





Every hopper has a list of map-mode combinations (e.g., CTF on Coliseum)

Each combination is assigned a unique number

A combination CAN appear twice or even more in the list. This effectively doubles or triples the weight of that combination

appear twice or even more in the list. This effectively doubles or triples the weight of that combination We track, for each player, the last unique combination number they played, and which hopper it was on.

After we have a group of players ready to play, we pick the “number” least recently played by everyone.

A combination appears twice in the list, so has two different unique numbers. The system doesn’t realize it’s doing the same thing twice. We can improve this for sure.

You join a match already in progress. In this case, the system did not involve you in the decision process – this is the same with or without veto though.

You play a different hopper and then come back to this one, at that point, the system has “forgotten” your last map-mode combination in the hopper. We could also improve this, though it doesn’t feel like as high of a priority.

We like the idea of a forfeit, but we won’t see that in Halo 5. As a rule of thumb, you probably won’t see any changes to Halo 5 that have to alter the UI.

We have to be careful how we balance punishing quitters because most of the time, it’s a one-off, not habitual.

We may add a “soft forfeit”. Basically, you can quit if someone else on your team quit first without a penalty. You would still lose the normal amount of CSR as if you lost the match, to prevent exploits and collusion (see previous posts), but wouldn’t be marked for banning. This accomplishes the same as a Forfeit without the explicit feature. You vote to forfeit by leaving. It would also mean you don’t have to sit around 1v4 waiting for them to kill you 50 times to avoid the higher CSR loss / ban risk.































there are much fewer high-end than low end players so it won’t happen often

when it does happen, you don’t lose much CSR if you lose

you get to observe how the game is played on a higher level

I’ve spoken a few times on veto, but I’ll reiterate again a little, and give more details about how we choose the map and mode.We don’t hate veto, but we currently feel like if we can instead prevent you from playing the same thing twice, that probably solves the majority of complaints that lead to a desire to veto.This is how we currently pick what is played:So here some situations not protected by this method that will cause the same thing twice:It is a lot more efficient for us to decrease how often you see a given combination than it is to implement veto, so we would rather start there and see if that solves the problem most of the time. The biggest complain we see isn’t so much “I just wish I could veto” as it is, “I hate seeing the same thing over and over”We’ve also addressed these topics a few times in past posts, so please go back and read those as I won’t go into as much detail here. Just in summary:There was some back and forth this week on tight vs. loose matchmaking in social. We’ve looked at this quite a bit and trust me when I say we understand the pain on both sides.The above average players likes to come “relax” in Social and not have to try. Which, yes, seems really silly coming from a “fair” point of view, but regardless of how silly it is, that represents a significant portion of the population that consistently stop playing if their matches get too “sweaty”On the other side, the opposite happens to lower end players who just want fair matches. They perform poorly against the upper end and also stop playing.The much larger group in the middle are mostly fine either way, though they unfortunately also bias more towards the “looser” than tight matches. So the “net” desire is for the looser matches.We do still try for a decent amount of time to match tightly in social, but depending on who is searching when you do, it will eventually give up and allow something looser.My personal feeling on this, which I think agrees somewhat with the comments in the thread, is to give a mix of both types of matches. Some really tight, some really loose, which perhaps making the proportion somewhat depend on your skill. We have to be careful with that though because it’s really easy to spike wait times. This approach is on my current list of things to try in the somewhat near future. I would make some matches much tighter than they are today, and some possibly much looser. That way, everyone gets what they want, some of the time, and there’s also a nice variety.These two issues are related. I loosened FFA and Proving Grounds matchmaking because higher end players weren’t matching at all. The result is players who couldn’t play the game at all are now matching in those hoppers, but they are also seeing examples of wide skill spreads --- Plat to Champ, etc., within the same match.At the same time, high end SWAT players are still struggling to find matches, perhaps especially in EU. We could loosen the matchmaking in SWAT which would let some of you find matches.This is a classic matchmaking trade-off. Certain hoppers will struggle to create matches for higher-end players at certain times of the day in certain regions. If we loosen the matchmaking enough to accommodate those players, you will see more wide skill gap matches. So you high end players may start getting matches easily again, but some of those matches will lack competition. At some point the trade-off becomes: “We just don’t have any interesting matches for you right now on this hopper”So the question to you folks also is, “Are you willing to play a non-competitive match if that’s the only one you’re going to get?”Letting higher skilled players match lower will sometimes make those Platinum players sad, but:That said, I do plan to tweak those settings more in the weeks to come.