Whats the excuse for no visible ranks?

Games Other Halo
1

So what is the excuse for no visible 1-50 ranks in game? Is it cheaters <mark>r u really going to let boosters and cheaters get the best of you</mark> who really cares there any every game with ranks let the legit competitive players have something to go for that everyone can see.

Will it not work the ui? Simple Divide ranked and social playlist and make it so on ranked playlist it doesnt show your spartan rank it just shows csr

Do you want this game to be for casuals seriously? A game that is competitive will play better for casuals than a game that is built for casuals wont play good competitive!

<mark>What is it really leave a comment below and tell me!</mark>

2

Cheaters and not worth the time and/or effort this late in the games life cycle.

You could argue that they should improve their banning system to catch those cheaters and I agree entirely. But for what little amounts of people play this game and how easy it is to just open your browser and check www.quickcsr.com or Halo Waypoint, it isn’t worth it.

3

I would hardly call it an excuse. They made a very deliberate decision and went with it. Many of us disagree with it, but 343 hardly needs an excuse when they have stated that it was something they chose not to do.

4

> Cheaters and not worth the time and/or effort this late in the games life cycle.
>
> You could argue that they should improve their banning system to catch those cheaters and I agree entirely. But for what little amounts of people play this game and how easy it is to just open your browser and check www.quickcsr.com or Halo Waypoint, it isn’t worth it.

Who cares though let them cheat succesful games like wow have cheaters and they have ranks! and plus theres not that motivation to get a 50 unless its in game so people can see it dude why do u guys like ranks on websites halo 4 is the only game to do so its freaken annoying!

5

If I remember corretly, the reasons they gave are that they don’t want anything that could make noobs cry (in so many words), they don’t want to encourage cheating, and they can’t change the UI to include visible ranks.

6

Does it hurt to check the site afterword?

If it puts you up against people of your skill anyway, then you shouldn’t have to check. If you want to get a higher csr, then do a team game and have a good team. I’m sure someone will be willing to play with u.

fyi no hate or rage in this post :slight_smile:

7

> So what is the excuse for no visible 1-50 ranks in game? Is it cheaters <mark>r u really going to let boosters and cheaters get the best of you</mark> who really cares there any every game with ranks let the legit competitive players have something to go for that everyone can see.

Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, Rainbow Six? There’s a LOT to be said for games that doesn’t try to second guess how good players should be. For one, they emphasize real ability (by letting it stand on it’s own) instead of making a great pantomime theater of skill for the peanut-eating masses to go for through ranks that are no more representative of how good of a player you are than your emblem is.

But how can I possibly say that? Doesn’t everyone know 50’s mean something? They sure say so in the community. Well say a 49 is facing down a 20 on Narrows in Halo 3 Team Doubles. What happens there? How will the same matchup on Ghost Town go down? What if the 20 has a 50 backing him up and the 49 a 43? What if the gametype is BR starts but the 49 has an shotgun and brute shot? What does all this mean for the next game against a 44 and a 47? What if they get matched against a different pair of 44 and 47? What if one of them only has a 14 in Ranked BTB? What if that one is the 44? What on earth happens?

Don’t know? That’s the point. Ranks, any rank in any game, do nothing except describe what you have played. They say nothing about how well you’ll do in any future scenario, and thus they fail to achieve their one and only purpose. Stop investing so much in showy numbers and let the game speak for itself.

