season the main drop off seems to be from the left hand side of the curve… which is dragging players to the left a bit.
And in my case, sadly, I’m struggling to get less than 180ms a game - so I haven’t really put a lot of time in recently. 