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Halo |OT8| A Salt on the Control Room

Blissful

Neo Member
Trueskill exists in Halo 3 Social and all Reach playlists. Reach's restrictions are just looser than a lot of people would like, including me. In Arena it works the best because it forces everyone to feed the TS blackbox the minimum number of games to figure you out. H3 Social and the rest of Reach get thrown off by guests and so on.

It honestly feels like it doesn't even exist.

At the end of the day, I just want Halo 4 to match me with players on my level.
 

Risen

Member
You need to do your research and actually play the damn playlists before you start defending something that is not there.

Irony... it's there, dripping in your post. Can you find it?

True skill is there, even in social H3, but the match making restrictions are very loose - so you can match quickly with a wider range of skills. True skill does not set the restriction, it's a hidden skill number relative to others who play the game. The match making system is tuned to varying degrees of restriction to allow tight to loose matches in skill.

DANG YOU FYREWULFFFFFFFFFF
 

FyreWulff

Member
It honestly feels like it doesn't even exist.

At the end of the day, I just want Halo 4 to match me with players on my level.

The rule of thumb is: you're required to use Trueskill on all 360 titles. The only exemptions are MMOs and EA games, because they run off of EA's servers, because MS was desperate to get EA to enable online in more than just their PS2 titles back in the day.

Halo, Gears, CoD, etc on Xbox are all running off MS's TS backend. You have to use it or MS won't license your game.

Irony... it's there, dripping in your post. Can you find it?

True skill is there, even in social H3, but the match making restrictions are very loose - so you can match quickly with a wider range of skills. True skill does not set the restriction, it's a hidden skill number relative to others who play the game. The match making system is tuned to varying degrees of restriction to allow tight to loose matches in skill.

DANG YOU FYREWULFFFFFFFFFF

Hyper'd
 

Risen

Member
Nope. All you had to do to boost to a 50 in Halo 2 was lose your first game, then circle boost continous wins after that. It was exactly 120 games to do it in. I know, because I had to keep track of those fuckers when I reported them.

In Halo 3 it was restart your account until you got a lucky streak of 26 games for a 50. There's a reason why Reach forces you to turn in 30 games before it'll put you in a division. Even if you have an invisible "50", you have to defend it for at least 4 games.

Circle boosting was not the same thing at all... and you are making my point for me... 120 games vs 20-40 depending on list in H3. H3's was inferior in that respect and it's because of True Skill's construction.

Point being, in H2 you had to win, and win a lot to hit 50. Even when trying to manipulate the system. Not so much in H3.
 

Blissful

Neo Member
The rule of thumb is: you're required to use Trueskill on all 360 titles. The only exemptions are MMOs and EA games, because they run off of EA's servers.

Halo, Gears, CoD, etc on Xbox are all running off MS's TS backend. You have to use it or MS won't license your game.

Fair enough, but the way it was implemented in Reach was pretty poor.

Having it loose, like you stated pretty much makes it useless.
 

Caja 117

Member
Trueskills does work to a certain degree in Halo Reach, I have noticed the difference when I played with 2 groups of friends I have, one of those group usually pulls out Players that have my same level, whereas the other group I have I usually end up with negative 16 or 20 in the game.

The problem right now is that the playlists doesn't have enough players for trueskill to work properly .
 

Risen

Member
As I said, Halo 3 did not actually display TrueSkill values. What people were manipulating was a flawed interpretation of them, which is probably one of the reasons why that system was abandoned.

I guess I can see where the argument is made that the interpretation was flawed - because obviously if people are manipulating the system the number may or may not mean anything... however, the real manipulation was of the flawed system, not the interpretation of it. The only way people could manipulate the interpretation would be those that purchased a 50 and were not really a 50. In that sense they are "putting the fix in" on their number.

Either way it's word games...

There's no getting around how easily the system was manipulated compared to H2's.
 

Blissful

Neo Member
Trueskills does work to a certain degree in Halo Reach, I have noticed the difference when I played with 2 groups of friends I have, one of those group usually pulls out Players that have my same level, whereas the other group I have I usually end up with negative 16 or 20 in the game.

