Addressing Core Issues with the Halo Infinite Ranked Experience

If you have followed me for more than a few hours, you know I love Halo. It has been my favorite franchise since C.E., and I’ve spent more time than I’d likely even want to know playing it through the years. From endless split-screen hollering with friends to competitive LAN parties, local tournaments, and, of course, competitive online play, Halo has been a staple part of my gaming routine for over 22 years.

Since its launch in 2021, it has been no different with Halo Infinite. As I sit down to write this, I’m about to hit 1,100 hours played, which includes nearly 4,400 matches of multiplayer (and that’s minor compared to some). The vast majority of that has been spent in Ranked Arena, which, if you are reading this and are somehow unaware, is the playlist that matches the settings of the Halo Championship Series (HCS). I’ve been fortunate to attend professional events through the years (including the HCS Major in Kansas City and the 2022 World Championship in Seattle for Infinite) and have played with and/or spoken to countless competitive players, including some who have worked at Bungie and/or 343 Industries. It’s one of my top gaming passions without question.

Now let me preface the rest of the article with a couple of quick points:

I certainly don’t claim to be a professional or elite Halo player. What I describe below is merely what I believe to be a few of the core issues negatively affecting the Halo Ranked experience for players like myself. I have discussed these extensively with my friends and the Halo community I engage with. I’m merely hoping to provide a little insight into the frustrations.

I’m also not going to address the on-going issues with online play as it relates to networking/netcode/telephony. 343i is addressing those themselves, and, as such, the issues are already recognized as fundamental for the entire online experience.

Point Ranking System

Description:

The point ranking system used in Halo Infinite has the ability to provide a player up to 15 points per match, negative or positive, depending on their performance. I won’t go into all the nuts and bolts of the ranking system in its entirety as I assume, if you’re reading this, you have a cursory knowledge of it. If you want an in-depth overview, you can find it here directly from 343i.

How it Works:

After a match you individually lose points if your team lost, and you gain points if your team won. As noted, this can range from 1 to 15 points. However, the overwhelming majority of the time the system allocates points in the middle of that range. There are very few examples where you will gain 12+ or lose 5 or less.

Generally speaking, the matchmaking system in Ranked Arena tries to match teams equal in skill. This means that each team has a close to 50% chance of winning the match. After each match, then, you’ll personally gain or lose around 6-10 points, and you’ll win and lose at about the same rate. You can likely already see where the issue arises, but let’s demonstrate why that’s an issue for consistent players.

Why it’s an Issue:

In short, not enough of the point system range is used regularly.

Let’s say you begin at Diamond 1, which is point level 1,200. You then play 100 matches and perform extremely well with your teams, leading to a 55% win rate in those matches. Let’s calculate this as a “best-case scenario” without issues.

• In the 55 wins, let’s say you play well and gain an average of 9 points per win. That would be 495 points gained.
• Over that same period, let’s say you lose an average of 8 points for each of the 45 losses. That would be 360 points lost.
• With each rank representing a 50-point range, you would have moved up to a mid-Diamond 3.
• At an average of 10 minutes per match, a player would have spent 17 hours of “near-ideal” play in their skill level, without any issues, to move two ranks.

Of course, the above is not what happens in reality. In reality:

• You will sometimes lose more points than you gain.
• Most average win-rates are not 55%. Again, the entire purpose of matchmaking is to create matches to keep you close to 50%.

With that in mind, a more realistic scenario looks like this:

• Even playing well with your teams, you win 51 of the 100 matches and gain an average of 8.8 points while losing an average of 8.2 points.
• This means that over the course of 100 matches of play, and playing well according to the game, you will have been positive for 49 points.
• Therefore you would have remained a Diamond 1 after playing well for nearly 20 hours and winning more than 50% of your matches.
  • Keep in mind, that’s over 100 matches. During single sessions of 2-4 hours, you’ll often be sitting at the same rank as when you began regardless of whether you were “on” or “off” with your personal play.

Originally, the system rewarded individual performance heavily. Being a team-focused game, 343 Industries shifted the point allocation to better represent wins versus losses. In theory, that’s the correct choice. At the end of the day, what matters is whether your team wins or loses.

