chapel said:
Though it shouldn't be as elastic that it is. Too many times do I get in a game and dong on people hard, but then 5+ games later I am being donged on. I know that sometimes it is inevitable to have players way lower or way higher than your skill, but in Reach it seems to happen a lot more than it ever did in previous halo games.
Well, there's a few problems here, the main one being player population. The game only has a limited number of players to match at a given time. In a small playlist like Team Objective, the number of people who are actively matchmaking (i.e. not in a game) is pretty tiny (in the hundreds or even tens), and at a certain point the game has to give up and throw you into whatever suitable game it can find rather than waiting half an hour to find the seven other players who are closest to your level (and even then may not be that close). In a world where every playlist had one million people in it at all times, TrueSkill would work better. As it is, sometimes you are going to dong, sometimes you are going to get donged on. And 'deranking' is pretty pointless precisely because of the increased elasticity. Sure, you get the fun of donging for a few games (after putting in the work of deranking), but you can't fool the system for long, and soon enough you will be the one getting the dong once more. Removing the numbers in fact makes this behaviour less likely because players can't actually see it at work (i.e. can't see a number ticking down). You can't ever stop people trying to do it, but it really should be
less of a problem in Reach.
Truth be told, Halo 3 wasn't doing any better a job of matching people (in fact, it was probably doing worse), but I guess the gimping of TrueSkill meant you don't get quite the same violent swings as you do in Reach. Personally, I kinda wish Reach did have some 'social' playlists where TrueSkill didn't apply (or barely applied)... but I tend to feel that way just after I've been getting beat up on for a string of games. I don't like getting beat up on. Nobody does. And trite as it sounds, that is a giant and pretty much unsolvable problem for game designers.
chapel said:
The reason I think a percentage would work is because it really isn't a negative thing (well unless you aren't in the top 90% of people). When you tell someone you are in the top 80%, you know you are better than at least 20% of the population. The real benefit comes when you are 50% or above, knowing that you are better than over half of the playerbase is a good feeling imo.
The distribution would probably not be that even, though. The vast majority of players would be vying around the 35-65% range, or even closer than that, and constantly complaining about minute back and forth adjustments, the lack of progression, etc. Everyone below that would feel massively inferior and quit for a game that doesn't tell them how bad they are, meaning the whole population then adjusts so more people get dumped out of the midrange. They then quit in turn, and so on, until only a handful of 'pros' are left and they are squabbling over the swings. It would be a
disaster. About 10% of the population actually wants to know how well they are doing relative to everyone else (i.e. shunted into pretty static points on a curve), and they themselves are usually significantly above average, so for them it's a backslap (Gold/Onyx badge).
chapel said:
Oh and I know arena has all that baked in, but the problem is people don't want to play 3 games a day for 10 days in arena. Hardly anyone plays it anymore. It could be due to them fucking it up with only one map choice at any time, but it really doesn't feel as competitive as it should. The quitting is terrible, and that stems from their daily rating... that is what is ruining arena, oh that and armor lock.
I am surprised that it takes 10 days; 7 would be more reasonable, and you'd probably see a small boost in population if it was changed.
But the main problem with the Arena is exactly what I'm saying here: people do not
really want to know how good they are. They want the game to tell them that they are good, and that they are improving (bars are being filled). They want it to reinforce all their existing beliefs about their skill level. And as soon as ~|*SnIpEmAsTeR92*|~ finds out he is, in fact, Bronze and not Onyx, and that despite hammering away at the Arena for weeks on end (working, meanwhile, with a whole load of weird ideas and assumptions about how the ratings and placements actually work, as 99% of the playerbase do), he cannot improve to Silver and
stays Bronze, slamming his head against that wall, winning some, but losing just as many... he is going to say "this is bullshit" and quit.
Meanwhile, around the corner, Black Ops will be doling out free handjobs just for showing up.
I don't blame Bungie for their philosophy. I commend their philosophy, and I think the various player assessment mechanisms are good in principle, with a few niggles in practice, but I also suspect that for most people, finding out
exactly how good (read: bad) they are is too much to handle.