Hello fellow Guardians. In this post, I would like to provide a suggestion to change how ranking and matchmaking works in Season 6 and going forward. I will keep it brief and easy to understand. This is definitely not inspired by the Halo system of the early to late 2000's and any resemblance is just coincidental. [b]Current System[/b] Currently, there are 6 tiers to the Glory and Valor rank system: Guardian, Brave, Heroic, Fabled, Mythic, and Legend. In competitive, whenever you lose a game, are disconnected for any reason, or quit a game, you lose glory points. In quickplay, you do not lose any valor points. There is a streak which improves how many points you get per game. There does not appear to be any observable method to how players are matched. It is not based on skill or location. I ran the IP logs through a geo IP database for the last 100 matches I've played with the observation of people all the way in Canada, down to Brazil being matched against me. I live near NYC/D.C. It is not based on skill as I see people who are MLG/streamers and I see wet noodles who have somehow ended up killing themselves with their own guns. I can maybe win 1, but get stuck against MLG players until about 10 games later when the game puts me with people under 3 K/D. Either way, the system blows and is not very fun. A better system will make the sweaty aspect based on skill, not just from avoiding shotguns and nova warp supers. [b]New System[/b] [u]Rankings[/u] In the proposed system, the idea of competitive and quickplay lists will no longer exist. Glory and Valor will no longer exist. Instead, the system will be replaced with a tiered ranking system which piggy backs off of the existing 6 tiers and introduces a final tier. The sixth tier is the highest tier and called "Commander". Here is a table of the rankings and experience [url=https://i.imgur.com/5YqMbST.png]Rank Table[/url] More tiers/levels could be added if needed. [u]Experience[/u] There are two aspects in which experience can be distributed. The first aspect is the game outcome while the second aspect is based on personal performance. If you win a game or tie with the other team, you earn one experience point. If you lose, you do not earn any experience points. If you quit or interrupt your connection, you lose one experience point until you reach the lowest experience of the current named rank. This means you could go from R4 Legend down to L1 Legend before stopping progression. The reason you don't lose experience when you lose a game is you still improve your skill. This system is based on skill. If you could simply lower your rank too much from losing, it would make things unfair for lower leveled players. No experience is given in private games. Based on how you perform will play into how you get experience. If you have a K/D/A above or equal to 1.0, you will earn an additional experience point regardless of the game outcome. If you are below, you will not earn additional experience. This is to reward players who do well solo, but might not be on the best teams. You will have a global rank, a solo rank, and a season rank. Your global rank is your overall performance, your solo rank is your performance in solo games, and your season rank is your performance over the past season. The season rank resets every season. Each rank unlocks new shaders, weapons, glows, ornaments, armor, emotes, ships, emblems, sparrows, and ghost shells from vendors so you can show off your skill. Each named rank will have pinnacle weapons you can earn and which rotate each season. [u]Matchmaking[/u] There will be two playlists types to choose from: ranked and unranked. Unranked is more like the quick playlist while ranked is similar to competitive mode. Ranked games affect your seasonal rank. When queuing into a playlist, you can choose from solo-based games or team-based games similar to how you select a different nightfall or select raid difficulty on the game screen. Solo-based games will put you into games like Rumble or Solo Mayhem. Team-based games will put you into the rest of the types we have. Unranked games will prioritize what you see in the quickplay list now and not things seen in competitive. If your team stays in after the game has ended, you will be able to vote on a possible map to play on next. When queuing as a solo player, you are matched with others based on the following criteria: named rank grouping, K/D/A over recent games compared to overall games, and location/latency to other players. If the server can not find enough players to start a game within 90 seconds, you are moved into a different queue and fill in spots of premade teams. When you are with a team, you are matched with other teams based on the aforementioned items on a per-player basis. If the server can not find a team that is close in those items, the game then adjusts the threshold based on the median skill of the group so that good groups can't just carry a low skilled player and get matched with low skill groups. The goal of this system is to create a competitive and fun experience based on skill and not just weapons. It will try to match solo players with other solo players. I know there was this whole ordeal about there not being enough solo players for the playlist awhile back and it was resulting in long queue times. That being said, how many updates have Bungie released, only to find out they were not working as intended from a bug on their end? I assume that was the case with the playlist back then. Thanks for reading and have a nice day.