When Operation: Blue Team comes to Halo Infinite next week, it’ll include a hefty playlist update. We’ll be consolidating some things for Match Composer and adding some new experiences that we think you’ll be pleased with as well. Let’s get into things!
Match Composer
As Halo Infinite has evolved, the Infinite team has worked hard to bring a ton of new experiences to the game: Husky Raid, Fiesta Castle Wars, Action Sack, Firefight, Infection, BTB Sentry Defense, and so many more. As a result, there are now a whole lotta options for you to choose from in the Match Composer. (The options are not quite infinite but pretty close!) We’ve monitored the data and seen what is being selected or searched for most often and we’ve been closely evaluating the health of the various playlists.
At the same time, we’ve also heard your feedback that some of the current Match Composer lists are a bit confusing and not as coherent as they could be. With this in mind, and with spring on the horizon, we’re taking this opportunity to do a bit of spring cleaning: specifically tightening up and re-arranging part of the Match Composer.
Q&A With the Infinite Team
There’s a lot coming with this update so we sat down with the Infinite team and chatted a bit about the upcoming changes.
What are the ultimate goals for playlist health overall?
The ultimate goal for all playlists is striking a balance between low match times and solid match quality with the least amount of skill discrepancy between the two teams as possible. We want players to go into matches to have fun and get in those matches fast so trying to balance the two is always a delicate dance.
With Match Composer, players have more freedom and flexibility to choose how they play Halo matchmaking than ever before. We’re seeing players take advantage of that across the board which we love to see. The downside to the Match Composer, however, is that it’s entirely possible to choose too narrow of a search resulting in really long search times to find a match.
What are some ways you go about ensuring players can get those “good matches” of short queues and teams with low skill discrepancy?
We started by looking at all the playlists available to players today in the Match Composer and there are a lot! There are nine social playlists with over 100 modes across the various lists…28 in Rumble Pit alone. Even within a single playlist, there are many, many different ways for players to “silo” (aka create a search so narrow that the time to match is very long) themselves via their search parameters. We also took a look at the options across different playlists and have heard your feedback of, “This doesn’t make sense here, it should be over there.”
The goal with this update is to reduce the number of silos by working to group like content with like. When we look at Action Sack, we agree that that’s the logical home for some of the more wacky or party modes just like we agree that “Arena Objective” is probably not the best home for Team Snipers.
How do you identify the problem areas and how do you know where to focus your efforts when working on things?
So our first stop when it comes to checking playlist health/data is the analytics team. We can see what silos players are choosing, how popular a specific silo is (or isn’t), and we can see that across each playlist. So from Quick Play to Action Sack, we can see what modes players are gravitating towards versus what isn’t resonating as well.
If we look at Rumble Pit as an example (remember it has 28 separate modes in the playlist itself!), here are the top 5 most searched modes (note: these are all FFA variants):
- Community Shotty Snipes
- Fiesta Slayer
- Ninja Slayer
- Shotty Snipes
- Slayer
From the information we gather based on your selections and playtime, we can see that players in Rumble Pit prefer the more “serious” game modes available to them so moving ones that feel out of place, such as FFA Purple Reign and Kong Slayer, to a more appropriate playlist, like Action Sack, just makes a lot of sense.
We’ve also observed that when players are wanting to play Shotty Snipers, for example, they select both versions available – Shotty Snipers and Community Shotty Snipers. To help limit the silos available, we’re combining the Community modes with the studio modes into one.
Another good example to look at is Quick Play. There’s currently 20 different modes in the playlist and with the top modes being:
- Fiesta
- Husky Raid
- Super Fiesta
- Super Husky Raid
- Team Slayer
The silos at the bottom are incredibly narrow and aren’t resulting in many matches as a whole in their current state. We recognize those are fun and unique modes so we’re looking to move them to other playlists where they will hopefully be more thematically fitting.
You have been putting out a lot of new playlists recently. Is there anything fun you can tease about what’s coming?
We’ve been really working hard on the combination of new and refreshed experiences to bring to the game. We don’t want to spoil what’s on the horizon but we do have a few exciting modes coming soon! Maybe as soon as Tuesday…
A huge thank you to the team for all their hard work!
We’re looking for ward to what’s coming next but, in the meantime, here’s a breakdown of what you can find in the various playlists after next week’s update.
Quick Play
- Super Husky Raid CTF
- Super Fiesta: Slayer
- Husky Raid CTF
- Fiesta Slayer
- Arena: Team Slayer
- Arena: Slayer
- Tactical Slayer & Community Tactical Slayer
- VIP
- Team Snipers & Community Team Snipers
- CTF
- CTF Neutral Flag
- Oddball
- King of the Hill
- Strongholds
- Assault: Neutral Bomb
- Assault: One Bomb
Arena Social
We’ve renamed “Arena Objective” to “Arena Social” to be more representative of the experiences provided in the playlist.
- One Flag CTF
- Elimination
- Attrition
- Vampire Oddball
- Extraction
- Land Grab & Community Land Grab
- Slayholds
- Legacy Slayer
- Legacy CTF
- Legacy KOTH
- Legacy Oddball
- One Shot Slayer
- Rock ‘n’ Repulsor
- Escalation
- Fiesta CTF
Big Team Battle
- Slayer
- Fiesta Slayer
- Heavies Slayer
- CTF
- Fiesta CTF
- Heavies CTF
- Total Control
- Fiesta Total Control
- Team Snipers
- One Flag CTF
- Sentry Defense
Rumble Pit
- Fiesta FFA Slayer
- FFA Shotty Snipers & Community Shotty Snipers
- FFA Slayer & Community Slayer
- FFA Ninja Slayer
- FFA Super Escalation Slayer
- Escalation Slayer
- Rock ‘n’ Repulsors
- Ninjanaut
- Juggernaut
- FFA Headhunter
- Vampire oddball
- Fiesta FFA KOTH
- FFA Oddball & Community Oddball
- FFA KOTH & Community FFA KOTH
- FFA Rocket Oddball
- FFA Elimination & FFA Community Elimination
Squad Battle
- Squad Slayer
- CTF 3 Capture
- One Flag CTF
- KOTH
- Assault: One Bomb
- Assault: Neutral Bomb
- Castle Wars
Action Sack
- Speedball
- Goose Halo
- Duckhunt
- Maze Craze
- Infection: Arena
- Infection: Alpha Zombies
- FFA Kong Slayer
- FFA Purple Reign
Team Doubles
- CTF & Community CTF
- Slayer & Community Slayer
- KOTH & Community KOTH
As always, we’ll be monitoring feedback as this rolls out and keeping a close eye on the changes. In the meantime, we’ll see you on the battlefield!