> Halo 3 was the first Halo game to use Trueskill matchmaking. Every Xbox 360 game uses Trueskill for matchmaking, regardless of whether it is displayed or not. Gears, Call of Duty, Halo 3 and Reach, GTA4… Trueskill. The only exceptions are MMOs that just use Live as a frontend, and EA games which are run on EA’s servers.
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> Even from day 1, the visible TS ranking was a massive improvement over the Halo 2 system. Matchmaking search times stayed fast for much longer, didn’t fall apart when population drops occured, and all 50 ranks were actually used, leading to less lopsided games after your TS had been determined. But it also inherited some issues from Halo 2 and Bungie’s implementation:
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> 1) Halo 3 does not use “pure” Trueskill. They futzed with the math a bit to slow the progression from 1-20 in order to convert it into a hill climbing experience like you were leveling up, and then the system would go from there. They tried to convert an algorithm not intended for RPG leveling up experiences and use it as one.
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> 2) This once again didn’t help stop the confusion that your TS rank is a tool to get you into close games and not an RPG level that you deserve to eventually reach 50 with.
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> 3) People did not understand that all 50 meant is that you were highly likely to beat anyone of the other 49 ranks in a one versus one scenario. 50 did not equal a certain K/D ratio, win/loss record, or other tangible numbers - it’s all relative to the rest of the userbase. If the highest skilled player in Halo 3 was as good as a Halo 3 15 is right now and everyone was “worse” than him, then he’d be a 50 and everyone else would follow suit.
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> This is especially true since it was used in multiple, separate playlists with different gametypes and setups. A 50 in Team Slayer didn’t mean much in Team Objective, nor did a 50 Squad Battle mean anything for MLG, as all the playlists had separate TS (including social playlists, who just hid your TS level in them and turned off strict searching). But it also led to people ‘earning’ a 50 in a playlist and then never touching it again for fear of ‘losing their 50’, even though their service record was always going to permanently show them as a 50 in the lobby. This led to population bleedout at the higher ranks of most playlists.
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> Enter the tightly interwoven relationship between Military Rank and Trueskill Rank, and people were punished by the rest of the playerbase for not focusing on a single playlist and grinding out a rank. You may remember idiots mocking people for being “a gold bar” because “they don’t get NEXTRANK_”, even if the mocker only had a 50 in Lone Wolves and the Force Colonel had a 44 in every ranked playlist.
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> Due to this social pressure and enterprising modders and cheaters, the massive Halo 3 black market formed. In Halo 2, modders mostly cheated to be -Yoinks!-. With the advent of MS point and Gold time cards that could be easily purchased, cheating became a capitalist system. The following services were available at the height of Halo 3:
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> - Boosting to 50 (Usually cost you ~1600MSP)
> - Modding a screenshot (~800MSP)
> - Modding a film for you to show you wearing Recon or having a flaming helmet (1600MSP)
> - Modding a film so that the names of the other intentionally bad playing players were replaced with known MLG pros or high profile community members, so it looked like you “donged” on Bungie or an MLG pro team (1600-2100msp)
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> Of course, since the later ones eventually resulted in a file share ban, the 50 boosting market EXPLODED.
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> It was fairly simple, and anyone could do it - set everyone to a language that didn’t have many players, combined with some network manipulation, and you could get a gamertag a 50 in about 30 games. Since all Trueskill looked for was who won a game and who lost, the boostee didn’t even have to play the game - the system didn’t care if they didn’t kill anyone, they just cared that they were on the winning team. Even in non-boosting, this resulted in easily carrying people to a higher desired rank.
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> At the apex of the 50 boosting frenzy and center stage to it’s activity was Mythic Brawl. People would go in with a new gamertag, boost or simply get a 50 fast, and then spam everyone they just played with an offer of 1600MSP for the account. I remember playing Mythic Brawl once and getting no less than 20 of these messages in one night. They’d openly advertise their modding or boosting services into their bio as well, which I always reported. But as soon as that account would be banned or have the bio text be replaced with CODE OF CONDUCT, they’d just make another account and do it again. They just had to put in an initial investment of 6$ for one month of gold, and sell the account for 20 to 50$ worth of MS Points or Gold time. It was a very lucrative business for all involved.
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> Players had no reason to stick to using one gamertag. People complained of being “rank locked”, even after I pointed out that they were a 29 and couldn’t get to 30 because they were only beating 24s and losing to 32s. Solution? Start a new gamertag and try to reach a higher rank before Bungie’s modified Trueskill caught up to you and started putting you in games much closer to your skill level. It devalued the legitimately high ranked players, who always had an eye of suspicion put on them. The boosters were also often -Yoinks!- and gave higher ranked players a reputation of being foul mouthed idiots who didn’t help anyone.
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> Fans who continued to play and pay for DLC were punished by the community for playing social playlists and not increasing their TS so that they could keep moving up in military rank. Bungie did make an attempt to fix this with the TU2 of Halo 3, which added per-playlist military ranks that ignored your TS for that playlist. This made the military rank closer to the original intention, which was a marker of how long that player had been playing and not how good they were (that was the purpose of the 1-50 rank NEXT to the Military rank). For all intents and purposes, the ranking up in matchmaking for most people was now endless.
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> You now constantly got nice feedback for winning in the post game lobby of that shiny new white rank slamming into the screen. It made sticking to one account have more justification, but people still ran alts and still boosted because they thought they ‘deserved’ that 50 TS rank. Oh, and of course the EXP boosters that thought someone having 800,000 EXP was legitimate and yes, I totally believe that you got all that 50,000 EXP in Grifball without boosting, ever.
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> But you’re probably going to ask me, “Hey, Fyrewulff. People boosting in a Grifball lobby doesn’t hurt anyone! Why do you care?”. And my answer is, EXP boosting didn’t really hurt me, or anyone really. It was the people boosting to that shiny 50 rank and then going into Rumble Pit and bragging to others that they were a 50. The rampant host booting (Cheaters had now upgraded to controlling and charging for the use of botnets to saturate opponents internet connections with) made playing ranked unfun. Cruising through the SWAT ranks and getting stonewalled at 38 because I was repeatedly sent into black screen and disconnected and then losing rank from that left a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn’t that I lost the game that made me mad, it was the way it went down.