The problem right now is that the playlists doesn't have enough player for trueskill to properly work.

Have you played Double Team? The population is decent for a 2v2 playlist but I have to go through 20 casual scrubs before I actually get to play a decent team.

O, and never go in alone in Double Team. It will cause a lot of frustration if your intention of playing Halo Reach is to have fun and win
 

Caja 117

Member
Have you played Double Team? The population is decent for a 2v2 playlist but I have to go through 20 casual scrubs before I actually get to play a decent team.

O, and never go in alone in Double Team. It will cause a lot of frustration if your intention of playing Halo Reach is to have fun and win

You mean team doubles? How many players does it usually have? and how many games have you played in Team doubles? if I'm not mistaken trueskill doesn't follow your "skill" globally, but independent for every playlist, I could be wrong.
 

FyreWulff

Member
Kids would bridge host and IP lock a group of friends so they only matched each other and would take turns winning and losing.

My favorite part is where they modded the playlists so they'd just get Warlock over and over again, and of course they had Warlock modded to give themselves super BRs and invincibiilty.

Which totally backfired on a couple of them, because I was prepared :lol
 

Computron

Member
Kids would bridge host and IP lock a group of friends so they only matched each other and would take turns winning and losing.

OK, that's a new term I haven't heard for a old concept.


My favorite part is where they modded the playlists so they'd just get Warlock over and over again, and of course they had Warlock modded to give themselves super BRs and invincibiilty.

Which totally backfired on a couple of them, because I was prepared :lol
explain?
 

Blissful

Neo Member
You mean team doubles? How many players does it usually have? and how many games have you played in Team doubles? if I'm not mistaken trueskill doesn't follow your "skill" globally, but independent for every playlist, I could be wrong.

They actually call the playlist Double Team in Reach.

I have played over 5000 games and still don't get matched up reguarly against other players who are decent.

Overall, I am a Forerunner and have played the game long enough to know that its True Skill implementation is garbage. My whole point is that I want to get matched up with players on my level, because if I don't, the game ends up being boring as hell
 
Ok. Awesome night so far. Now, one or two possibilities is true:

One - Franklez was at this concert.
Two - his doppelganger was there.

In either case, i have a few frames of video that I'll upload when i get home that shall be inspected to the fullest.
 

Redford

aka Cabbie
After having played Halo 4 E3 Build at Fan Expo.. is it just me or are the grenades even weaker than in Halo 3? Many times with a grenade in damage range for halo3/reach I never had damage done to my shield. (not sure if a glitch or grenades have less range) With indicator, jump/movement, and thruster pack, grenades aren't used much. (A good thing in my opinion) Thruster pack really is the go to armour ability I find especially on close quarters maps like Haven.. it can change the tide of a battle quickly.

Really digging the multiplayer. It'll be interesting to see the PAX build and what kind of effects the new build additions like the SAW, Rail Gun, and other weapons have.

Reach nades might's well be sidewinders. Even weaker than Halo 3 though? Wooooo.
 

FyreWulff

Member
OK, that's a new term I haven't heard for a old concept.



explain?

The modding was the worst after everyone had pretty much figured out how broken H2 Elites were with their head hitbox. So at the time, the vast majority of Live played Spartan. Even I had switched to Spartan (and seen my K/D go up from doing it).

What modders started doing was mod the Elite model to get what they wanted both on-host and off host. There were mods that only worked for the modder who was hosting the game, and then there was stuff that worked off-host. What they'd do is have their entire game go Elite and then make it so Elites were invincible off host and a whole bunch of other goodies. Of course, they publically posted this on forums.

I'd switch to Elite when entering the playlists that were really bad for modding. Game starts.. why is my screen flashing constantly? Oh, I'm being shot by 1000 rounds per second and I cannot be killed. I walk over to their flag and pick it up (also, the modder gave himself super-speed) and just hold it for the entire game to piss them off. They finally got it back in the last 10 seconds by literally punching me so hard that I flew through the map's outer walls and into the skybox on Warlock. :lol The entire time they were begging me to let the game end. I like to think we kept at least 2-4 games from being shat on by them.


