To touch on other points:
- Please make Onyx a lot more restricted. One of many issues with the ranking system currently is that it is far too easy to get into the highest ranks. Champion and Onyx should be a rare sight.
- Good explanations re: party matching/restrictions
- XP per playlist would be great and would add another incentive to grind as it did in Halo 3. Potentially adding rewards for reaching X rank in a playlist?
- I urge you to communicate with the team currently in charge of XP payouts for Halo 5 and ask them to add a dramatic increase in XP per game once you reach later ranks (SR140 to SR152).
- Please keep progression ranking and skill ranking separate. Far too many people look back at Halo 3's progression and skill ranking with nostalgia goggles on - there's a reason it was phased out.
- In-game leaderboards are a must. If not, at the very least visible on Halo Waypoint. Currently players have to get all hacky with the API (to my understanding) to get a rough estimate of what position players are.
- I don't think you need to constantly generate new rewards each season. Every couple of seasons maybe but I don't think that's necessary, especially if it's as phoned in as it currently is. The season to season rewards just for completing your placement matches are plain boring and I personally lost interest trying to get them all a year ago. Ideally just a reward for Champion (unlocks Onyx and Diamond reward), reward for Onyx (unlocks Diamond reward) and a reward for Diamond.
- Breakout shouldn't be a playlist, period. In its time as a playlist in Halo 5:
- Released as a ranked playlist in October 2015, population quickly died because it was stale and the meta couldn't ever evolve (just like Walshy told them during the development process as seen on The Sprint).
- Eventually new maps were added to the playlist and it was turned into a social playlist because it likely didn't have enough players and resulted in slow matchmaking times
- Someone decided that instead of reducing this playlist to a rotational one, it needed more resources dedicated to it with a full rework completely removing the uniqueness of Breakout, managing to piss off the current Breakout fans and for some reason making it ranked again.
Breakout should have taken a short time out, brought back in as a rotational social playlist constantly swapping with other playlists like Assault (4v4, please!), Triple Team, Super Fiesta, etc. I bring up what Quinn DelHoyo said when Monitor's Bounty was released - "Halo 5's ranked playlists will be approached and handled more sacredly, and with a higher degree of scrutiny."
Breakout existing as a ranked playlist completely goes against what he said in December. I saw that some underpopulated social playlists got the axe recently (and will be returning as rotational playlists) - this should be the case here. Breakout should return as a rotational playlist which features both old and new Breakout. - Thanks for clarifying leaving and surrender - I've been looking for a source for what 343 are able to detect when a player quits a game and this helps tremendously.