Blog

July 30 marks the start of the next ranked season, and with it comes some updates to the sandbox, ranking system, and ranked assassin. Also, our backend matching experiments are over, and as promised, we have more details on what we’re doing.

Let’s get right down to it!

There are quite a few Sandbox balance changes coming and you can read about them all HERE. For this blog, we’ve pulled out the ones that directly affect rankings.

After watching the Bandit Evo perform since the start of the HCS season and listening to the community conversation around the weapon and how its fast kill time affects gameplay, we’ve slowed down the rate of fire slightly. We didn’t want to make drastic changes in the middle of the HCS season, but rather push it in the right direction.

The Disruptor had a hard time finding its place on maps as an effective pickup like the other weapons on the map, so some changes were made to strengthen it while removing elements that players found frustrating.

The reticle “bloom” on the assault rifle was causing cases where players would miss shots, but it didn’t seem to register, and the weapon generally felt inconsistent at max bloom. This was tightened up a bit to give the weapon a more consistent feel.

In some cases, SPNKr felt inconsistent in terms of damage and kills. The goal here was not to functionally change the way SPNKr behaves, but rather to fine-tune some cases to be more consistent and reliable for players.

Grenade boost has been adjusted to allow grenade jumping in line with previous Halo titles.

There are changes to spawn points on most of the ranked arena map pack, including Aquarius, Recharge, Solitude, Live Fire, Forbidden, Argyle, Empyrean, and Streets. The goals of these changes are to make the spawning system more readable and consistent, along with reducing the number of times players spawn in too advantageous positions.

In response to feedback about Overshield’s location on Aquarius, the Overshield and Thruster have swapped locations. Overshield will now create the upper middle, Thruster will now create ‘P1’. Since the Overshield is a high-impact element of the map, the intention is to make this central location fairer for both teams to compete at all points of the match, not just at the beginning.

Last year we added a requirement for Ranked Arena players to seek solo/duo after 1600 CSR. This was done in response to feedback we were getting about players not wanting to play against parties of 3 or 4. While we saw an overall improvement in match balance and quality, 1600 players also felt too restricted and wanted to play more matches with your friends. We see in the data that the majority of players in Ranked Arena are looking for solo/duos (over 95%), so while we still want to make sure these players enjoy their matches, we will increase the solo/duo limit to 1700 CSRs.

And earlier this year we started experimenting with another change with deterministic CSR. Today, players above 1800 CSR go up +7 when they win and down -7 when they lose. This has been met with positive feedback and our data shows that players above this level play even more now! From July 30, this feature will start at 1700 CSR. As usual, we’ll be monitoring the impact based on what players are telling us and what we’re seeing in the data to continue making informed decisions.

In summary, once players reach 1700 CSR, they will start searching solo/duo and each match will reward or take away 7 CSR.

At a very high level, we match based on skill and latency, and you can think of match time as the currency we spend to find a match. If you prioritize finding better matches in terms of skill and latency, this means you can spend more time finding a match. The reason I say “may” is that there are obviously many other factors like time of day, region, local vs advanced options, group size, etc.

What we were seeing before the experiment in the ranked matchmaking data and what we were hearing from players was that there is room to make better matches. Also find matches with more players in my region or part of my region so I can have a higher quality experience. And we also noticed that there were many cases where a lower quality match was made where the matchmaker only took a few seconds to make the match. Based on this, we decided to experiment and push the match quality to be as good as possible without making it impossible for people to find matches.

The first experiment was to increase the weight of the pairwise predictability value. Pairwise Predicability will look at how each player stacks up against every other player in the lobby individually. Not only does this make the teams better balanced against each other, but we prioritize every single person in the lobby to be close in terms of the skills we believe are more important to making a quality match. After watching the impact of this change, we saw an improvement in this area, especially around the edges of the skill pool, such as Bronze/Silver and Diamond/Onyx.

Having concluded that there is a positive impact in terms of fair matches, we also looked at match time and concluded that there is no widespread tangible negative impact in terms of how long it takes players to find matches, as well as indicating data such as how many players cancel their quests.

We then decided to see if we could improve the latency, so we increased the weight there a few weeks later after the first change settled. Again, this means we’re telling the matchmaker to spend a little more time trying to find a match where the players searching will have lower latency. Again, we monitored the results, but there was no conclusive data indicating that our change was too small, or that there were other factors that contributed to this vagueness, such as changes to in-game playlists.

We’ve once again increased the predictability of pairings in hopes of further improving the quality of matches.

At this point, we started to see more feedback from the community, especially from players in less populated regions and in skill groups where there are fewer players. We’ve also seen feedback from players reporting that they search during what we consider to be “off-peak” hours, like super late at night or early in the morning. Usually in the afternoons/evenings after work and school most players tend to play. In terms of match quality, it was also not clear that there was a significant positive impact, leading us to conclude that we were overdoing it.

Finally, with the release of Match Composer, we’ve also added two new ranked playlists in Ranked Slayer and Ranked Doubles. I’m happy to report that we’ve collectively seen an increase in players (44% increase in the first week) and playing time in the rankings on a weekly basis. At the same time, several percentage points of the player population for these new playlists were taken from Ranked Arena, which in our opinion makes the matchup time take too long, and we’re certainly seeing an increase in anecdotal reports.

Because of this, we found and deployed another weighting update to find an average position between where this experiment started and where it was last, so that we can improve the overall experience, but still ensure that the matching time is not unbearably long.

This latest update has been live for the past few weeks and it seems to be a good working environment where we’ve improved the match quality from where it started without significantly hurting match times. At this point, we are calling our experiment a success and will not make further adjustments unless there are other conditions that change and we see changes in the feedback and what we can observe in our data.

We were very pleased to see so many players jumping into Ranked Slayer and enjoying the game. We’re committed to making playlist updates and working to deliver updates, here we go!

We’ve made an update to the Ranked Slayer map set along with a few Sandbox updates.

Thanks again to everyone who plays Ranked in Halo Infinite and for the feedback you’ve given us and continue to give us. The ranked team is committed to working on this experience day in and day out to improve the experience as much as we can. Good luck to all the teams competing at the HCS Atlanta Major this weekend!