Season 1Primer

This is still a beta.

This is the first run of a ranking system built from scratch for ANZ. It is still young, which means some of it is going to be wrong in ways we cannot see from here.

Expect things to move. Numbers may be recalculated, thresholds may change once there is real data behind them, and something that looks settled today may not be by the end of the season. That is what a beta is for.

So tell us when something looks wrong. A rank that makes no sense, a stat that does not match what you remember, a page that reads badly. Put it in the Development tab or message _vrall on Discord. It is genuinely the fastest way this gets better, and it is worth more now than at any later point.

01Nothing is recorded unless someone runs the tracker

This board does not get its numbers from NeatQueue, and it cannot see your games on its own. Halo writes a carnage report to your PC when a game ends. The Carnage Watcher is a small Windows app that reads those reports and sends them here. Nobody types anything in and nothing is estimated.

That app is optional. Nobody has to run it and nobody is going to chase you about it. But it is worth being blunt about what that means: a game nobody was recording does not exist here. Not missing, not pending. It was never captured and it cannot be recovered later.

One person in the lobby running it is enough to capture the whole game, for everybody in it.

02Open it before you queue

This is the one thing on this page worth acting on.

Halo does not keep a history of your carnage reports. It writes the report for the game that just finished, and the next multiplayer game you play overwrites it. There is only ever one, and it is only ever the last game.

So the watcher has to be running at the moment a game ends, to copy that report before Halo replaces it. It cannot go back for a game you played earlier, because by then there is nothing left to go back to. Play three games and then open it, and those three are gone for good. This is not a limitation we chose and it is not something a later fix recovers.

So open it before you queue rather than once you are already playing. Leave it running and it stays out of the way, and you never have to think about it again.

03What counts and what does not

Not everything recorded ends up in your stats.

• Games nobody finished are excluded. If a match fell apart, it does not count toward anyone's numbers.
• A half-recorded series shows the wrong scoreline. A matchup sitting there as 1-0 is the giveaway, since that is not a result a best of three can end on. It means games were missed. Another reason to start the watcher before the first game rather than midway through.
• If something looks off, flag it. Any game can be flagged for review. A flagged game gets looked at rather than quietly deleted, and nothing is excluded without a reason shown publicly.

04Casual is the main queue, and you can opt out

Casual is ranked now. It is the one main 8s queue, so it moves your skill rating, it is on the public leaderboard, and a casual matchup shows its full detail publicly like any other.

That also means the numbers matter. If somebody was running the watcher, every kill, death, assist, medal and bit of objective work in that game was captured and counts.

If you would rather your casual games stayed off the board, opt out. Sign in with Discord, open My Stats and use the casual opt-out. Your casual stats then show as "Anonymous", and you leave the casual rankings.

Opting out changes what other people see. It does not stop the games being recorded, and your own stats stay visible to you.

05Your profile

Click any name anywhere on the site and you get that player's profile: their stats, their maps, their gametypes, their rivals.

Sign in with Discord and your own profile gets two things nobody else can see.

06How ranking works, roughly

It is Halo 3's own ranking system, rebuilt. Same idea as the 1 to 50 you remember: the system keeps a running estimate of how good you are, and of how sure it is about that estimate. Beat a team it expected you to lose to and your rank moves a lot. Beat one it expected you to beat and it barely moves at all.

There is one change. In Halo 3 only the result mattered. Here, the result still matters most, and how you actually played scales it.

• Win and play well, and you gain more than the win alone would give you.
• Lose but play well, and you lose less than the scoreline alone would cost you.
• Win while contributing nothing, and you gain less.

It is not a separate points system bolted on the side, and your stats can never outvote the result. The result decides which way your rank moves. Your stats decide how far.

What playing well means here

Two things, weighted equally. Your kills, deaths and assists, and your objective contribution.

Objective contribution is not just captures and hold time. Those only credit whoever finished the job, and say nothing about the three people who made it possible. So it reads the medals the game already hands out and measures the rest of the work as well: pulling the flag, returning your own, killing the enemy carrier, and the fighting around the hill and the ball. All of it counts as objective play in its own right.

Every queue has its own rating

Your skill is worked out per queue, exactly as Halo 3 did it. Casual, scrims and 2s are separate numbers, and being a 40 in one says nothing about the others.

What moves a skill rating

• Casual 8s, scrims and 2s series, each moving their own number. The unit is the series, not the individual game, so taking a best of three the long way does not earn more than winning it quickly.
• Not if you have opted out of casual. Your casual games then stay off the rankings.

The insignia is a different thing to the number

Halo 3 showed you two things and so do we. The number is skill. The insignia beside it is service rank, and that is earned with XP rather than by skill alone, with a minimum skill needed to reach the higher ones. It is why two players can both be a 50 and wear different badges.

XP moves you through the grades of your insignia. Your 1 to 50 skill is what unlocks the higher ranks. How XP is earned is in section 07.

Both gates have to be met. XP alone will not make you a Colonel if your skill has not got there, and a 50 with very little XP is still a Sergeant. Your skill here is your best across any queue.

Two thresholds

• Five matchups in a queue before you get a rank in it. Until then the site says you are qualifying. It is not stalling, it genuinely does not know enough about you yet.
• Three games before you appear on the public leaderboard. That is one series, near enough. Until then the board does not list you yet, so a single game cannot put anybody on top of it.

07XP

You earn 1 XP for each game you win. A loss earns 0. It is per game, not per series, so winning a best of three 2-1 is two XP.

Some periods are Double XP, where each win earns 2. The mods switch Double XP on from the admin portal, so it can start without warning.

The leaderboard has an XP column and sorts by XP by default. You can sort by rank instead. XP carries you up through the grades of your insignia, and your 1 to 50 skill is what unlocks the higher ranks.

All 42 insignia, and what each one takes

Insignia		Skill needed	XP needed