Another one was on Backwash. This was one of those spawnpoint modders where they has us dying in one spot as they fired upon my team with BR. Elite model to save the day again, not invincible in this case but I had tons of damage resistance, so I just pounded the trigger as I spawned until I shot the modder. Cue our entire team just opening fire on THEIR spawn as they start wondering what the fuck is going on.


Non-prepared one favorite was the modders that would make you spawn with skulls. Since the engine didn't properly garbage-collect oddballs, all you had to do was wait ~3 minutes and the hosting modder would spawn so many balls from killing your team that he'd lag himself out. Easy win after that.
 

Caja 117

Member
They actually call the playlist Double Team in Reach.

I have played over 5000 games and still don't get matched up reguarly against other players who are decent.

Overall, I am a Forerunner and have played the game long enough to know that its True Skill implementation is garbage. My whole point is that I want to get matched up with players on my level, because if I don't, the game ends up being boring as fuck

I gave it a check, right now is has a little under a 1000 in comparison, MLG has around 700, point is that a social playlist with a population of 1200, 1500, 2000 is too small for trueskill to work properly, you play Halo 3 social right now that will have around 5000 and the situation is basically the same.

a Ranked playlist with a visual representation of skill will only make MM search slower because of the low population,trueskill works for what it is design to do, but low populated playlists make MM searchs erratic.
 
I'm trying to get Halo PC working on my computer but I'm hitting a weird glitch.

I updated it with the latest patch and when I start the game the HALO splash screen shows up, but then it drops me back to the desktop and the music starts to play but I can't do anything except exit the game with the task manager.

Anyone know of a fix for this?
 
Ok. Awesome night so far. Now, one or two possibilities is true:

One - Franklez was at this concert.
Two - his doppelganger was there.

In either case, i have a few frames of video that I'll upload when i get home that shall be inspected to the fullest.

FORGET THAT< GET OUT REACH BACK OUT
 

Blissful

Neo Member
I gave it a check, right now is has a little under a 1000 in comparison, MLG has around 700, point is that a social playlist with a population of 1200, 1500, 2000 is too small for trueskill to work properly, you play Halo 3 social right now that will have around 5000 and the situation is basically the same.

a Ranked playlist with a visual representation of skill will only make MM search slower because of the low population,trueskill works for what it is design to do, but low populated playlists make MM searchs erratic.

Halo Reach has a low population because the game is terrible. Also, the playlists were poorly organized and were consolidated around 4 to 5 times! LOL

Halo 4 shouldn't have a population problem in its initial year based on how much marketing 343 has been doing. My only fear is that they will make Halo 4's MM similar to Reach with this loose Trueskill implementation.

Either way, I'm glad I have other games to play if Halo 4 ends up being a MM flop. It just saddens me that a game I use to love is quickly turning in to crap.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
Primordium is possibly the most boring thing I've ever read. For all of the complaints Cryptum had about it being slow, I feel the 2nd is a 1000 times worse. I'm like 220 pages in and I basically force myself to read a chapter every few days, bleh.
Heh, that's how I read it. It took me six or seven weeks, a couple chapters ever few days. I kept thinking, okay now something will happen. And it did! They walked through a forest, to a desert, then to a forest. Then got in a boat. Then got off the boat. Then found another forest.

The above spoils 200 pages. Sorry about that.


Back from The Dark Knight Rises. Decent, not great, not terrible.
 

heckfu

Banned
Hey folks, went ahead and made a blog for all the HaloGaffers to access from PAX to post things for the weekend to have it aggregated on one site without comments and things to get the posts lost in the shuffle of news, etc.

http://halogafatpax.tumblr.com/

This is in no way a replacement for Gaf during pax, to be clear, just an addendum.

For all the gaffers going, I'm going to PM Duncan the details of how to access the site to post, etc, to post on the PW protected page with our contact info.
 
3JnxR.png


dont hold your breath.

Timed announcement coordinated with Waypoint's Wednesday Weekly Whatup
Bulletin
?

