In my eyes a perfect ranking system is a ranking system where EVERY game you play is competetive and never feels to one sided. Unfortunately the way reach is that is the exact opposite of what is happening. If you search in a team of 4 players 90% of the time you demolish the other team while barely putting any effort in. On the other hand if you search alone you play against a team of 4 or 3 that has teamwork and are on a same general skill level as each other, great for their team, not for yours. Every game i search alone i get matched with xxkittenkiller32xx or some random kid who is entering a playlist or halo in general for the first time without a mic and no awareness at all, making it near impossible to win a game with their 1kill and 25deaths. That being said what i want out of halo 4 is a ranking system that seperates you completely from players of different skill levels so that if you feel like playing alone, you can.
Sample Ranking system
4 divisions each with a numerical value that displays your progression through those divisions.
Division A , B, C, D whatever you want to title it has ranks 1-25 ....1 and division A being the lowest, 25 and division D being the highest. Players in the A division play against and ONLY against players in the A division or lower if they are searching against a t04 (see bottom of post for example). the numerical rank of yourself vs the opposing players numerical ranks should influence what % of a level you go up and down in order to insure you are only ranking up fast if you beat players who SHOULD be more skilled than your current rank shows. Example : a 7A goes up against a team with an average level of 16A, the player wins and should be awarded a certain % of level based on how much higher or lower their opponents average was. This will help ensure that a player doesn't just get lucky and move up through a division fast because he kept playing with people on the lowest portion of that division.
Now to the whole searching alone or searching with a team problem. If searching in a team of 2 you should be matched with a team of 2 on your team and 2 teams of 2 on the other team,
if you search in 3s it should be 2 teams of 3 and 1 random person added in on each team with a rank close to that of your groups.
if searching 4s well you should only match vs other teams of 4 because it is the only way to ensure a close competitive game.
a problem i can see with this is that players in a higher division match up with a friend in a lower division or on a newer account to play worse players, this can be solved simply by only factoring the players who are in the highest bracket.
Example : a team of 4 searches and their ranks are D20 D19 D25 and their friend is a B12 ONLY the players in D division should count towards the teams average skill and only search for teams that are equal to those players only. This will help make sure that players cant manipulate the system to play lower ranked kids for whatever the reason may be.
This to me would be the ideal ranking system, please leave constructive feedback in the posts below and tell me what you think
