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I primarily play this playlist since it was released but something has been really bugging me lately. People have been playing and getting under a 100 score in a 20 minute game.
It’s bad enough that sometimes you find a match and see that the other team is fully organized, 8 man Rank130’s; but then to add insult to injury the INVERSE is on your team. Split screens, Tri-screens and generally people who get less then 5 kills, on more then 20 deaths. This is a message to all solo players who que up for big team skirmish, please, for the love of my sanity, step up your GAME. Become sentient.
There are, I believe, a few different factors driving this:
Casual players who bring even more casual players with them to games think of “Objective” as less intimidating than “Slayer”. They’re wrong, because the former is often won by K/D supremacy to hold on to a narrow lead, but they probably do not know any better.
Anything “big team” is going to get people who love to drive vehicles and are terrible on foot. 343 has absolutely loaded up most BTSkirmish maps with power weapons so they spend more time on foot after people like you and I blow up their Mantis five times in a row. This got started in Halo 3 and Reach with “Heavies” games and equipment/abilities and only increased in Halo 4 with armor mods and now the broken, overpowered “Survivor” module. There is now effectively no penalty for being terrible at Halo’s core mechanics and specializing in killing people one way with one overpowered vehicle time after time.
A large number of players on Xbox Live are simply terrible. By terrible, I mean unskilled, trolling, handed a controller and a Rated-M game by Mom and Dad just to keep the kid entertained, or some combination of the above. There are enough new players every day to make it impossible to exclude this type of player from matchmaking.
The easiest way to fix this problem would be to make BTSkirmish (and BTSlayer) more like they were in Reach, pre-heavies. Vehicles would be generally limited to Chaingun Warthogs, Mongeese, and Ghosts - powerful vehicles like the Banshee or Gauss Hog would require careful map design with lots of additional cover. Either the Plasma Pistol or Plasma Grenades or both would not be available as a starting loadout. No LightRifle starts, no Survivor mod, and ordnance drops would be replaced with on-map weapons.
I guarantee that making people get good with the BR/DMR/Carbine/Pistol, frags, and an automatic of their choice will eliminate the appeal of the playlist to people who are not skilled enough to contribute to a team.
Yeah Big Team Skirmish is full of bad players, makes me wanna resurrect my Spartan School series - but they wouldn’t read it anyway.
Your best bet is to go in with a party of at least three guys. Three guys can make a difference on the team while everybody else can do their pawn thing.
> I see no mention of CSR on this thread? Maybe keep an eye on that?
Well the problem with CSR for these playlists (Any objective game like CTF or BTSkirmish) is that (and correct me if I’m wrong) your CSR in these types of playlists is based on how well your TEAM does, so if you’re amazing at playing something like CTF (this is where I encounter the problem most often) but then get matched with a bunch of noobs and end up loosing, your CSR will go down, and you’ll then be matched with even worse players, and if you keep getting unlucky and getting placed on the team with the slightly worse players, and thus keep loosing, it’s near impossible to get matched with any good players or get your CSR to go up.
Never, never, never ever expect to win a big team game by searching alone. NEVER trust me, I learnd it the hard way. You can go positive 40 and your team will still make it possible to lose.
CSR is trash and doesnt work or make any sense. You get matched with everyone, no matter how high or low his CSR is.
> CSR is trash and doesnt work or make any sense. You get matched with everyone, no matter how high or low his CSR is.
CSR works fine; it’s matchmaking that’s messed up. Of course you won’t be able to rank up if matchmaking doesn’t find you decent players to play with and against.
> > CSR is trash and doesnt work or make any sense. You get matched with everyone, no matter how high or low his CSR is.
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> CSR works fine; it’s matchmaking that’s messed up. Of course you won’t be able to rank up if matchmaking doesn’t find you decent players to play with and against.
No its not.
I was CSR 44 in SWAT, then I played 3 games and won all 3 of them. 2 Times I was the best player with like 30 kills and of course I was positive every game.