One can dream... But I'm preparing for disappoint.

And...
True Skill in Halo Reach.
 

Ken

Member
OT: If I were to actually try to play more than 30+ hours of Skyrim (which was all I played until I found it really boring), should I get Dawnguard early or wait until I finish the main story.
 
Hey folks, went ahead and made a blog for all the HaloGaffers to access from PAX to post things for the weekend to have it aggregated on one site without comments and things to get the posts lost in the shuffle of news, etc.

http://halogafatpax.tumblr.com/

This is in no way a replacement for Gaf during pax, to be clear, just an addendum.

For all the gaffers going, I'm going to PM Duncan the details of how to access the site to post, etc, to post on the PW protected page with our contact info.

Great work and idea, HeckFu.
 
OT: If I were to actually try to play more than 30+ hours of Skyrim (which was all I played until I found it really boring), should I get Dawnguard early or wait until I finish the main story.

I'd say don't get Dawnguard at all, especially if you are playing the PC version of the game.
 

Blinding

Member
I highly, highly doubt the console announcement from MLG is Halo 4, CS:GO seems the most likely (and that's not because of how I think Halo 4 will be at release, but rather how ridiculously long MLG takes to create their gametypes.)

if anyone going to pax would be kind enough to grab me a league of legends code (if they're being given out,) i'd be incredibly grateful.
 
OT: If I were to actually try to play more than 30+ hours of Skyrim (which was all I played until I found it really boring), should I get Dawnguard early or wait until I finish the main story.

I'd wait. If you've finished the main quest of Skyrim (and maybe some guilds), and are still hungry for more, then get Dawnguard.

Also, damn, this thread is salty.
 

Striker

Member
exactly. at least in halo 3 social, you lost 1 exp point for quiting, gained nothing for losing and got 1 for winning. they also gave you a rank depending on how much you won. sure it meant nothing but it was something to play for
It didn't mean anything either, nor did it stop quitters. Unless you want to consider win tallies in Social Slayer or Rocket Race (which became 2x EXP after a while) is some magical feat.
 

raindoc

Member
Re: Forerunner Saga by G.Bear

i like the books.
no doubt: there isn't much action in them, especially considering that their roots lie in a FPS, but they do a great job in introducing the reader into a new world, from an explorer's point of view - raising more questions than giving answers, that's how it should be imo.
together with 343's promise to take the in-game storytelling more seriously (and hence hopefully answering questions) these books make me - a campaign player who isn't into Halo because of the MP, but the SP experience - more excited about Halo 4 than everything else.
Content-wise i see these books as an appetizer and i dig Bear's writing style.

The Fall of Reach, by most fans considered (one of) the best Halo novels, is the only book i never finished reading in my entire lifetime. and i own a lot of books. (granted, it was only the german translation, but then again: most of the novels i own are translations).
= tastes differ, but these books [FR saga] are meant to introduce the fans to the historic background of the Haloverse (especially the Reclaimer Trilogy) and that's what they do in an (again imo) immersive way. to me it felt like i was there, wandering about Installation 07.
 

Woorloog

Banned
After forge world I never want to play another Forerunner map ever again.
Have is one such... and Halo 4 will likely have other Forerunner maps as well.
Makes me actually wonder whether 343i will explore non-Forerunner settings with MP maps as the campaign will be heavily Forerunner focused.
Does anyone else think of popcorn when using the DMR? I've always wondered that..
Just with the SMG. Its in universe nickname is popcorn... The DMR doesn't sound very much like popcorn popping, i think.
Re: Forerunner Saga by G.Bear

i like the books.
no doubt: there isn't much action in them, especially considering that their roots lie in a FPS, but they do a great job in introducing the reader into a new world, from an explorer's point of view - raising more questions than giving answers, that's how it should be imo.
together with 343's promise to take the in-game storytelling more seriously (and hence hopefully answering questions) these books make me - a campaign player who isn't into Halo because of the MP, but the SP experience - more excited about Halo 4 than everything else.
Content-wise i see these books as an appetizer and i dig Bear's writing style.

