Perhaps - maybe - if it was part of some larger, themed gametype where the class was pre-determined and unable to be swapped it would work.

https://www.bungie.net/7_Bungie-Weekly-Update--11202014/en/News/News?aid=12419

Damnit Bungie, WHY ARE YOUR SYSTEMS SO OPAQUE!?!

I'll see myself out of it

This gives you a great idea of what it's like to be the lowest level in Iron Banner

To really measure skill you'd need to look at things like:

Not really. You only need to worry about whether you win or not.

Obviously you need to worry about the win / loss record of the player you are gauging. But you also need to look at the wins and losses of other players when they are playing with that player. If a player causes other players they play with to win more than they otherwise would, it means that player is more skilled. You can compare relative to one, or all the players on your team to get a very good idea of how skilled the player is in a team, and even break down optimal team compositions.

Reaction Time
Overall Accuracy
Headshot %
Encounter Survival Rate
% of team points earned
Team win %
Points earned out of all players in a game (used as a comparative for ranking purposes)
Average points of teammates in games with this player vs. in games without this player
Other known win influencing factors such as: When this player is on a team, does that team capture more or fewer objectives than the average. What about the enemy team? Does this player's team collect more or less Heavy Ammo than the average. Enemy team?

And so forth.

You could probably come up with hundreds of stats to track for metrics like this. Compare them all to the average of all players, and then average out your player's rank. Bam, you've been ranked.

Here's the trick... You should NOT match your player against only players in the same skill rank. Rather, teams should be assembled to reach an average overall rank among all players. That exposes the players to different skill enemies, and provides opportunity for each to improve against enemies that are not within their tier of play. Maybe there should be alternating playlists, where some are all players of roughly equal skill, and some are matched teams of equal overall skill, but with wider internal variance.

The mobs get a 33% shift for being a level higher, but I doubt IB is anywhere near this huge of a change, so naturally there is little difference seen when players are using maxed out purples.

This sniper rifle is a two shot kill in the body and a one shot headshot, which means it's the same as every other sniper rifle in IB in terms of damage.

You've described the situation in such warped terms that... wow.

Efrideet's Spear + final round = 1 shot kill on their toe.

EDIT:
1. You're wrong.
2. Why do think it should be different?

Okay, you're describing an extremely specific situation where you've also wasted spent two shots elsewhere, so in reality this is a three shot kill.

It's a counter-example. You calling it a 'three shot kill' still leaves that status unaffected.

'Number of shots to kill' on it's own is just such a warped, narrow, way of looking at it so as to be pointless.

You are completely missing my point. Take any gun at 300 attack power in iron banner, and it is just as effective as a 331 version of that gun. You're comparing apples and oranges instead of looking at the actual issue I have here, which is that Iron banner is supposed to let your gear matter, but - as the OP said - the degree of change from one tier of gear to another is too small to be significant for most players. And number of shots to kill isn't "warped." There's no incentive to get a 331 weapon if you have a 300 weapon that you really like, because similar weapons take a similar number of shots to kill. There's no advantage bestowed by having a 331 weapon. If you have a 300 Efreet's Spear that has your beloved final round perk, guess what? It's a 1-shot kill with that final round in today's level 32 iron banner, and I don't think it should be. Below max level weapons should not be as effective in Iron Banner as max level weapons.

so 1: You're ignoring the intent of the post, which is normal bullet damage for a 300 attack sniper is effectively the same as a 331 attack sniper. A 300 Efreet's spear with final round would 1-shot with that last round just as well as a 331 version.

2: Because Bungie has stated that in the Iron Banner your gear matters. But that doesn't seem to be the case. A 300 weapon is equally effective to a 331 weapon as far as I can tell.

Right, it was designed in the way that gear close to the maximum would behave similarly. Gear still very much matters outside that narrow range at the very top. Light level affects the damage grenade, melee and supers do. I've tried dropping to 29 and suddenly my grenades didn't quite kill when I expected them to.

Try a 242 Attack rare-tier weapon next time you're in IB.

Again, you're missing the point. There should be a noticeable difference between level 32 and level 31, not just level 32 and level 29 and greater. It doesn't have to be massive, but you should notice a difference when you play at level 32 from when you play at 31. This far into the expansion, anyone who has been playing for a month or longer should easily be able to field at least 300 weapons, which pretty much negates the level differences of Iron Banner, making it basically the same as Control in the regular Crucible in terms of gameplay. You're saying "gear close to maximum" but that actually means "brand new and never upgraded exotics and raid weapons, as well as old pre-expansion weapons that are fully upgraded." Those guns simply should not be as competitive as post-expansion weapons that are fully upgraded to 331.

Personally, I'd like to see almost the opposite of what it is now: A steeper initial curve, that wasn't so bad later on. Maybe an inverted parabolic curve, where the difference between a 32 and 31 is big enough to require an extra shot from a 31 to kill a 32, and then the difference becomes less the further you go down, maxing out around 5 levels of difference, such that a level 20 and a level 27 are basically the same effectiveness against a level 32, but still quite a bit less effective than a 30 would be.

That would cause lower level players to, I think, feel less excluded from the event, and would still provide ample incentive to higher players to always bring their max level gear, and would also make max level players feel more powerful than they do now.

Did some quick research on this. It appears that many players with low-level guardians also get this buff when playing crucible.

How much of your skill tree was unlocked while you were playing? Perhaps it applies to players who haven't completely unlocked the armour/agility/recovery bonus perks, and balances that?

Void walker is fully leveled up, and I get the stat boost.