8

> > So what is the excuse for no visible 1-50 ranks in game? Is it cheaters <mark>r u really going to let boosters and cheaters get the best of you</mark> who really cares there any every game with ranks let the legit competitive players have something to go for that everyone can see.
>
> Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, Rainbow Six? There’s a LOT to be said for games that doesn’t try to second guess how good players should be. For one, they emphasize real ability (by letting it stand on it’s own) instead of making a great pantomime theater of skill for the peanut-eating masses to go for through ranks that are no more representative of how good of a player you are than your emblem is.
>
> But how can I possibly say that? Doesn’t everyone know 50’s mean something? They sure say so in the community. Well say a 49 is facing down a 20 on Narrows in Halo 3 Team Doubles. What happens there? How will the same matchup on Ghost Town go down? What if the 20 has a 50 backing him up and the 49 a 43? What if the gametype is BR starts but the 49 has an shotgun and brute shot? What does all this mean for the next game against a 44 and a 47? What if they get matched against a different pair of 44 and 47? What if one of them only has a 14 in Ranked BTB? What if that one is the 44? What on earth happens?
>
> Don’t know? That’s the point. Ranks, any rank in any game, do nothing except describe what you have played. They say nothing about how well you’ll do in any future scenario. Stop investing so much in showy numbers and let the game speak for itself.

Visible ranks do two things assuming a ranking system that at least pretends to encourage positive impact:

  1. influences game play: people are more concerned about winning than they are stat farming. The visible rank does make people care, and I would say that lack of visible rank is a big part of the reason that objective play lists have such a problem with people not playing the objective these days. Obviously some people will be overly motivated and approach the game in unsporting manners, but I think the positive effect more than compensates.

  2. creates fair matches: When you can see exactly how close or far away from you everyone in the game is, there is a greater onus on the developer to ensure that skill based matchmaking is doing a proper job. At the very least, once that good job is done it increasing consumer confidence.

9

> 1) influences game play: people are more concerned about winning than they are stat farming. The visible rank does make people care, and I would say that lack of visible rank is a big part of the reason that objective play lists have such a problem with people not playing the objective these days. Obviously some people will be overly motivated and approach the game in unsporting manners, but I think the positive effect more than compensates.

So let’s lie to people about what their gameplay represents to “motivate” them into playing more of one particular product despite what they might otherwise want for themselves? Isn’t that, well, evil? Shouldn’t our game be able to support good gameplay and good behavior without having to resort to the virtual equivalent of smack? I’d say such a move smacks of failures in core gameplay mechanics that, as it is, aren’t being addressed because we’ve found other ways of motivating people.

Of course I’m being overdramatic, but I just find it silly to prop up an irredeemably broken system by saying that it’ll support all sorts of wonderful behavior when you can probably say instead that people don’t play for anyone but themselves because so much time is spent trying to evaluate and glorify the individual, and badly at that.

> 2) creates fair matches: When you can see exactly how close or far away from you everyone in the game is, there is a greater onus on the developer to ensure that skill based matchmaking is doing a proper job. At the very least, once that good job is done it increasing consumer confidence.

So if two or more lies match up with each other we have a fair game? The most powerful way to break consumer confidence is to have their expectations dashed by the game they play in the very next moment. Unless you can be absolutely sure ranks work there’s no place for using them as a visual guide to matchmaking quality. But as you can’t (as they aren’t predictive by any stretch of the imagination) they’re absolutely self defeating, and in that they’re liable to create some very odd mindsets in people who WANT ranks to mean something but have less and less evidence to support that wish. They must instead try to find ways of excusing reality to bring it into line with their expectations.

“Oh I didn’t just loose to that team of 30’s. They just relied on the noob-tube/noob-cannon/noob-rifle/noob-vision to win the game in spite of my clearly superior skillz! Oh and it’s my team’s fault too! Stupid noobs…”

Thus we have tangible degradation of the community (the maintenance of delusional mindsets) along with the tangible degradation of the game itself (as innovation is substituted for more powerful reward mechanics like “skill-based” ranks) to try to bring up consumer confidence in a way that can’t possibly work with the systems we have at our disposal. At this point I think we’ve run out of feet to shoot ourselves in just to have ranks.

10

>

Where are you coming up with the lies stuff? And I never said that it is a motivation to play more. If anything, the rating system should not give an advantage to playing more beyond whatever time period it takes to get a statistically relevant data set.

I said that it influences HOW you play. For example, beyond the very lower levels of play, a visible rating system eliminates the guys that are willing to amass a spread of -20 as long as they get 13 kills or so are eliminated. Players start pursuing the objective of the play list instead of whatever their perceived objective is.