The Fall of Reach, by most fans considered (one of) the best Halo novels, is the only book i never finished reading in my entire lifetime. and i own a lot of books. (granted, it was only the german translation, but then again: most of the novels i own are translations).
= tastes differ, but these books [FR saga] are meant to introduce the fans to the historic background of the Haloverse (especially the Reclaimer Trilogy) and that's what they do in an (again imo) immersive way. to me it felt like i was there, wandering about Installation 07.

I reckon many people have problems with Greg Bear's style, which is kinda... focused? Sparse? He doesn't describe the surroundings, people etc. that much. Or maybe that is just how i see it, i found the FR saga hard to read even though i read a lot of science fiction.
Oddly i didn't find Bear's EON hard to read, just unpleasant experience (oddly enough, he managed to convey despair and disbelief very well) though interesting.
Cryptum is interesting enough, delving into Forerunners rather deeply. But Primordium spends too much time with pre-historic humans, quite literally. Not very interesting, Ghaleon wrote very well about this earlier.
The amount of action isn't very important in a book for me.

While i've read the Fall of Reach a few times, i don't particularly like it (though it is better than the First Strike). It does give a nice backround for the Halo's world.
But no Halo writer has managed write the the books in very immersive way... But then i don't get into worlds via characters, so that's just me. Also, the games have already established the world for me so that affects the reading experience. Wasn't Halo FoR released before Halo CE? I read it well after Halo CE, after Halo 2 come think of this.
 

Overdoziz

Banned
All I know want to say about trueskill is that in the week that I played Halo 3 Team Slayer some time ago I got more close matches than in of 2 years of Reach.
Coincidentally it also takes about a week to find a single match in Arena.
 

Tawpgun

Member
After I read primordium...


I had no idea what actually happened.

Cryptum was fine but Primordium was just some characters walking with vague references to other things I think were important.
 

zap

Member
I'll definitely push on, but other than the time I read the Simarillion in high school, I don't think my eyes have ever glazed over so quickly from boredom.

And I thought you were cool :/

I couldn't put the Silmarillion down...

Primordium wastes 300 pages, easy.

Why make a series about the Forerunners and then hardly focus on them, have our main characters do nothing but walk through a wood talking to themselves for the whole book? So much wasted potential. It could have been awesome. Voc's Terminals stories were 100x more entertaining and interesting than 90% of Primordium.
 

ZalinKrow

Member
I can't wait to hear stories from PAX. Obviously I'm mainly interested on hearing any new Halo 4 stuff I can, but I'm also looking forward to hearing how you guys get on there. It's gonna be cool to have so many impressions of the latest build :)
 
Like fucking clockwork.

To an extent though, your posting that it "technically" exists, but thats not really good enough. Whether trueskill technically exists or not is one thing, if its been implemented so poorly it might as well not exist is another. I am personally glad there's no ranks in Reach, because the idea is so laughably bad. Competitive Reach would be awful.

With Halo 4 though, even if they don't have a ranking system, I hope they tighten up the invisible trueskill, and give some indication of the players ability on the other team. I was playing Black Ops yesterday, and even though they don't have skill based matchmaking, at a click of a button you can see a lobby leaderboard showing K/D, Score Per Minute, they're last match results, and you can then quite easily choose specific people and view a complete overview of they're career, including overall win/loss etc.

My point is, after seeing if someone is good, you know when its time to turn your A game on :p, with Reach, every game feels like a social slog, because no one tries. CoD has the toolset to highlight when a game might be a tougher match so people know when to make more effort. If they choose to do so or not is up to them.
Stealth brag: ranked in the top 5000 for SPM
. I think its worth clarifying that I know Reach provides a level of information, but its behind so many menu's and so poorly presented I dont think anyone would use it very often.

I get the feeling Halo 4 is going to be a more casual party game experience from the get go anyway, so this may all be moot, but if there are more competitive modes, I would hope they have the infrastructure for players to know when its time to play 'properly'.
 
