Halo Infinite multiplayer changes and improvements are coming. According to 343 Industries community manager John Junyszek, the team has been "studying" both player ranks and ranked matchmaking since launch, and this work is about to come to fruition with a set of new updates that will begin to roll out next week. Highlighting the content of these updates, Junyszek notes issues like rank inflation, inaccurate skill assessment, and uneven player skills will be addressed.

"First and foremost, our skill rating system has been analyzing real matches since launch and we're ready to deploy some of the learnings from this live data," says Junyszek of the coming changes. "These learnings will help the system become even better at assessing a player's skill and should place them more accurately in our skill distributions. This will be the first backend skill update like this since launch, and we plan to do them continuously throughout the life of the game. Just like we've been doing, we will keep monitoring matches and rolling out updates frequently to make sure the system can stay up to date with the latest player behaviors – thus continuing to accurately assess player skill."

According to Junyszek, in addition to a skill rating improvement, 343 Industries is resetting Competitive Skill Ranking ranks in order to allow everyone to get an updated CSR "that is more indicative of their skill." The changes were inspired by seeing that the previous system was being "too generous."

"Since we saw that the CSR system was being overly generous since launch, these changes are being rolled out to help bring things closer in line to where they should be," said Junyszek. "This period led to a full tier inflation of ranks and, as a result, most players should expect to be placed a full tier lower (Diamond players will find themselves in Platinum, Platinum players will find themselves in Gold, etc.) after this rank reset."

Junyszek continues noting players should expect to be one tier lower after the update since the previous system was placing players too high. Going forward, placement matches will place players lower.

"Typically, after you complete your placement matches, your CSR is a little lower than where the system thinks you'll end up after playing for a while," said Junyszek. "This happened in Halo 5 as well because it helps start each rank reset (typically during a Season rollover) off fresh and provides players room to progress their CSR rank. Since ranks are being reset in the middle of the season, this will be reduced to help make sure you have a shorter climb after your placement matches. At launch, Diamond 1 was the highest CSR players could land at after completing their 10 placement matches. Much like above, since we're resetting ranks in the middle of the season, we want to reduce the disruption it may cause by raising this to Diamond 5. This will not affect most players, but it will mean Onyx players will spend less time in Diamond since the system already knows that they are likely an Onyx player."

All of these tweaks and the rank reset are set to go live on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 22. As noted, this is just the beginning of a slew of updates that are aiming to improve ranked matchmaking.



Posted: Feb 20, 2022 8:51 am
Related Forum: Xbox Forum

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/halo-infinite-xbox-update-multiplayer/