- Rank resets and other competitive changes are coming to Halo Infinite next week
- The update should help players find their true skill rank
- Players will find themselves in lower ranks but will go up quicker
343 Industries is rolling out a mid-season rank reset and changing the CSR system in the hopes that this will fix many ranked multiplayer issues.
New Update Rolls Out Soon
Halo Infinite surprised everyone when it was released a few weeks earlier than it was initially supposed to. The campaign dropped on December 8, but multiplayer, which came with a ranked option, was available already in November. However, this early release saw the multiplayer to be not quite well polished up. Players have been criticizing it and these critiques have continued into 2022, with many still claiming the XP reward system is unfair.
With all this in mind, 343 Industries is keeping their promises of updating the system and will be rolling out a mid-season update, that should address common issues in ranked such as rank inflation, inaccurate skill assessment, uneven player skills, and others.
In an update on Halo Waypoint, 343 community manager John “Unyshek” Junyszek explained that the new system was analyzing real matches since launch. This should help it become better at assessing a player's skill and should place them more accurately in the skill distribution. 343 also added that this update is the first backend skill update like this since launch and that they plan to do them continuously throughout the game’s lifetime.
What Will This Mean for Players’ Ranks?
Players have long been complaining about Halo Infinite’s “broken” matchmaking system. The new changes will reset Competitive Skill Ranking (CSR) ranks, so matchmaking should be better in the future, as it will take better account of players' skills. However, players should expect to be placed a full tier lower (Diamond players will go down to Platinum, Platinum players will find themselves in Gold, etc.).
So far, the system was placing players too high. The problem was that once a player completes their ten placement matches one’s CSR is a little lower than where the system thinks the player will end up after playing for a while. Since ranks are being reset in the middle of the season, this will be reduced to help players move back up more quickly.
At the start of the season, players could end up at Diamond 1 after completing their ten placement matches. In order to reduce the disturbance caused by the reset, this has now been raised to Diamond 5. This feature 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.
343 Industries believes that these changes, which will drop on February 22, will help improve the ranked experience for players of all skills by providing more accurate, balanced, and fair matches. The company acknowledges that it still has a lot of work left to do, and promises it will continue to make updates based on the community’s feedback and live game data.
