We are pleased to announce, just days away from the worldwide Halo 4 launch and the first MLG Halo 4 tournament in Dallas, the Competitive Skill Rank system in Halo 4. The CSR will appear post-launch in an update to Halo Waypoint and associated Smartglass applications.
When will it launch?
The short version is CSR will launch early next year when it’s ready. We have an extensive post-launch plan for Halo 4, including DLC, playlist updates, and title updates. As soon as we have a confirmed launch date for the Waypoint update that includes CSR, we’ll make an announcement. Set your expectations for release timing appropriately since this will require delicate tuning, testing and implementation for Waypoint Web, Waypoint Console and Smartglass integration and is a feature designed specifically for the competitive community.
What is it?
At Halo 4’s launch, the competitive skill system will measure your performance against other players in Halo 4 War Games and use this information to match you up against opponents of comparable skill ranks. When the CSR system is fully implemented post-launch, Waypoint will assign each player a visible and detailed Skill Rank, viewable in the player profile section of Halo Waypoint.
How will it rank me?
All players will be ranked on a per-hopper basis, so, for example, you will have a unique CSR for your Slayer Pro games vs. your CTF games. CSR is currently planned to use a familiar and easy to understand 1-50 scale (subject to change or alteration). Your CSR will go up and down based on match outcomes.
Which playlists will support CSR?
All competitive playlists will support and track CSR. As the playlists will continuously change post-launch, the exact list of playlists that will support CSR will be determined when the system is ready to drop.
Will a CSR be ‘assigned to me’ once the system launches? Or do I need to start fresh?
Matchmaking and hoppers will be tracking and analyzing data from Day 1, and when the final settings for CSR are in place, we’ll make the call on whether to use existing data as a baseline for your CSR, or to start everyone fresh in new playlists.
Why the delay?
We know how important skill rank is, and we take skill integrity very seriously – we want to make sure we’ve taken the time to test, tune, and balance the CSR system in a live environment, and identify problems and potential exploits before launching the system publically.
Taking the time to test and tune the system ensures we can deliver a very accurate and meaningful skill rank, and gives our competitive playlists time to mature to for optimize a wide range of playlist and game settings.
Enjoy the launch!
We’re incredibly excited for Halo 4 to launch, and to see you at one of our worldwide events, or online November 6th. We see this announcement as just one of many new experiences and features coming post-launch to Halo 4 and are excited to share more with you in the future.
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