In our August Drop Pod preview blog, we outlined a few upcoming changes to Halo Infinite matchmaking that would be landing this month. As these updates draw nearer, we wanted to outline them again and provide a little more detail. The focus over the next week will be to improve matchmaking in Ranked and update our playlist offerings.

To get things started, let’s take a closer look at everything happening in matchmaking over the next few days. 

Ranked Experience 

In preparation for Ranked Doubles, we'll be updating how we determine skill (MMR), which will help us make better matches and improve the accuracy of CSR ranks. This will require additional maintenance that involves resetting CSR ranks. We plan on deploying these changes early on Aug 23, with the maintenance window lasting a few hours. During this time, Ranked Arena will not be available, though all other playlists and online services should be available. 

In the days leading up to the maintenance window, we will have two other small changes rolling out as well. The first change, which has started today, is a small Ranked experiment with CSR that will be running until we close out this current ranked period. The impact should be minimal, but it will help us gather information for potential future ranked improvements. The second change is that the Fireteam CSR Limit, which has been active in both Solo/Duo playlists, will begin to take effect in Open Crossplay starting Monday, Aug 22. To learn more about the Fireteam CSR Limit, please visit this page on the Halo Support site.

Playlist Offerings 

Next Tuesday will also bring about the addition of two new playlists: Ranked Doubles and Team Doubles. In order to help make room for these two new additions, the Last Spartan Standing playlist will be rotating out of the lineup. As with all playlists, we will continue to monitor their individual health in addition to the health of the entire matchmaking experience. If all these playlists perform well, we will continue experimenting with adding or rotating more playlists in the future. 

Since that was quite a bit of info all at once, here’s a quick summary of the timeline for the matchmaking updates:

• Friday, Aug 19 – Ranked experiment begins (should have minimal player-facing impact) 
• Monday, Aug 22 @ 11am – Fireteam CSR Limit applies to Open Crossplay 
• Tuesday, Aug 23 @ 10am PT – CSR rank reset occurs and Ranked maintenance begins, taking Ranked Arena offline for ~3hrs 
• Tuesday, Aug 23 @ 10am PT – Team Doubles (social) goes live 
• Tuesday, Aug 23 @ 11am PT – Last Spartan Standing comes down 
• Tuesday, Aug 23 @ 1pm PT – Ranked Arena, Ranked Doubles, Team Doubles come online 

If you have any feedback around these changes when they go live, please be sure to share your thoughts right here on our Forums.

We’ll see you all online for some Doubles action soon!