In any cooperative/communal environment it is important to have incentives set up in such a way that the players’ primary motives will line up most of the time.

11

> >
>
> Where are you coming up with the lies stuff? And I never said that it is a motivation to play more. If anything, the rating system should not give an advantage to playing more beyond whatever time period it takes to get a statistically relevant data set.

See. my original post. No rank, regardless of what it takes into account, can accurately describe how good of a player you are because, first of all, you cannot define just what that actually means beyond “the ability to win.” And given that with so many different weapons, players, maps, and gametypes winning never means quite the same thing from one game to any other there is absolutely no possible way to mathematically describe anything about player skill except their history, a history which means nothing to the very next game.

It’s all bunk, and to maintain it in full view of that is to lie (to again put it overdramatically. It’s at least not honest but that so less interesting a way to put it.)

> I said that it influences HOW you play. For example, beyond the very lower levels of play, a visible rating system eliminates the guys that are willing to amass a spread of -20 as long as they get 13 kills or so are eliminated. Players start pursuing the objective of the play list instead of whatever their perceived objective is.

Bull -Yoink-. Ranks may influence how people play but the lie being one that people believe is no justification for it. You’ve merely stated the problem. Some people buy into the ranking system to evaluate players, and for that to work in spite of the systems failings they have to maintain a very distorted view of their gameplay and that of other players. How you, however, come up with this insanity as building “team play” is beyond me though because the very premise here is that we have individual ranks. How good am I, you, or anyone else is being attempted to be shown through 1-50. Teams may not necessarily factor into that (beyond hosting the individual and ultimately deciding the win in a team-based game) but you can be sure the team will be one of the first things thrown under the bus when any given player feels that their rank is threatened by the many factors it can’t actually handle.

> In any cooperative/communal environment it is important to have incentives set up in such a way that the players’ primary motives will line up most of the time.

So what reward does the soldier ant have in sacrificing himself to the rampant hordes of carnivorous termites attempting to steal his colony’s grubs? It’s one of the defining features of the eusocial community (humans included) that incentives aren’t often associated with cooperative or communal activities, in play especially.

It’s economics (one particular kind of human-invented system) that creates incentives, and holding gaming accountable to the same standards you would set for a job is probably the first place where you go wrong. We don’t need to reward a player for gameplay beyond the very experience of that gameplay. The very first thing that 343 can do to improve Halo is to remember that one fact and build around it.

12

It doesn’t make since that you used since instead of sense

13

> See. my original post. No rank, regardless of what it takes into account, can accurately describe how good of a player you are because, first of all, you cannot define just what that actually means beyond “the ability to win.”

Is the ability to win not what you are trying to rate? Over a large sample size it can certainly get an accurate measurement of how you rate WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE SYSTEM. Its not disingenuous at all. Do you take moral offense to top 25 polls in collegiate sports as well?

> How you, however, come up with this insanity as building “team play” is beyond me

You don’t understand how encouraging players to win a team game type encourages team play? I can’t help you there.

> We don’t need to reward a player for gameplay beyond the very experience of that gameplay.

Obviously the very first goal in designing a game is designing one that is fun to play. But players will derive their fun from a variety of different goals and play styles. In the context of play lists that are structured around team play with objectives, individual players pursuing their fun in a way that does not align with the play list negatively impacts every other player in the game. Incentives help to keep everyone on the same page so a minority does not undermine the goal of your game play for the majority.

14

> Are 343s excuses for no visible csr pathetic? [/h]**

That very question, is an example why Bungie came to the decision that ranks were a failed experiment with Halo 3. It is that sort of attitude in general and towards other players in pre game lobbies, during games and post games, along with cheating, boosting account selling etc, that saw the demise of ranks.

The sort of attitude your question displays, with the word “pathetic” gives clear indication that you must be a former Halo 3 players of which ranks were dome away with due to…your attitude hasn’t improved…R.I.P Visible Ranks…thank yourself.