Now I am CSR 41 in SWAT, I ranked down for winning every game as the best player.
In the Global Champion Playlist I was getting my 50 by being second place in 1 game.
I also ranked down in Team Throwdown which is really hard for winning and staying positive.
I am also stuck on 43 in legendary slayer after winning 200 games and losing 5.
It doesnt work, its like saying that bananas are blue.
> I was CSR 44 in SWAT, then I played 3 games and won all 3 of them. 2 Times I was the best player with like 30 kills and of course I was positive every game.
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> Now I am CSR 41 in SWAT, I ranked down for winning every game as the best player.
> In the Global Champion Playlist I was getting my 50 by being second place in 1 game.
These are the matches that caused you to rank down (I can tell by comparing the “CSR This Game” to the previous and subsequent SWAT games). As you can see, you were beaten in score by players whose CSR was way below yours. Granted, your K/D spread may have been better in the second match, and I agree this is a flaw of the system, but I just want to point out that there was a science to the downrank and the game doesn’t just arbitrarily assign numbers to players.
Of course your CSR will fluctuate by a few points over time. It’s relative to the skills of other players, and other players’ skills change. I bet that if you play a few more SWAT games, your CSR will start to climb again. The same happened in Halo 2 and Halo 3. Any 1-50 ranking system is going to have flaws, regardless of how you calculate it.
Also keep in mind that CSR is always a game behind. I cannot think of any logical or technical reason for this, so I think that that’s dumb.
This topic is more about how players are matched with each other than how players are ranked. Though matchmaking uses CSR to match players, the two are separate systems and handle different tasks. The issue with players not getting matched with other players of like skill is matchmaking’s fault for not making good skill matches, not CSR’s for not rating skill accurately.
Its funny because I think Halo 4 is FULL of bad players, but also MANY great players as well. I have a similar problem as well. For some reason I get teamed up with a lot of “new” or unskilled players while the other team is full of MUCH better players judging by their K/D. I don’t know if it is bad luck or if CSR just doesn’t work like it should because I have above 40 in both Big-team and Infinity slayer but for some reason my teammates always need a babysitter to let them know when they are about to screw up. Like I have said before in recent post I really don’t mind helping “noobs” play better but when they just die and insta-spawn just to do it all over again through the whole game without even trying to coordinate then we have a problem. I really think 343i needs to try and fix CSR matching, because its not working like its supposed to and I miss having those neck and neck games like back in te Halo 3 days.
I joined in a CTF game with randoms against TTL(tied the leader, great players and sportsmanship) and it was CTF on BTB skirmish. they had map control, running a solid hog and a banshee. We came back and won.
But id say you can expect that in most bigger playlists if you play alone. I seem to get a good mix of good players and bad players in skirmish.
im down for some skirmish, add me. I started like a week ago and now im sucked to it more and more.
This isn’t with just big team objective it’s with almost all game modes just look at my recent big team battle game. It’s simply CSR being useless and doing nothing. Probably because the population is so low it’s hard to find people your skill level.
> Its funny because I think Halo 4 is FULL of bad players, but also MANY great players as well. I have a similar problem as well. For some reason I get teamed up with a lot of “new” or unskilled players while the other team is full of MUCH better players judging by their K/D. I don’t know if it is bad luck or if CSR just doesn’t work like it should because I have above 40 in both Big-team and Infinity slayer but for some reason my teammates always need a babysitter to let them know when they are about to screw up. Like I have said before in recent post I really don’t mind helping “noobs” play better but when they just die and insta-spawn just to do it all over again through the whole game without even trying to coordinate then we have a problem. I really think 343i needs to try and fix CSR matching, because its not working like its supposed to and I miss having those neck and neck games like back in te Halo 3 days.
I must agree with ThatSpartanDude. I’m just about to the point to give up on Big Team and focus on something else.
I’ll have three or four matches where I get teamed with semi-skilled players where everyone is doing their part and it’s very enjoyable. Then I have those matches where half the team is shooting each other and acting like idiots and everyone else is running for their lives trying to battle through horrible odds all game because of these morons.
