Hey folks! It’s great to be back here at 343. Like I said, I’d like to try and give regular updates, even if some are small. This update will be a bit longer than others though, since it’s my first and I have catching up to do.
I haven’t been back long enough to be fully up to speed, but I’ll try and address some of what I’ve heard so far, and we can continue the chat from there.
Playing Solo vs. Parties
We’ve definitely heard the community on this one, and have been thinking about this for some time. We need solutions that increase fairness without making players avoid playing with their friends. We’ve heard the following suggestions from the community, which are also in line with what we’ve spoken about internally:
Smurfing (sometimes to boost)
We’ve heard your pain on this issue as well, and have also been discussing ways to fix it. We’ve observed higher skilled players getting friends to re-roll and party with them for easier matches. We’ve also observed players re-rolling solo to get easier matches.
Here are the solutions we’ve heard and some feedback I have on them:
Starting at the Bottom
We’ve heard some suggestions for having a ranking system that starts at the bottom and goes up instead of having placement matches. First off, I do think it’s important to have a fun progression system. Our current preference is to separate the progression and ranking systems so both can do what they do best without being restricted by the other system. The goal of a progression system is to make you feel like you’re “progressing,” calling out milestones in your personal development. The goals of a ranking system are to give feedback in actual skill development, and make sure the matchmaking feels fair. These goals can be conflicting, so we like to avoid having them in the same system.
For example, if a ranking system starts at the bottom, you end up with several problems. For one, the true Bronze players get owned all day long by every player starting off in the system each season. This leads the Bronze players to stop playing and the ladder collapses. You can try and fix this by matchmaking on MMR (known actual skill) instead of CSR, but then the PGCR gets really confusing because there will be players of all CSR levels in every match. This makes the ranks lose meaning because apparently, even though you’re a Platinum player, you play with lots of Silver and Gold players who are just as good as you. The ranks lose meaning because at any given time, a given rank will have players of all kinds of skill levels that are making their way through the system. My personal ideal is that a Gold player can clearly feel how much better they are than a Silver player if they play. But if we start at the bottom, that Silver player could actually be an Onyx player that destroys the Gold player. It gets confusing.
I am happy to pass on progression concerns to our progression team, and get feedback from them. I did like the suggestion of some kind of XP per playlist, but the progression folks may be cooking up something better.
(1 / 2)
I haven’t been back long enough to be fully up to speed, but I’ll try and address some of what I’ve heard so far, and we can continue the chat from there.
Playing Solo vs. Parties
We’ve definitely heard the community on this one, and have been thinking about this for some time. We need solutions that increase fairness without making players avoid playing with their friends. We’ve heard the following suggestions from the community, which are also in line with what we’ve spoken about internally:
- Party restrictions (classic Halo style): We’ve discussed preventing solo players or 2-player parties from playing against a team of 3 or 4. A related approach is a separate solo/duo queue. Both have wait time implications for players in larger parties, so we would need to see make sure there are enough 3- and 4-player parties of close enough skill looking for matches at the same time. This is a fairly simple and understandable solution if the population supports it.
- Better Skill Estimation: We can improve our skill model to know that parties play better than solo players, and matchmake accordingly. So when you do face organized parties, you’re so much better than them individually, that you can still win half the time. For example, we match a party of four Gold players against four Platinum solo players. I’ve seen this approach result in even matches in the other titles. The major upside is most parties don’t have longer wait times. The downside is it doesn’t fix the feeling that when you do lose to a party, it wasn’t fair---even if it really was fair.
- Better CSR for Individual Performance: This is somewhat related. CSR gains / losses could be adjusted to account for individual performances when you aren’t in a full party. So if you carry your team but lose to an organize party, your CSR won’t go down as much, or may even go up instead. The downside is it introduces a bit of competition between people on the same team, which may result in bad behavior. But you could argue that when you are playing solo, you can’t guarantee you’ll have good teammates anyways, so we should let you enjoy the game still.
Smurfing (sometimes to boost)
We’ve heard your pain on this issue as well, and have also been discussing ways to fix it. We’ve observed higher skilled players getting friends to re-roll and party with them for easier matches. We’ve also observed players re-rolling solo to get easier matches.
Here are the solutions we’ve heard and some feedback I have on them:
- Require a minimum SR: We’ve also heard this suggestion internally. If we make the barrier to enter ranked high enough, it won’t be worth re-rolling anymore. Concerns:
- It puts up barriers to ranked play up for legitimate players, which we’ve never done in Halo before.
- Barriers decrease population, which increases wait times
- There are many ways to earn SR outside of Arena, so we’d be chasing the right SR level.
- Don’t allow parties with a large gap: We could have a clear rule like, parties can have a skill gap within them of at most one division. My main concerns with it outside of that are:
- It adds a new barrier to playing with friends that Halo has never had before
- That barrier can result in less people playing and higher wait times for everyone
- It doesn’t solve the solo smurfing problem
- It doesn’t help at all in social since there are no visible ranks.
- Matchmake parties above the average MMR: This is a softer version of the last solution. We matchmake parties closer to the max skill in the party, rather than the average. The upside is it’s less likely to have a lopsided party owning worse players. This still doesn’t solve the problem of solo players smurfing though, and when we’re wrong and you truly are a bad player trying to play with your skilled friends (this is me), it’s an even worse experience than now. We could argue it’s always a bad experience playing with a skill gap, and that ranked just isn’t the place for that. I do like softer solutions like this that don’t potentially slow matchmaking.
- Find skill and rank on the smurfs faster: We can actually find player skills much faster than we are today. We can easily detect a smurf and immediately match them against where they belong. Assuming this is doable, it is probably my personal favorite solution because the problem silently goes away without matchmaking implications or kludges. Maybe too silently though?
Starting at the Bottom
We’ve heard some suggestions for having a ranking system that starts at the bottom and goes up instead of having placement matches. First off, I do think it’s important to have a fun progression system. Our current preference is to separate the progression and ranking systems so both can do what they do best without being restricted by the other system. The goal of a progression system is to make you feel like you’re “progressing,” calling out milestones in your personal development. The goals of a ranking system are to give feedback in actual skill development, and make sure the matchmaking feels fair. These goals can be conflicting, so we like to avoid having them in the same system.
For example, if a ranking system starts at the bottom, you end up with several problems. For one, the true Bronze players get owned all day long by every player starting off in the system each season. This leads the Bronze players to stop playing and the ladder collapses. You can try and fix this by matchmaking on MMR (known actual skill) instead of CSR, but then the PGCR gets really confusing because there will be players of all CSR levels in every match. This makes the ranks lose meaning because apparently, even though you’re a Platinum player, you play with lots of Silver and Gold players who are just as good as you. The ranks lose meaning because at any given time, a given rank will have players of all kinds of skill levels that are making their way through the system. My personal ideal is that a Gold player can clearly feel how much better they are than a Silver player if they play. But if we start at the bottom, that Silver player could actually be an Onyx player that destroys the Gold player. It gets confusing.
I am happy to pass on progression concerns to our progression team, and get feedback from them. I did like the suggestion of some kind of XP per playlist, but the progression folks may be cooking up something better.
(1 / 2)