However, the pendulum was swung too far in one direction. With individual performance barely factoring, and with little variation in point allocation up and down, it leads to players being “stuck,” often regardless of their personal play. Anyone who plays Ranked regularly can speak to examples of this.

Two Diamond 1 players can have drastically differing performances in a loss, with one player contributing heavily to the objective and having a high KDA while the other did noticeably worse in all performance categories. Yet, the point loss will be 8 points for better performance and 7 points for the other. This is simply not representative of what occurred in relation to the players’ performance. It prevents long-term separation of the player base and feels punishing to the player who played well.

Individual performance is not represented enough in the point separation. The difference between the top player on a team and the bottom player (win or loss) is usually 1 or 2 points.

This is from a Slayer match that I played today, showing my stats and those of my three teammates. It should go without saying that we all shouldn’t have gained the same 8 points for that victory.

From what I understand, the “CSR” and “MMR” ratings play into this as well, but those have been adjusted over time too. Again there are some more details on those systems here.

Potential Solution:

Fully utilize the 15-point system for wins and losses

Winning should gain points and losing should lose points as it does today. But attempt to better calculate individual performance within that parameter. While that in itself isn’t easy since, as we all know, there are many intangibles that don’t show up on a scoreboard, a general idea can still be made. Infinite already has an in-game scoring system that factors KDA and Objective performance in the game – it quite literally ranks players 1st to 4th on wins and 5th to 8th on losses.

Using a wider range of the point system would create more separation among the player-base, thus better representing their individual skill. It would also be infinitely more rewarding when performing well as you would feel like you actually made some progress after a session. Lastly, it would be less punishing when a player played well but lost and less rewarding when a player played poorly but won (as it should).

Smurfing

Description:

Players are frustrated with the matchmaking and point systems as detailed above or want to play with friends without negatively impacting their main. Thus they create new accounts to circumvent the system.

How it Works:

As Halo Infinite is free to play and Xbox Live no longer requires a paid account to play online multiplayer, anyone can create a new account and begin playing. A player only has to complete 25 non-ranked matches to be able to then play Ranked Arena. Thus, experienced players are creating new accounts, speeding through fast, non-ranked matches, and then purposely performing poorly in their Ranked qualifying matches.

As the game considers that it must be a “new” player who performed poorly in the qualifying matches, that player begins in the middle of the rank-range (typically high-Gold to low-Platinum). They then play to their full potential as a high-level player, dominating lobbies for hundreds of games until the system catches up and they settle into the “correct” rank range.

Why it’s an Issue:

I’m not sure I really need to describe why this is an issue as it should be readily apparent. Smurfing creates a large imbalance in the team matchmaking, ruins the experience for players in those matches, and further compounds the issues with the point-allocation. This has become a glaring issue over the past several months in the Diamond rank-range – so much so that we can often spot a smurf during the match. I can only surmise that these are people who want to “achieve” Onyx rank.

Potential Solution:

Sadly, you’re never going to stop some players from doing this. It’s an issue in all free-to-play online games with a competitive component. But a better solution is rather straight-forward, and many other games do the same:

Require substantially more matches before allowing a player to play Ranked matches.

25 matches is simply not enough to then open Ranked Arena to players. Increase this number substantially (maybe 100 matches?) to ensure long-time players can’t simply take advantage of the system. Naturally, this has to work in coordination with AFK/quitting recognition as well so the 100 matches actually have to be truly played.

Staleness

Description:

Again, I’m not sure I have to describe this in too much depth. Ranked Arena is stale as a playlist, with updates coming too few and far-between.

How it Works:

Ranked Arena matches HCS competitive settings, as I noted. This is by design so that players can enjoy the same settings as the pro teams, and pro players (or aspiring pros) can practice/scrim with the maps/equipment used in tournaments. Therefore, map, equipment, and game mode updates have to be thoroughly considered and curated for balance.

Why it’s an Issue:

From a design perspective, there’s no issue here. Carefully balancing the playlist for pro-play is important. The issue is that adjustments and additions are implemented too infrequently.

