A poll was put up on HaloWaypoint regarding how the ranking/skill system should work in Halo 4. Their were 4 choices:

• Reach’s Arena
• BPR (updated from Reach)
• Reach’s Progression System
• Other

With the choices given for the poll, I had to go with “Other.”

It can’t really be any of the other three. Some might argue for BPR, but that can be so easily manipulated. If BPR is for each specific playlist, well not so much, but it still has flaws.

If BPR is to measure your skill and wins are considered, then take this example:

Griffball…people go into that playlist all the time and go for kills rather than wins. Spawn killing in GB is quite rampant and likely will stay that way for most gamers. Winning really means nothing in GB. Only time it does is if you need to get so many wins per day. Then you can play some games of Griff and get it over with quickly. Otherwise, you kill.

Your BPR will suffer because you’re not winning. Yet, it’s very likely if you tried to win, you would. So artificially keeping your BPR down in one playlist like this makes you look not as skilled so that you can be matched up against others with similar BPRs who may or may not manipulate the system. If their BPR is a measure of their trueskill and yours is kept artificially at the lower rate, then in regular matchmaking you are likely to trounce the opposing team.

Again though, this is only if BPR is taken into account as a whole, rather than per playlist.

Personally, I don’t want to see a 1-50. For those who aren’t as skilled, they’ll never be able to attain that rank. Or let’s take for example what happened a lot in Halo 3. One person on your team is a 50 while the rest of you are in your 40s. That matchmaking system invariably matched us the team with one 50 against a whole team of 50s. Is that fair? Hardly. I really started HATING Halo 3 matchmaking system the last 9 months or so because of this and looked to play other games. If that same system is in play for Halo 4, a lot of people are going to get tired of it quick and quit playing the game. That’s not something 343 wants.

Now take Reach’s rank (not arena). That is a measure mostly of how many games a person has played, to a point. No matter what, you’re still going to have to put in many hours to hit Inheritor. So hopefully you’ve gained some skill in that time. However, just because someone is an Inheritor, it does not automatically mean they are good.

I’ve seen lately how people are taking advantage of the custom challenges and earning upwards of 200K credits per day. Lots of repetitive campaign play that doesn’t require much skill. Those folks while technically are using the tools provided are still manipulating them to their advantage.

What would I want to see for rank? Nothing. That is to say, the other team should NOT be able to see your rank, nor you theirs. Trueskill is matched up behind the scenes. I’d prefer that a team’s total number of skill be averaged, then matched up with another team of like averaged numbers within a small tolerance.

For example a team of 4 that has the trueskill ranks of 30,35,40,45 would have a total of 150/4=37.5 So they would be matched up against a team that’s trueskill average is close to 37.5, let’s say +/- 5 though that could be tailored as the ranks get higher up.

Now, to prevent people from creating new accounts to manipulate this, number of games and kills per game would also be taken into account. So someone who created a new account and has amazing numbers would have a trueskill that would be high even though their amount of games do not seem to reflect that.

How many times have you seen restarters come in with hugely impressive K/Ds yet their skill is low (at least to start)? It is frustrating to say the least. It’s yet another way people manipulate the system. Trueskill should go up much faster when people use second accounts and have high K/Ds and not be dependent on number of games played. Then those same accounts would be forced to play against highly skilled players.

Of course the problem becomes people selling those accounts. But if those accounts are low in games but high in skill, then sold off to some noob who then gets thrashed repeatedly, a system not unlike Reach’s where you get credit banned could be in place. Yes, that means the noob gets punished for paying for an account such as this and then not playing up to that skill level. However, if enough of that happens, then it would hopefully stop noobs from buying those accounts. If so then the market for those high skill accounts would dry up and the restarters would make money off of them and just have to play legitimately.

Of course their would be more parameters than what I posted and certainly complex algorithms. Hopefully though you get the gist of what I’m getting at.