





Noise

Imperfections in the model

Great, new players that the system is slow to adapt to because of noise

Parties not handled efficiently yet

A lack of competition during the time that the player is searching. Sometimes intentional on the part of the player, combined with a need to not make players wait forever







If a solo only playlist is 100% successful and all solo players go to the solo playlist, then parties of 3 can no longer play the game. At all . In addition, all other party sizes wait much much longer for a match because there would be way less people to play.

. In addition, all other party sizes wait much much longer for a match because there would be way less people to play. If a solo playlist is less than 100% successful, then everyone suffers and waits longer than before because now there are less people in both playlists.













It might have overestimated you and we prefer you go up rather than down if it is wrong.

We want you to “prove” you deserve the expect CSR. Just like in, e.g., NCAA sports. The ranking systems can all say a team is #1, but they still have to win the tournament, or win the bowl, to be crowned. The system may expect you to be Diamond, but wants you to first play like one for several games in the season to earn it.

You are brand new and the system hasn’t seen enough past history to believe you are Onyx yet. This also means you probably went 10-0 vs. mostly Gold and and Platinum players, which isn't convincing enough to make you Onyx.

You have an established history already, and the system is trusting that history over your recent performance

In addition, if you have a past history of being, e.g., Silver, your 10 matches will be mostly against Silver, and 10-0 vs. Silver does not make you Onyx.

Competitive players play social to relax. They expect looser matches so they don’t have to try as hard.

Casual players (especially lower-skilled ones) get the opposite experience. They get owned in Social, and have the impression that Ranked is the only fair place for them. That, or they just stop playing the game because they may think Ranked is going to be even worse.

When Casuals get driven to Ranked, this ironically annoys competitive players who sometimes get “casuals” on their teams.

























No. Other than the fact that your friends will have pretty rough games because it will still match you towards the middle. So if you’re Onyx and your friends are Gold, your friends will be getting stomped by Diamonds.This is understandable. Unfortunately, if enough people do this, then it becomes a reinforcing problem. There aren’t enough people in Onyx because they’re all smurfing, which causes more to smurf.We’re working to mitigate this so high-ranked players can match more consistently, so stay tuned.No, that’s normal in all the best matchmaking systems because of:If you read back into previous posts I talk about how we are planning to address this. We are first going to try a more efficient approach than hard cut-offs because those hurt the population. We’re developing a system that knows how much better a party is than a non-party, and will matchmaking accordingly. If the only fair opponent is another party, it will do that.A solo queue would be a bad idea at this point because:My experience with solo only queues in FPS is they cause more harm than good.On the other hand, I think we can give more fair matches than we do today to solo players without needing a separate playlist, but it’s going to take a bit of time to implement. I will keep you posted. The same system that will help with party matching will also help with smurfs, so those solutions will come together in roughly the same time frame.After placement matches, we start your CSR behind your expected CSR (MMR) because:In previous seasons, CSR started about 30-50 games behind expected. This season it is about half that (15-25 games), so it should take less time to “prove” you deserve what MMR expected of you. In CSR and MMR terms, CSR was set 200 rating behind your MMR after placement. Now it is 100. So a true 1650 Onyx player will start at 1550, for example. A true 1550 Onyx player will start in Diamond 6.For Onyx, we haven’t changed the CSR boundary, but instead we made a higher MMR map to 1500. After placement, some players will be farther from Onyx than they used to be, and probably won’t get there. Those that still deserve Onyx after this change should have no problem getting there within roughly 15-25 games.There was some confusion around just how high CSR can be out of placement. In general, it is always 100 back from your MMR. This means you can indeed place into Onyx.The exception is high-Onyx players will never place higher than Onyx 1700, and you need at least 1800 to be Champion. This was to prevent people from getting Champion by just starting out earlier in the season than everyone else. This is also partly how we caught the problem with this season's first reset. People were Champ right out of placement.You may wonder why you can go 10-0 in placement and not get into Onyx. This is because either:In general, I agree withphilosophy on social vs. ranked. That said, there’s this funny paradox that occurs between Ranked and Social which I’ve come to accept over the years:This is a tricky problem to solve. I personally think Social should have a mix of tight and loose matches, treating the worst Casuals carefully so as not to lose them and keep the population healthy. Even Ranked could benefit from the occasional looser match to add to the variety.Some of the community have suggested we increase the Social offerings to get casuals out of Ranked, but I don’t think Casuals are in Ranked because of a lack of offerings. I think they’re there because the perception is that’s where fair matches are.So, ironically, Social ends up being where the competitive players go to chill and play mostly vs. each other, and Ranked ends up being where Casuals go almost all the time for more fair matches, and Ranked players go when they want to “lean forward”A few more suggestions were given on how to communicate the matchmaking choice vs. the visible CSR. We’re listening to those, and looking at a number of ways to make this more clear, but we won’t see this in Halo 5.I think it would be cool to tell players their exact performance after a match in CSR terms. For example, a Gold player might see “even though you’re Gold, you just played like a Diamond player, so don’t be surprised if you see Diamond opponents! Keep it up and you’ll get to Diamond!” Stuff like that.A few of you have asked about having some set of daily goals to hit in the form of “quests”. Halo 4 had this in the form of rotating Challenges. We also like this feature and would love to improve on it even further, though we won’t be seeing it in Halo 5.