Would love to hear your thoughts, thanks again for all the attention you have given this thread.
Hey, thanks for that example!
So the data is not biased towards good players. In fact, the by far more popular majority case most likely swamps how CTF is played at the high end. Most players probably do what you saw, just run around slaying and now and then get lucky and score.
One story we could use to explain the counter-intuitive trend that we see in the data is that, like in your match's example, a lot of players run around and slay, on both teams. If that's the case, then, on average, the teams that slay well are more likely to get lucky and score, thus winning. So it comes back to slaying again, and that slaying creating more opportunities to get lucky and score. That appears to be how Halo CTF has been played by the "average" player for many years based on data from severla past Halos.
Notice I said "average", clearly NOT how it's "meant" to be played nor how it is played at the high end. But, nonetheless, how the large majority of millions of players have been experiencing it, and therefore we have to consider how things actually happen vs. how a much smaller group of folks thinks they "should" happen. If we ignore this, we run the risk of designing systems that alienate the majority with no benefit. It would be a bit unfair to expect solo players without mics to play the way an organized team does. But we could at least make them aware that there's a better way.
As you get towards the high end, it probably flips and changes into coordination being key, but that is probably washed out in the millions of games where it really is just random luck favoring the slaying team since they're more likely to be alive and able to grab a flag when they can.
Ideally, we'd have a system that supported that game play, but also showed that there's a "better" way. A system that didn't neglect the mainstream folks and called out the players that really do cause wins because of this, but also show players that there's a level above that type of play, which is how you personally are playing.
My current working idea is something like this:
- Personal Rank that moves whenever you do not play in a full party. This is going to be biased towards solo performance, even at the expense of the outliers. This is necessary to reward the play experience of by far most of our players. It's also allows players who don't have mics or can't get into parties to still feel like they "shine" BUT the personal Rank would, in theory, not be featured as prominently in the UI. Just enough to find it.
- Team Rank that is attached to specific full parties that only moves when you play with that specific party. This one would be purely win- and skill-based. Only goes up on a win, down on a loss, proportional to match difficulty. Teams could be named, and would be prominently featured in the UI, ideally with in-game leaderboards. Maybe even be the only place we allow Champions.
The goal is to support and how our mainstream solo folks are actually playing the game, while podiuming the aspiration to play as the organized team.
This stuff is always in flux though, I'm just sharing where my current head is.
