I have people on my team who are in onyx, gold, bronze, etc!!! Did 343 just say “screw it, there’s not enough players for matchmaking, so we’re opening the floodgates”?? The same horrible ranking system, but we’re teamed up with people who don’t know what they’re doing and getting penalized for it because ranked prioritizes objective modes. Just take the servers down already if matchmaking is going to be like this. Your ranking means nothing anymore.
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It’s low population. The match maker is just doing the best it can with what is available within acceptable wait times.
Why would they deliberately do that?
It’s just numbers.
I also imagine people have dropped off ranked a bit with the reset coming next week.
Your opponents have the same problems. Whichever team deals with it better has the advantage.
Or if it frustrates you this much… take a break and play BTB or something.
I would think it hold pretty true.
The ranking system will still be able to work with the data at hand. It knows the team’s relative MMRs and it knows what to expect from each player in terms of personal performance.
I’m unaware of any major shifts in player’s ranks.
Similar match making problems hit H5 in the last few years. It will suit some players - those who’s play naturally supports their team-mates.
ie. Lone wolves may struggle.
And such players find it frustrating because an individual effort can’t simply lift the team to victory like it used to.
There is more than one way to “carry” a team.
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Not sure if the rank reset will solve the situation. With the low player base your placement matches will also be problematic
It should bring people back for a brief surge.
It’s what tended to happen in H5.
I guess?
The system will still work with what it’s got.
It knows how even the matches are (or aren’t) It can still gauge player performance.
So ranks will still get spread around the normal curve of the population. There will still be accuracy ranking players in relation to each other.
So most players won’t see the difference. I remember people saying that in Halo 5 it was pretty much the same Bronze to high Diamond.
But as the population fell some people found themselves dropping back from Onyx into D6.
There was a bit of a skew at the top end back to the left.
As I mentioned. Some players will thrive in this scenario. The game will reward team play more than individual brilliance.
Those Onyx type players who run with and support the weaker links will get as boost. Multitasking is the key. Communication will become even more important.
It’s a broken mess that I have never heard anyone say benefits the game
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The lower population?
Yep. It’s sad and messy.
Fingers crossed the CSR reset and doubles gives things a buzz.
But then we’re relying on Forge.
We’re still 3 months from season 3. 
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In an ideal environment you could play the placement matches with player among your skill. But with lower population you will face opponents with much lower or higher skill.
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That would be ideal. For sure.
But you still have two evenly matched teams (or at least a quantifiable mismatch). So you can rank on the result. And you can still judge personal performance for each player.
Good players will be expected to go positive. Lesser players negative. But you can still rank people up or down based on that. A good player may rank down by not going as positive as they should. A lesser player may rank up by going less negative than expected.
It’s like betting on the line in a sporting event. The “break even” point fore each player is not the same. And it is not a K/D of 1.0
TrueSkill2 can accurately rank a player out of a 4v4 playlist in 46 games. I’m not sure how much of this relies on closely matched skill levels. And if it does slow things down - we don’t really know by how much.
In all the years of discussing ranking I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned. Menke et al often said that the system was still accurate in ranking players that played in squads - which would be a similar situation to the low population rank ranges we are seeing?
So if it does slow it down - it probably doesn’t slow it down much.
As some stage the population will fall enough that it will start to drag players out of position to spread the ranks. If you only had a 500 Diamond/Onyx type players (as an extreme example) left playing the game - the ranking will still sort them into a normal population; Bronze to Onyx. Just with very small actual skill difference between Bronze and Onyx.
Hopefully we don’t ever get close to those types of numbers.
Know what you mean. I played Halo 5 for 6 years. Initially you got very close random teams in the placement matches.
But the more the population dropped, the more wierd team combination. I remember 1 season where i ended bronze 5 after the placement matches. The following up ranked matches i got a lot of hate messages. Guess why? A platinum player among legit bronze player.
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Definitely agree some the items mentioned above. The cross team chatter and the post game lobby where if people stayed they played were lumped into another game were great features.
It’s sad that items like this have been removed.
I couldn’t find a game in ranked this morning. Waited five minutes and gave up. Game is dead
Noooooo. It’s just resting it’s eyes.
Did 343 enable party matching for matchmaking?
One would think that there’s enough players in their respected division to just match against one another. Instead of having 2k plus onyx match against golds, plats & diamonds. I think in most other games you just match against the division you’re in. It would be nice to have that. Instead of matching based off of some hidden rank. That way you’ll make it through the ranks to your proper division instead of playing against that division the whole way on your way to getting there.
Do you mean the new restricted limits?
I’m not sure. And if they did it’s being over-ridden by the low population stress.
Sadly, there probably isn’t.
Hopefully we get a bit of a population spike next week with the CSR reset and ranked doubles.
And then with Forge.
But 343 needs a big Season 3.
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Theres noone playing this game. Its scrapping together what bottom barrel player base there is. Sad times for Halo.
That’s what happens when there’s only 60 players searching for a game.