343 Industries' redemption tour continues. After delaying Halo Infinite for over a year, 343 finally released the game to both critical acclaim and commercial success in late 2021. Several months later, 343 continues to make tweaks and improvements to Halo Infinite in a bid to turn it into a successful live-service game. As part of its latest changes to the game, 343 is resetting the ranks of all Halo Infinite competitive players.
343's community manager, John Junyszek, uploaded a new Halo Waypoint post explaining the changes. One of the biggest takeaways is that players might have to find themselves a full rank lower going forward after placement. According to Junyszek, Halo Infinite's "Competitive Skill Ranking" system was "overly generous". 343 blames this systematic issue for the imbalance of player skill across Halo Infinite's competitive matches. 343 is hoping to solve this by changing the CSR for a more accurate reflection of a player's skill.
The silver lining here is that 343 raised the cap on how high players can rank after playing their first ten placement matches. Instead of the Diamond 1 placement cap, players can go up as high as Diamond 5 after placement. 343 added that this will minimize the disruption the rankings reset will cause and make it so that Onyx players "spend less time in Diamond since the system already knows that they are likely an Onyx player."
