Since the beta launch, the team has been monitoring matchmaking data and keeping a close eye on the overall system to ensure it’s working as expected. Additionally, we’ve heard feedback from players who are concerned with how the rankings are working and/or express frustration with their ranked experience. Work will continue in this space but we’re making some targeted changes in the short term:
We adjusted the ranked matchmaking rules to increase the priority of close individual skill matches, particularly for players at the higher skill levels. We’re taking this in stages – the first priority increase took place on Dec 11th, and the second took place today.
We adjusted the BTB matchmaking rules to prioritize making matches with lower latency. This will mainly help players in lower population regions avoid high latency matches.
We’re doubling the overall matchmaking timeout from 5 minutes to 10 minutes, to better accommodate very high skilled players finding suitable matches, particularly when in full fire teams or searching from low population regions.
We will continue to monitor ranked and overall matchmaking closely and will share more details on the system and future plans as we can.
As of this news post, the team is aware of and actively working to address Big Team Battle intermittent matchmaking issues that have been reported over the past few days. We appreciate your patience and support as we continue investigating and working on solutions. Please be sure to follow @HaloSupport on Twitter for the latest updates.
Lastly, we understand some players are also eager for more Ranked Playlists beyond the game’s current offering. Please be note that we have more technical complexities to navigate with Ranked Playlists than Social, so any future ranked updates are going to take more time.
We received a ton of feedback, especially early in the beta, about CSR progression. We’re planning a separate post that will dig deeper into some of the issues people are seeing, but wanted to briefly address two areas of feedback here: rank inflation and overall rank distribution. The distributions that we see for each of the 3 ranked playlists over the past week are illustrated below.
Ranked Open Queue
One of our goals in the design of the CSR system is that the median CSR should be around Platinum 1. You may notice that the Open Queue playlist is quite close to our goal, but the Solo/Duo playlists are skewed towards Diamond/Onyx. You may also notice two other things that are present in all three playlists:
A decent sized “spike” at Diamond 1. This exists because Diamond 1 is the highest rank we’ll grant to a player immediately after completing their 10 qualifying matches. So the “extra” players in Diamond 1 are players who would add to the high Diamond and Onyx columns if they continued to play more ranked and work their way up through the higher levels of the CSR system. (But for now they have taken a break to do more social matchmaking, or campaign.)
A smaller spike at Onyx 1500. This is a result of aspects of the CSR algorithm that make CSR progression slightly harder once a player reaches Onyx.
We are working on adjustments to the CSR algorithm to shift the distribution to be more in line with our goals and your expectations, especially for the Solo/Duo playlists. However, as we do that, we have to be careful not to make changes that will have a negative effect on players who have already achieved these higher-than-expected CSRs, so it may take some time. Today marks the third overall update to Challenges and Progression since Halo Infinite’s beta launch on November 15. In each case, Challenges have been iterated and tuned, removing outliers and adjusting troublesome entries, while also helping to speed up overall Battle Pass progression. So far, we’re happy with the results of these changes, but we know there are plenty of opportunities to continue evolving and improving.
There’s a lot of work to do here to truly address player feedback around these systems – and broader changes are going to take time (i.e. performance based XP, per-match XP, additional progression vectors, etc..)– but in the interim, the team will continue targeting meaningful services-side updates to hone and improve the overall experience.
Today’s update aims to further alleviate frustrating challenges, adds brand new challenges to take advantage of the new playlists, and reduces the requirements for the weekly Ultimate Challenge. And, while it won’t come into play quite yet, changes have also been made for Event Challenges to help address some initial player feedback.