Of course it’s to do with the HCS crowd. There is no good why they couldn’t just add HCS and non-HCS ranked playlists but instead they forced it on all of us regardless of if what we want or not. Good teams would exist regardless of it radar or not. If people really want a high rank they would find a group of friends to play regularly with.
I would have thought that inherently that ranked play and e-sports kind of go hand in hand?
Surely the “HCS crowd” would tend to focus and adopt game strategies that promote the better team players.
Or have I missed something?
As I said - my own personal preference would be to have a radar - but I can see how taking it away and forcing teams to communicate / use markers creates a significant skill gap that allows the better teams to shine.
No. Taking stuff away so it only caters to specific people is not “hand in hand”. People have difference preferences on ranked. Just like some people hate using power weapons in Infection since some of us prefer the mode to just be shotgun and sword.
No HCS promotes their version of what they want. Better team work can exist with any game due to communication. If people want this it’s fine but the problem there is no option to choose the non-HCS version so I can play it the way I want instead.
Too bad no game that uses it can retain players in the same way games using true skill 1 did.
Well, in that case we also better go back to hidden levels and rank locking.
Yay. I’m a ‘50’. Who wants to buy my account.
What’s better?
A game that retains players and is beloved by its community, but people sell accounts with a fake internet rating.
Or
A game that loses 95%+ of its players and nobody cares about their fake internet rating, but the developers get to make GDC talks about how great their rating system is at retaining players.
You and 343 seem to think option 2 is clearly superior.
Clown world. 
2 Likes
I would hope that even most clowns can grasp the difference between correlation and causality.
But maybe not.
O man you must work for 343. The gaslighting is real.
You are aware that a causal relationship between TrueSkill 2 and player retention is the developer’s own argument for why it’s good, right? The argument is literally “this system is in the game because it increases player retention”.
Shame no game using it can retain players. Wonder why?
5 Likes
They don’t care even if you put in a ticket directly they just give you a bunch of nonsense
It’s not Infinite related but with MCC I got a stupid “Active User Signed Out” issue that literally makes it I can’t play the game with my main account, thankfully I had a backup with some stuff unlocked for when my nephews popped over so I can at least play it that way. I put in a support ticket and I just got a generalized response saying “We don’t have a workaround at this time”.
This has been happening for about 2-3 weeks now, and for what I read this has been an issue for some players since Reach launched on PC in 2019. So they’ve been aware of this for 3 years and still don’t have a workaround/fix? Like really? The only thing I’ve been able to find to maybe fix the issue I haven’t been able to try yet is literally wait 3-4 months IF the issue even fixes itself as every other option I found doesn’t work.
The amount of communication they gave when updating MCC and even leading up to Infinite was pretty impressive whether it was good or bad news (ie. delaying forge, campaign co-op, etc.), but since Infinites launch it’s like they just did a 180 with their customer service and communication which honestly just really bugs me, especially since I’m literally locked out of the one I play the most out of the main 3 games (MCC, Halo 5 and Infinite)
I wound up just buying MCC & Infinite on Steam because of this problem with the gamepass app (was going to do it anyway because of Steam Deck). I eventually got it fixed (don’t remember what I wound up doing), but for about two weeks I just could not play anything because one of my kids accounts got signed into my PC along with mine.
And I agree, their support has gone from perfectly acceptable pre-Infinite to apparently nonexistent. I wonder if they’re going to go the DICE route and start openly harassing and antagonizing their community.
I believe the argument was that SBMM in Social increased player retention.
Which makes sense. And was never really about TrueSkill itself.
I wish.
The thing I find really interesting is that we could be arguing a lot of things about the ranking system; ELO or no. Which type of ELO. Better ways of expressing the CSR. The utility of seasonal resets, etc.
But the hill you want to dig your trench upon is that TrueSkill is better than TrueSkill2.
We don’t have a lot of concrete data on these implementations. But we do have a 24 page discussion paper from MS research which very clearly looks at how/why TrueSkill2 improves it’s speed and accuracy over TrueSkill.
I admit it’s using maths I don’t understand as well as I should. But there is no shame in that.
Going back to TrueSkill1 would be insane.
The hill I will dig my trench upon is that TrueSkill 2 sucks and does not do what the devs claim - increase player retention.
We have 2 halo games and at least 1 gears game that show that.
2 Likes
What the game NEEDED was another delay for a year.