The “Break it Down” Blog

Even though there has no official announcement about a third title update to Gears of War 2 it is all but expected after Rod Fergusson’s, Executive Producer of Gears of War 2, recent post about possible changes to how public matches are ranked in Gears of War 2. The current ranking system is based on Microsoft’s True Skill system but does not take into account how much experience people have with the game. It sounds like Epic is looking to change that.

Hey all,

So we’ve been looking at all the feedback on our skill ranking system and we completely understand why simply making your TrueSkill level visible can be frustrating. The algorithm is complex, so it’s not always clear how your rank will be affected by a particular match and your rank is based on the team’s outcome and not necessarily your individual performance.

So we’re looking to make a change.

What if, instead of skill rank, we instead showed your experience level. You would gain experience through your individual performance in Public multiplayer matches – the higher your score at the end, the more experience you acquire. Of course the experience gained across the different match types would be balanced so you couldn’t just grind on the respawning game types to try and level faster. The experience requirements for each level would grow with each level gained (like a typical RPG) and we’d have 99 levels of experience for you to show off your leetness.

Generally speaking your level will always go up since you’re always acquiring more score, hence experience, with each completed match. The only exception to that would be people quitting. Players that quit would gain an experience penalty that could cause them to be demoted. At the end of every match you will be able to see how much experience you’ve gained and how much further you have to go till the next level.

Since I know what one of the first questions is going to be, initially we wouldn’t have achievements for gaining experience levels because of Xbox LIVE rules that require all post release achievements to be tied to new DLC content. But when new DLC is released, it’s a whole new ball game then.

So, what do you think?

Thanks,

Rod.

Epic is looking for our feedback on this and has started a thread on their forums for people to leave feedback. Personally I’d rather see Subway’s weapon spawns be more balanced, but enhancements to the ranking system would be ok too.