A totally valid criticism of Trueskill is that it can't separate, identify and quantify the 'teamwork effect' of a familiar group of players since it treat's the team skill as a sum of the individual players. Arguably too, the skill estimates are only valid in too narrow of an application. In the real world of online games with various gametypes, teamsizes and maps there is no inter-prediction of skill and no model of how to do so.

Trueskill simply needs to incorporate moneyball style algorithms, which were designed to determine just this.

TrueSkill is not a terribly accurate measure of skill because it heavily weights winning,

In fact winning or losing is the only gamestat Trueskill takes into account.

which is not a skill/talent that an individual controls.

Each individual of a team will have a partial contribution to a game's outcome. Trueskill recognises this and that is why the larger the team size is (and the fewer teams), the more games it takes to converge an individual player's skill estimate.

Or in another way, the amount of information from each game has to be split up between the members of a team. In small teams (1v1) all of that information is about one player directly relative to another player, but in larger teams (8v8) the information has to be split many ways.

Winning requires all team members to play well (or at least enough to make up for the worst).

Nope, they don't need to play well, they just have to be better than the other team.

This is why you still get terribly unbalanced matches.

Trueskill makes no attempt (and can't really be expected to) account for performance variations or run-away wins. The example given on the trueskill page is of 2 people who are racing cars. B makes a bold move at a corner to try to overtake Player A, they fail, and crash. B drives slowly for the rest of the race - knowing they've lost - and end up crossing the finishing line 30 seconds after A. B isn't really 30 seconds worse than A, and if they hadn't tried to overtake would have come within a few seconds of A. But the point of Trueskill isn't to find 'how much better' they are in score-terms but rather to find a relative ranking and theoretical draw probabilities. B will do other races against C, D and others and win those instead, placing their estimate between A and the rest of the field.

A great player who plays with bad teams will still have a lower TrueSkill than is accurate for his or her abilities.

If a player chooses to play with those players, then that is their choice to be ranked the same as them. Conversely, the people they play with will have slightly higher skill estimates than they really are.

A totally valid criticism of Trueskill is that it can't separate, identify and quantify the 'teamwork effect' of a familiar group of players since it treat's the team skill as a sum of the individual players. Arguably too, the skill estimates are only valid in too narrow of an application. In the real world of online games with various gametypes, teamsizes and maps there is no inter-prediction of skill and no model of how to do so.

However, in the narrow scope of a single playlist, a player is expected to be matched into different teams, play against different teams and their individual skill is slowly teased out from the results of many games. Everyone does this, so the incidence of 'bad teammates' vs. 'good teamates' and 'I had a good game' vs. 'I had a bad game' should even out.

Personally, I think creating an algorithm that does not weight winning so heavily and K/D and KA/D more would be a better one. Positive k/d's almost guarantee you took more points from the other team than they took from you, which essentially is the key to winning. Get enough positive K/Ds and you win. That way, individuals with high K/D's would get ranked higher in TrueSkill and you would face people as adept at killing as you are.

Problem is that any metric that is not about winning and losing directly is potentially open to abuse. It also immediately favours certain playstyles. i.e. go around killing, hanging back, sniping, rather than actually contributing to winning the game by making captures.

If you remember, Halo Reach had the 'Arena Rating' system that attempted something along these lines. It favoured a playstyle around hoarding power weapons for yourself, rather than what was strictly best for the team's liklihood of winning.

This sniper rifle is a two shot kill in the body and a one shot headshot, which means it's the same as every other sniper rifle in IB in terms of damage.

You've described the situation in such warped terms that... wow.

Efrideet's Spear + final round = 1 shot kill on their toe.

EDIT:
1. You're wrong.
2. Why do think it should be different?

Okay, you're describing an extremely specific situation where you've also wasted spent two shots elsewhere, so in reality this is a three shot kill.

It's a counter-example. You calling it a 'three shot kill' still leaves that status unaffected.

'Number of shots to kill' on it's own is just such a warped, narrow, way of looking at it so as to be pointless.

so 1: You're ignoring the intent of the post, which is normal bullet damage for a 300 attack sniper is effectively the same as a 331 attack sniper. A 300 Efreet's spear with final round would 1-shot with that last round just as well as a 331 version.

2: Because Bungie has stated that in the Iron Banner your gear matters. But that doesn't seem to be the case. A 300 weapon is equally effective to a 331 weapon as far as I can tell.

Right, it was designed in the way that gear close to the maximum would behave similarly. Gear still very much matters outside that narrow range at the very top. Light level affects the damage grenade, melee and supers do. I've tried dropping to 29 and suddenly my grenades didn't quite kill when I expected them to.

Try a 242 Attack rare-tier weapon next time you're in IB.

- Change the damage curves so that being even one level higher or lower is significant.
- Add in elemental shields determined by what subclass you are playing. If someone keeps owning you with a certain gun switch subclasses!
- Perhaps change kinetic damage to subclass-element damage so you don't have to beat a raid on hard or something just to do elemental damage consistently. This would make subclass selection even more important.
- Alter the scoring structure so kills award more or less points based on level. Sure, you can mop up that level 20 guy but doing so gets you next to nothing while if he manages to get the final hit on you he's going to get a massive bonus.
- Maybe do something like starting each match with ammo in all guns and supers pre-charged? Matches would start with a bang and shrewd teams would keep a guy or two back to put on the hurt a bit later in the match...

Or it could be a complete flaming wreck of a disaster ;p

So... ActionSack 2.0? :D

I think it would be neat if your subclass determined what element your shields were. I'd forever play as a Titan just to annoy people with Mythoclasts!

See, now this is actually getting interesting to me. If our shields were elemental based, and elemental burns were added into the mix, it might be a cool little meta layer on top of the combat.

Or it could be a complete flaming wreck of a disaster ;p