Uh, it's there. If it's still trueskill in Halo 4 then having a skill level is part of the matchmaking formula, you get matched with people similar in skill. To even have matchmaking you need to have some sort of skill denotation. I'm pretty sure it was there in Halo Reach as well, it got to the point once that I could only get matched up with like 2 other teams in the regular MLG list.

Arena was just a different weird system that just gave you ranks for wins or something, at first it tried to get individual merit but that went away quick IIRC.

What you're whining about is being able to see the stupid little rank number next to your name again, that just encourages cheating and win-trading. I hope it never comes back. Unnecessary.


Yeah you don't even know what you're babbling about. Carry on.

Why are you lying on the internet? That has practically nothing to do with trueskill. It's more likely that was influenced by party size and ping suitability.

And from that whole exchange I don't think he's 'whining' about having a number next to his name but rather the fact that, outside of one playlist in Reach, the game does an incredibly poor job of matching similarly skilled players. Thankfully Frankie has commented that Halo 4 will not use the trueskill system as it is implemented in Reach. I can only take that to mean it will be significantly tighter in its skill matching as it couldn't get much looser than how it is in Reach (sans Arena).
 

TheOddOne

Member
Another issue with Reach's system is that there is no real punishment for losing, if you quit, you don't lose anything. If you stay and lose well you still get your credits. There are no stakes at hand, it's just play or don't play, win or don't win. In which case they should just turn off matchmaking and put up a custom games browser.
Plywood again confirms he is my favorite member, watch out Viewtiful, Elzar and Ryan. The whole mentality of everybody “wins” has made the population much worse, they are never getting punished so the mentality to do better or avoid getting punished never enters the brain.

The current systems in Reach that do punish, such as 10 minute ban for quitting from matchmaking, while on paper sound good. Their implementation is appalling and much of those annoyances are related to the everybody “wins” system or just randomness that can’t be explained. The Halo 2 and 3 ranking systems had their “outside” flaws, rampant selling of accounts, but at least it was a more thought out system for the people actually invested in them.

The everybody wins mentality is mostly brought on by Call of Duty, to a certain extent. Filling bars and giving instant feedback on your accomplishments is the meta core of the game, it rewards you for basically for doing anything and everything. Of course players like that, it is a nice system that is direct and very friendly. The problem however is that the ranking system takes a less prominent role, because to supplement the above factors you have to ease the system for people who go up the ladder – so cut out the factor of consequence.

The effect the above mentality has on the industry is appalling. On one hand it is a very easy system to implement and you will probably get a userbase to accept your game faster. However, this also means that all the games will go to this win system and every game will start looking the same (regardless of genre). More unique systems (more challenging) will be put on the wayside by consumers, because well it’s not that easy system. Publishers will likely never allow developers to test out other systems.

Call of Duty 4’s system for accomplishments was at the time it launched just one of those systems. There were ton of other games that had unique ranking systems. Now to see the whole industry chasing one all system is disheartening. All short term thinking that eventually will bite a lot of developers in the ass.

Also, it might be an unpopular opinion, but Firefight/Spartan Ops should have their own separate ranking system. Now it just deludes ranking and never actually does tell us anything about the skill of the player because it is lumped up into a global rank
 

Caja 117

Member
Plywood again confirms he is my favorite member, watch out Viewtiful, Elzar and Ryan. The whole mentality of everybody &#8220;wins&#8221; has made the population much worse, they are never getting punished so the mentality to do better or avoid getting punished never enters the brain. .

Yup. Current system is so bad that I can actually level up while been AFK, I love Halo 3 experience system because if You loose you gain no EXP, you quit out, you loose EXP. it was simple and good.
 

willow ve

Member
Yup. Current system is so bad that I can actually level up while been AFK, I love Halo 3 experience system because if You loose you gain no EXP, you quit out, you loose EXP. it was simple and good.

Yep. The Reach system is such a grind that it actually encourages AFK players. Who really has the time or commitment to sit through the countless hours required to hit top rank? If it was skill based, and could be gotten in a month of play, there would be incentive. As it stands now there's really no incentive to play just to earn credits. I feel like I'm back to ranking up in Rainbow Six Vegas... what a grind.
 
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