Syxnrgy wrote: ZaedynFel wrote: Removing Team Skirmish As you may have already read, we are removing Team Skirmish this Thursday. We're doing this for a few reasons, among them:

We have an overall goal to increase matchmaking quality across all lists.

Team Skirmish overlapped significantly with Team Arena and to a lesser extent, HCS, drawing players away from those playlists, causing lower quality across all 3 lists.

Of the three playlists, Team Skirmish was the least “healthy” in population and match quality.

Team Skirmish wasn’t that “Social”, and still “sweaty” in feel, despite being called “Social,” so it wasn’t really serving enough of a purpose in that position. We’ll be monitoring the health of HCS and Team Arena after the change to see if it had the intended benefit.

We understand that Team Skirmish did have some variety that both Team Arena and HCS lacked, and so we are also discussing ways to increase variety in Team Arena. We don’t have additional details on that yet though. 343 Industries need to start sifting and diluting the population into a few playlists... basically just remove needless playlists that occupy similar roles. They also need to add a vetoing system to vote on the maps/gametypes otherwise players will just constantly "manual-veto" via dashboarding and restarting their games until they get a good mode.



Changes should be:

Move Team Arena from Ranked to Social. Add Breakout Arena and Assault/Oddball to this new Playlist;

- the Halo Championship Series playlist already occupies the role that Team Arena had in the RANKED section. If players/teams want to rank than do it based off the competitive rulings (ie HCS), players can otherwise solo que in social competitive.

- Add Breakout Arena into Team Arena.

- Add Slayer Maps into Team Arena.

- the Halo Championship Series playlist already occupies the role that Team Arena had in the RANKED section. If players/teams want to rank than do it based off the competitive rulings (ie HCS), players can otherwise solo que in social competitive. - Add Breakout Arena into Team Arena. - Add Slayer Maps into Team Arena. Remove Team Slayer and Breakout from Ranked;

Remove Team Action Sack from Social;

- We have a Customs Game Browser where players can actively search for random customs shenanigans no need to hold matchmaking for this anymore. The new ARENA section should look like this:



RANKED HCS Playlist

Doubles

FFA

Snipers* SOCIAL Team Objective (Team Arena, Breakout Arena, Assault/Oddball)

Big Team Battle

Infection

Mythic Shotty Snipers* * Means that the playlist is rotational.

Josh has already said either in this thread or a previous one (or maybe on Twitter, I don't remember for sure) that Team Slayer is the healthiest playlist when it comes to population and match quality, so why would they remove it? I understand that a fewer selection of playlists might force players to play playlists with a lower population, but when you remove playlists that have been a part of the Halo franchise since at least Halo 3 (ie SWAT) won't solve anything and will most likely just tick players off since there are those who play those playlists exclusively. Not everyone enjoys objective gametypes and just wants to play Slayer, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to obtain a rank in that playlist. As far as moving them to social, for some of us, that's basically the same thing as removing them completely since I'm sure I can't be the only person who doesn't enjoy Social and only plays Ranked. I mean, that's why I don't ever play MCC (aside from it still being broken). I hopped on the other night thinking it'd be refreshing to play some older Halos and was quickly reminded why I never play, all of my favorite playlists were removed from ranked and made social (Snipers, SWAT, and Team Slayer especially). I enjoy having something like a rank to work toward rather than wasting time playing Social. I personally enjoy most of the current ranked playlists, so I personally wouldn't stop playing the game completely if one was removed or made Social, but some players only play SWAT, Team Slayer, Breakout, whatever playlist is their favorite, and wouldn't simply find another playlist, they'd quit the game completely. Driving away what little population we have left doesn't seem like the greatest idea.