15

Duncan Idaho 11, look at the individual CSR playlist as an example of how ranks influences and encourage a certain style of gameplay. People in those playlist when trying to rank up become extremely selfish because that is what is required by the CSR system.

-baiting their teammates
-stockpiling power weapons instead of giving some to teammates, increasing their odds of winning the game.

  • Rushing endlessly trying to get as many engagements as possible regardless of how many times they die or how much they go neg.

When you give people a goal wither it be in the forms of rank or challenge, people will change how they play to achieve that goal. So why doesn’t the game developer us this to their advantage and create goals that promote solid gameplay. That is something an in game w/l ranking system does.

People would start to

  • plug back in their mics to communicate
  • Start playing the OBJ instead of stat -Yoink!-
  • Support teammates instead of leaving out to dry

to name a few improvements.

Regardless of wither the system ranks you somewhat accurately(see Halo 2) or is somewhat off(see Halo 3) the benefits of having a system in place that is in game and is base off w/l benefits the game greatly and should not be left out.

16

> > Are 343s excuses for no visible csr pathetic? [/h]**
>
> That very question, is an example why Bungie came to the decision that ranks were a failed experiment with Halo 3. It is that sort of attitude in general and towards other players in pre game lobbies, during games and post games, along with cheating, boosting account selling etc, that saw the demise of ranks.
>
> The sort of attitude your question displays, with the word “pathetic” gives clear indication that you must be a former Halo 3 players of which ranks were dome away with due to…your attitude hasn’t improved…R.I.P Visible Ranks…thank yourself.

You never even played Halo 3, so any opinions you have on the Halo 3 MM experience are not valid.

Where there rank bashing going on in halo 3?

Yes but not to the extent most people like you make it out to be. Also there where already tools in place to prevent the bashing such as the Mute button, or the ignore and avoid options though the xbox menu. The only place where bashing was rampant was the Bnet forums and there were mods to handle that.

As far as account selling, there is nothing wrong with it. It happens and many other games besides Halo. Look at league, COD, WOW and many other games. Them buying an account does not break gameplay or effect a large portion of the population.

and FYI ranks were in Halo 2 as well. It wasn’t a Halo 3 experiment.

17

> and FYI ranks were in Halo 2 as well. It wasn’t a Halo 3 experiment.

To be fair, modding undermined the Halo 2 ranking system.

18

> > Are 343s excuses for no visible csr pathetic? [/h]**
>
> That very question, is an example why Bungie came to the decision that <mark>ranks were a failed experiment with Halo 3.</mark> It is that sort of attitude in general and towards other players in pre game lobbies, during games and post games, along with cheating, boosting account selling etc, that saw the demise of ranks.
>
> The sort of attitude your question displays, with the word “pathetic” gives clear indication that you must be a former Halo 3 players of which ranks were dome away with due to…your attitude hasn’t improved…R.I.P Visible Ranks…thank yourself.

When I read the high lighted part I can only assume that you’re implying that ranks were first introduced in Halo 3. Would I be correct in assuming that? If so, you are very wrong. Ranks made their introduction in Halo 2 and in my opinion they were perfected in Halo 2 as well. Like someone said earlier, all the modding and network tampering is what hurt H2’s ranking system.

However, with that said, it really bugs me to see someone try to speak on the behalf of past halos when they have never even played them. Do you really think you have the knowledge base and experience to offer a valid opinion in this matter?

19

Will the visible csr really change how the game is played or will it be another excuse to back out of a game?

20

> Will the visible csr really change how the game is played or will it be another excuse to back out of a game?

Well… I can only assume that being able to back out once the teams and voting options are determined was an unintentional mistake that slipped into the game because there was no beta. I say this because when someone quits out at the voting screen, the game will begin without replacing the players that quit out.

Fixing that issue would prevent backing out as a result of map or player selection. Once the player selection process is completed, treat quitting out of the voting menu the same as quitting out of the game. Full penalty to your visible rank.