If you're like me and you love playing Halo online, then you have to agree with me that there are a few things that are ruining any sort of enjoyment from playing against people on your skill level. I have come to accept a few things when playing any sort of game online. A few I can live with and a few I can't. The ones I can live with are your run-of-the-mill cheaters. You know who I mean, the ones who get modded controllers, or know all the secrets in the game to jump to secret places. These people are equivalent to taking back some extra cash at Monopoly, or looking ahead at words in Taboo.
The one thing I can't live with is de-rankers. If you are unfamiliar with the term, I'll explain. When playing Halo online in multi-player, you receive a ranking based essentially on your wins and losses and how you perform during the game. These rankings are intended to have players compete with other people of their skill level. I'm unsure how high the rankings go but it starts at 1 and works it's way upward from there. I have played around 1800 games in Team Slayer (a game type that pits 4 players against 4 others and the first to 50 kills wins) and my highest ranking is 41. It's a pretty high ranking for the average Halo player and I think I've pretty much hit my ceiling. I'm not getting any better. I still enjoy the competition but most of the people at the same ranking are better. Because of this my ranking often slips back down to the upper 30's. Then I'll win some games and get back to a level 40 and then lose some and go back to the 30's and so on and so on. In theory, it's a great system. It keeps players in their skill level and keeps games fun and exciting.
A De-ranker is a term given to those that purposely lower their ranking. They do this by joining a game and then not playing, committing suicide or even worse, betraying (killing a teammate). The downfall of this is that it is now 3 vs 4 or in some cases 3 vs 5 and it makes everyone else on the de-ranker's team also de-rank by virtue of the loss. The idea behind it is that if you are having trouble winning at a level 40, keep losing and de-ranking until you are a level 20 and then dominate the competition. It's kind of pathetic actually, but for some reason people hate a challenge.
The problem with this is that X-Box Live doesn't have a proper monitoring system to rid the world of these people. There is no one looking at players records to see if they are doing this and actually leave it up to the players to police these evil doers. I have filed many complaints and never heard the end result, but the fact is that people are still doing it which leads me to believe that nothing is being done about this. There needs to be an X-Box Live department dedicated to eradicating the people from not only Halo but any other online games where you rely on other teammates. It's annoying when you spend what little free time you have trying to unwind with some Halo only to have it ruined by forces out of your control.
