Reach Multiplayer Arena Q&A Transcript
So in the arena, will it force you to be a Spartan or an elite if you join a all Spartan or elite game, or will it group players by their player model?
We seriously considered this, but ended up deciding that splitting the population along Spartan/Elite lines would not be good for matchmaking speed and quality.
So no–if you join a Spartan Only playlist, you’ll be automatically switched to a Spartan. Ditto for Elite Only play-lists.
Did the WoW arena system have any influence on the Reach arena? If so, what sort of influence?
A couple of us here have some experience with it, but the nature of the games are really quite different. Different problems, different solutions.
What is to stop player from hitting the Arena hard, fast and the minimal amount of times so they can attain and keep a high k/d ratio? What is going to stop highly skilled players from using lesser skilled players from the start?
Nothing, but we’re not using a direct K/D ratio for that reason. 1 kill / 0 deaths = infinite rating! Woo!
Now a player who plays the first 5 days of the season and dominates every game might end up in Onyx at the end of those 5 days (in fact, he almost certainly would), but that’s no guarantee that he’ll stay there as more players start putting in games. As mentioned earlier, the distribution of players could change as the Season goes on and push an idle player out of a Division as more players fill in.
And highly skilled players will be matched against players of similar skill. If they de-rank to gain access to lower skill ranges, well, that doesn’t really help them at all–they’ll end up in a lower Division. And I don’t think anyone will really care if you managed to get a sick 1650 rating on one day if the end of the Season places you in a low Division.
(That said, de-ranking is a ranking system abuse and we do have some countermeasures.)
If say a bronze division player played with a gold in the gold division would the bronze player get more experience/more likely to go up for getting kills than they would in a bronze division game?
If the Bronze Division player placed higher than the Gold Division players, then TrueSkill would definitely bump him up further than if he had beaten other Bronze Division players.
But if he craters in that game and comes in last, well, he probably won’t gain anything at all, even if his team ends up winning. (On the upside, he probably won’t go down at all either, though.)
In Halo 3, some game results would be thrown out by TrueSkill because they occurred in what TrueSkill deemed as an uninteresting match (not competitive, not matched properly). That’s the way I understand it from the research I’ve done with Microsoft FAQs and articles and whatnot. Games could also be tossed out due to them being unreliable (people quitting, for instance). But that system also only took into account wins and losses.
Will the new system operate much the same in terms of games being thrown out? Or will it be a bit more loose? Also, was anything I said up there actually true?
Much of the above is true.
We should be feeding better data into the system, so fewer games should be thrown out. More importantly, the Arena play-lists will be a little less confused (and therefore uncertain) about how to handle parties with mixed skill, which was a common problem in Halo 3.
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