Well, it may be a lot like CoD's ranks considering the armor improves you, and you collect spartan points (Game Informer before you complain) for ever being a distraction for a kill, the 1-50 couldn't work because the spartan points, as much as i don't like CoD or BF, there ranking would be a nice adition to the world conquering Halo Universe. Well i'm hoping it just runs on the Spartan points, but if it requires a certain performance in a certain amount of games to rank up, while you do not de-rank that would be the best, Almost everyone here plays Reach (If you don't why are you here?) and sometimes you go into matches with people that plain out don't know what they're doing (Team Killing, Taking down your shields so you die, tea-bagging kills) those people along with many more like that will be on Halo 4, so do you really want to be teamed up with people like that? Being the top rank then at a fast speed climb down even more? Halo 2 it was to hard to rank up (While it was the most classic Halo and the funnest) Halo 3 like mentioned had boosters and people who sold there 50's, Reach you ranked up with time, the Inheritors on Reach are the real Halo fans (While many are extreamly rude) because they play to play, what do you get out of playing Reach? Nothing but a good time, armor is worthless besides looks, so why do so many people play it then? They play it for the fun of Halo. In the latest edition of Game Informer, it explains "You're going to start off as a recruit, and proceed through the ranks, as you rank up you'll unlock more abilities. You gain Spartan points, which you can use to purchase items to put in your loadouts. You can construct these loadouts around your preferred playstyle."