I’ll try and keep this short and sweet.
Halo 2/3 had a team ranking system. I bet many of you played Halo 2/3 like I did; with (mostly) the same group of friends. You’d all go in together focused on winning and gaining ranks together as a team. And you’d all be prepared to drop ranks if the team wasn’t performing well.
Halo Reach Arena ranked people based on “individual performance”, and this is where I believe the Reach ranking system was flawed.
When you go in to team games, the focus should be on everyone working together for the win. With every team, there are different roles to be fulfilled. You have main slayers that can usually weild a sniper effectively and dominate the entire map with their presence. Then you have support players that (in my experience) get shots on people, call out weak enemies, time powerups and assist main slayers in map control. Then occasionally you have the sneaky beavers that could completely throw the enemy off balance by flanking and doing damage for the other players to clean up… There are loads of different roles, and players can frequently switch between them. The fact is that on every team, there’s almost always going to be the guy that gets the most kills, the guy that gets the most assists, and then the other guys that generally break even and get a few assists. In a good team, all these players are as valuable as eachother.
In Reach, the emphasis is on getting kills and assists to level up your own rank. This promotes selfish weapon -Yoink!-. This can break down the team dynamic, and make every player feel as though they’re a lone wolf that needs to constantly perform otherwise they’ll be rated lower than the rest of the team. This happened in my experience on Halo Reach. I played Arena with the same group of 3 friends for a few months. As main slayer, every month I was rated Onyx without fail, whereas my team mates were all rated silver/gold. This was obviously frustrating for them, and it certainly didn’t bring the team together. Why were they rated lower? They performed vital roles on the team. They got the same amount of wins overall, yet the game deemed that I was better than them every season. I should add that we were all 50s on Halo 3, because the game ranked us as a whole, not individuals.
I would like to see a hybrid Halo 2/3 ranking system. Everyone on the team should have a stake in eachother’s rank. If the team loses, everyone should be punished. If the team wins, everyone should be rewarded. A good team is greater than the sum of it’s parts. Just because a player performs a different (perhaps less selfish) role on a team, does not mean they should be rated lower.
If you want an individual rank, you should consider playing Lone Wolves or Head to Head. Team games should have team ranks.
). Halo 3’s was fun but those who hadn’t played much saw much more progress and that led to (even myself) making upwards of 5 alternate acccounts just to score 50’s in multiple playlists with ease.