News Updates and More

[Tarvis]

Epic revealed how the matchmaking system worked.

Let’s take a moment to look over the ranking system in Gears of War 2, to make sure everyone understands what they’re looking at when they check out other players online. Your rank in Gears of War 2 multiplayer is based on your TrueSkill rating, which calculates the relative strength of all players on Xbox LIVE.

There are five ranks total, and the first rank is achieved after you play your first multiplayer match. The more Gears 2 matches you win, the higher your rank will be, and your rank will go down when you lose matches. Rank is not affected by Horde Mode and private matches. The ranks are displayed in game using the icons to the left.

TrueSkill is like the chess ELO system, which tries to predict who should win the match based on the skill of the players. If you were predicted to lose and your team wins, then your TrueSkill goes up more than if you won and you were predicted to win. This holds true for the inverse scenario: If you were predicted to win and you lose, then your ranking drops more than if you were predicted to lose.

Rank is not a constantly increasing value, such as is typical in role-playing games (RPGs). Your rank may plateau or even drop as it closes in on your correct and accurate skill level. It will probably take tens of Public Xbox LIVE matches for your rank to move in one direction or another, and it may even take hundreds of matches to achieve a skill with the highest rank we offer, assuming you are good enough to get there.

Also, keep in mind that each rank icon represents a specific range or bucket of TrueSkill values, so while your skill is fluctuating in very small increments from match to match, your rank icon will only change when your skill moves from one bucket to the next. Therefore, your rank is not just about number of kills or experience or the amount of time played. It's an aggregated representation of your skill level based on your wins and losses during Public Xbox LIVE matches. And yes, quitting will lower your rank.

Link to Post

You can view the ranks below.

<img src="/images/ranks.gif">

As for site news, I've began setting up the character pages, and video pages. Hopefully I can have both finished by tomorrow, depending on if I can upload the rest of the videos tonight.

I've also tossed around the idea of seperating site news and gears/xbox news, as that's what I was doing right before zeldaxtreme was closed. Any thoughts?

Also if anyone wants to write for the site, it doesn't matter what it is, reviews/rants/editorials/or even content for the site, just let me know and I'll put it on there. If anyone does so, I will implement a ranking system so people can review each entry, unless anyone thinks that would be a bad idea.

 

[Joe]

Yeah didn't we have a seperate news moderator at ZX? Wasn't it Yoda?

First off we could pluck a few reviews from that Joegan thang, and we should have a rants/review section. Maybe have a blogging thing open to all users instead of just staff? I'll definitely write some stuff for the site, let me know if there's anything in particular you want done.

 

[Logan]

I'll write up some stuff on other games since I'm playing through all those. I'd love to write up some gears stuff such as strategies and what not.

I know Travis was having some problems with it, but it'd be awesome if you could get your capture shit to work. Vids would be neat.

 

[Joe]

Oh yeah we should prolly have some stuff on original Gears too

 

[Tarvis]

I downloaded a good program for my capture card last night, the only problem recording videos is the fact there is a delay which makes it hard to record gameplay. HOWEVER, all I need is a composite to composite connector and I can just have the output from my TV go to the computer, and I can record it that way, so the delay won't effect me at least.

 

[Tarvis]

I thought I had one, but I don't know where it is