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Today, Halo 5 would try to find any group with an average of 4000. Including 4 solo players with a skill of 4000 each.

But we believe that group of solo 4000-players would get destroyed by Fireteam A.

Instead of telling the matchmaker Fireteam A is 4000, tell the matchmaker Fireteam A is 4500. Remember 4175 would be a 1 in 100 chance, so 4500 is a huge gap.

Now the matchmaker will not consider a 4500 vs. a 4000. It will look for 4 solo 4500 players or another full fireteam where the individual players are 4000.

But there ARE no 4500 solo players, they don't exist. The only way for an even match would be another 4000-rated full Fireteam with that +500 boost (exactly like party restrictions).

So the system makes the 4500 team wait a long time because there aren't any 4500s

We could allow the Fireteam to eventually match the 4000-rated solos.

4000-rated Fireteam A matchmakes

matchmaker looks for another 4000-rated Fireteam, but can't find any

matchmaker finally lets Fireteam A play vs. 4000-rated solos

3000-rated Fireteam searches for either another 3000-rated Firetam OR 4 solo 3500s. A team of four solo 3500s will be more than good enough to compete with a 3000-rated team. Maybe too good.

























We’ve heard some concerns about the integrity of the top of the ladder. We have reconsidered the tuning and decided some players are getting too many points for defeating worse teams, effectively turning ranks at the top of Onyx and Champion into purely a time investment grind. While we do want some minimum time investment to reach your Rank, it’s currently too biased towards quantity of wins rather than quality. We are retuning that to give an appropriate amount of points based on opponent difficulty.In those cases where top Onyx and Champion players cannot find a fair match and are matched against easily defeated opponents, they will not get many points. This is needed to maintain the skill integrity of the top of the ladder. The amount of points you get for defeating a team needs to be proportional to how difficult your opponent is. If your opponent can only beat you 1 in 30 games, then you should only get 1 point for beating them, assuming your current CSR is in the right place. Conversely, if you beat a team that usually beats you 29 out of 30 times, you should get 29 points, and they should lose 29 points. This keeps the system accurate.While the system is adapting to this change, there may be some bumps for the highest-ranked Onyx and Champion players. It will make the end of this season a little more rocky than intended, but will be smoothed out by the beginning of the next season. We intended to wait until the end of the season so as not to affect the current ranks, but this turned out to be the best window for applying the needed change.We also understand the concerns over the size of Onyx. The original intention I had for Onyx was to be only the top 2% or so players. It looks like it may be larger than intended, so I may cut back in the near future. This may mean that most of you that are currently Onyx would drop to Diamond, so I’d like feedback on how you would feel about that. On the one hand, it makes getting to Onyx more rewarding and a clearer indication of Halo mastery. On the other, it feels bad to lose it. One possible option is to only make this more exclusive change for Team Arena.Some of you have expressed ongoing concerns over party restrictions, so I’ll try and explain a bit more on how we can have our party restrictions cake and eat it too by adjusting skill rather than direct restrictions.Most of you would agree that the advantage of being in a 4-player fireteam will overcome any group of 4 solo queuing players at your same skill level. That advantage can be quantified. It's just another skill gap. A skill gap literally translates to "how often will team A beat team B" If team A will win 99 of 100 matches vs. Team B, that's a skill gap of around 175 on the CSR scale (give or take). For any record vs. another team, I can find the skill gap. So if a fireteam always beats a non-fireteam, we can “quantify” always in terms of skill rating, and then require the opponents be THAT much better.Example:This is exactly the same as party restrictions, but more flexible. In the party restriction case you have this:Same exact thing., in the skill version, we gain the following flexibility:If we know that "+500" is the right skill offset to compare a Fireteam to a solo, a 3000 Fireteam vs. solo 3500s results in an even match. I've seen this work on millions of matches in other games. It's doable and worth trying.We know a number of you like the idea of having XP on each playlist, we are also liking the idea internally. But don’t expect this in Halo 5.[edited and removed a paragraph with incorrect information]We’ve heard the desire to have in-game leaderboards. We agree this would be awesome, but this won’t happen in Halo 5. Also, just for a little insight, in-game leaderboards are often a lot harder to integrate into a game than you would expect. Making the data available is often not the bottleneck. Instead, it’s getting the UI / UX design and engineering work done. Even there, the work itself isn’t a huge deal, but the fact that UI/UX designers and engineers are some of the busiest on the team.That said, we do like leaderboards and I won’t forget about them.