That’s why I say all new players should be required to go through some kind of Academy playlist. Instructors would all be CSR 30 or above and none of the time spent in the Academy would count against their CSR. However, they would receive special awards for their service for training new Halo recruits. Perhaps a new emblem to denote their status as an Instructor in the Academy to be shown in game in every playlist they participate in outside the Academy.
I think it would benefit game play as a whole and make everyone’s experience more enjoyable and at least have more structured players coming into the playlists. Can’t be any worse than what we have now.
> That’s why I say all new players should be required to go through some kind of Academy playlist. Instructors would all be CSR 30 or above and none of the time spent in the Academy would count against their CSR. However, they would receive special awards for their service for training new Halo recruits. Perhaps a new emblem to denote their status as an Instructor in the Academy to be shown in game in every playlist they participate in outside the Academy.
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> I think it would benefit game play as a whole and make everyone’s experience more enjoyable and at least have more structured players coming into the playlists. Can’t be any worse than what we have now.
Not only would that be a big turn-off for new players, it seems pretty darn complex. How would it work?
> That’s why I say all new players should be required to go through some kind of Academy playlist.
Players don’t screw around in vehicles or shoot each other because they’re new. They do it because they have no desire to be competitive at all. They like screwing around and griefing others.
This is the problem that occurs when you match competitive high-CSR players with noncompetitive low-CSR players. I have a lot of problems with Halo 4, but the broken matchmaking system is what drives me to want to leave and never look back.
Dust 514 from CCP Games requires all new players to go through an Academy playlist. It acclimates players to the game as a whole as far as weapons, skills required to use weapons, how to acquire skill points and earn in game currency to purchase weapons.
I went a little overboard with the Instructor thing but that system works nicely with Dust 514. Would it work with Halo 4 or 5? Not sure. At least it would keep the new players out of the main playlists and having the Academy as a training tool would not hurt in my opinion. If it drives off players that are going to act like idiots I say so be it.
343i would have to invest the time to create the playlist and at this late stage in the game I’m unsure if they’re willing to invest that much time. Perhaps they could include something like this in Halo 5. My hope is they will.
From what I see the majority of players that are acting stupidly are lower SR ranked players which means they are newer to Halo 4. I’ve been writing these players names down as I see their childish activity and will not play with them again. I have those players listed on an Excel spreadsheet that way I don’t forget.
I don’t get to play as much as I like and want to enjoy it when I do so if I see those players names in the lobby on my team I’ll back out. I just don’t have time to waste with these people anymore and I won’t waste my time anymore. Play as a mature person or quit.
> From what I see the majority of players that are acting stupidly are lower SR ranked players which means they are newer to Halo 4. I’ve been writing these players names down as I see their childish activity and will not play with them again. I have those players listed on an Excel spreadsheet that way I don’t forget.
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> I don’t get to play as much as I like and want to enjoy it when I do so if I see those players names in the lobby on my team I’ll back out. I just don’t have time to waste with these people anymore and I won’t waste my time anymore. Play as a mature person or quit.
I use the Avoid Player option for this very reason, quite a bit. I think that overall it is difficult to find a good, evenly matched game. Due to the low population.
When the LS playlist was up I decided to take some initiative and try and educate myself and others. I would send messages to people who quit asking them why, I would send messages of encouragement to players who did poorly, I would send messages of congratulations to those who did well. I received a mix of good and bad responses.
In the end I decided that I really just needed to chill out a little. I’m not going to change how others play. I am powerless in that arena. I sometimes can’t even control how I play when I get upset about camo or Promethean abusers I turn in a tunnel vision fiend still. My worst habit to break.
However, even after this decision of chilling out I have contemplated watching bad players’ POV and handing out some free tips. Yeah I am not on par with a lot of you guys but I have learned the importance of staying alive. We’ll see. Whenever I think about it I remind myself I’m more than likely playing with a bunch of ten year olds.