As an example, let’s look at map rotation. There are currently 8 maps in the Ranked Arena rotation with 21 possible combinations of map/modes:

• Live Fire
• Streets
• Aquarius
• Recharge
• Empyrean (Pit remake)
• Solitude (Plaza remake)
• Argyle
• Forbidden

Forbidden was added just a few weeks ago, but the last addition prior to that was Solitude in June. Furthermore, the weighting for each map is not equal as some maps support more modes than others. For instance, Forbidden, Argyle, and Empyrean only support Capture the Flag. So even with those additions dating back to 2022, you can go dozens of games without playing one of them simply due to the RNG with map/mode selection.

15 of the 21 possible matches (71%) are held on maps that have been in Halo Infinite since launch in 2021. While consistency and balance are important, this simply doesn’t hit the mark from an engagement perspective. And that’s before speaking about some of the more extreme examples that can occur. For instance, I had a session recently where I played 8 matches, and 7 of them were on Recharge.

Potential Solution:

With content additions now being far more frequent in Halo Infinite across the board, a greater emphasis needs to be placed on the Ranked experience. While I understand that it’s likely down the priority list with relation to the core playlists, this is the playlist for your die-hard fans and the professional scene alike. I would argue that driving interest in HCS, keeping the pro players and teams engaged, and satisfying your competitive players/fans who spend thousands of hours (and dollars for that matter) on this game are all important.

It’s imperative that 343i improve the speed to market on updates to Ranked Arena. New maps need to be added more frequently, particularly maps that can support more than a single game-type (Solitude likely being the best recent addition).

While I’ve primarily spoken to map rotation, there are additional updates that can be made to keep the experience more fresh and interesting as well. Working with their insights team, equipment can be rotated, weapon spawns can be adjusted, etc. The Bandit Evo change for season 5 has been a fantastic addition, and Extraction likely will be with continued tuning. Let’s see more things in that vein!

The Melee…Oh…The Melee

Description:

This is not directly related to the Ranked Arena experience in Halo Infinite but, rather, all of multiplayer. It has a large impact on the gameplay from one match to the next. For anyone that plays multiplayer, they’ll know where I’m going with this immediately.

The melee is poor. It’s terribly inconsistent, and a damage mechanic that is unreliable impacts the integrity of a competitive game. This is primarily due to the “lunge” attached to the melee.

How it Works:

When you melee, your spartan will typically lunge at an enemy player, hit them, and break their shield. This is a powerful risk vs. reward scenario given that you have to be near another player, and it often leads to exchanges.

But it’s the lunge that creates the terrible inconsistencies. This is because, as a player, you never truly know the effective range of a melee swing. Sometimes you’ll lunge from a great distance, sometimes you’ll swing with no lunge at all, and everything in-between. This was even detailed further by 343 Industries themselves as the issues are compounded when playing online.

Why it’s an Issue:

This probably doesn’t need an explanation, but a damaging mechanic that has no consistency degrades the competitive experience greatly. It’s also terribly frustrating for players not knowing when they can rely on a melee to work as intended or not.

Potential Solution:

Melee hits breaking your shield is a core mechanic in Halo. It always has been, and there’s no issue with it fundamentally. Thus:

Remove the lunge entirely and, instead, increase the effective melee range by a % in relation to the player’s reach

This would allow the melee range to be consistent, which is the critical factor in players understanding when they should and shouldn’t melee. Knowing that you have to be in arm’s length to melee would further increase the risk of using the melee, and it would remove the guessing game that is the current lunge system.

Endless Potential

Halo Infinite is a fantastic game, and I certainly want to applaud the team(s) at 343 Industries on their recent update cadence. Furthermore, I want to call out that its growth potential in the competitive scene is immense. I adore watching HCS, and I encourage anyone who enjoys competitive gaming to give it a watch if you haven’t previously. The talent on display from the players and the broadcasting team alike is spectacular.

But the hardcore players are suffering when playing Ranked, and they don’t need to be. We’re here to support and promote Halo Infinite. Making it a better experience for us should be fundamental and the tools are already in place to do so. In doing so, it will help foster a broader player base, make it more inviting for new players to join the competitive scene, and expand this amazing community while learning what makes Halo so special.

<shamelessly insert random HCS pics>

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