Skill

Halo 3’s Matchmaking system includes many new options and abilities. One of them is giving you some new powers while you use the system to find games and opponents. Now, the process of meeting people with similar skills and experience has been improved.

Experience and Rating Points (RP)
One of Halo 2’s defining features was its ability to match players of similar skill levels, for enjoyable games with the fairest outcomes. Although it was a success, Bungie used that experience and data to build a more accurate and fairer system, ensuring even more balance, better matching and less cheating and abuse than ever before.

The Halo 3 engine measures both skill level and experience in its Matchmaking system. Some players desire to become pros, while others will prefer to haunt the middle ranks and enjoy the game just for fun. But every player will be rewarded with experience Rating Points (RP) - earned for time served in Halo 3 Matchmaking. Progress from raw recruit to decorated officer, a reward for good sportsmanship and yet another way to make sure games are evenly matched.

Wherever a Gamertag is seen in Halo 3, it will display universally visible experience "RPs" and their associated rank status (Sergeant, for example). It will then be known how long you’ve been playing – and how that compares to their relative skill level in a given playlist. A player with a large amount of RPs and a low Matchmaking skill level, might simply be new to that specific matchmaking playlist. Knowing that is the key to knowing your enemy. The layers of complexity that has built into the system should make it better and less prone to abuse than ever, while simultaneously enriching the player experience.

Stats, medals and other data will all be displayed right in the game, highlighting top performing players in the postgame carnage report, and visible to anyone who highlights your Gamertag. And yet with all this emphasis on progress, behind the scenes, huge strides are being taken in making the act and the consequences of cheating and grieving, less rewarding for those who tend to do this.

As with Halo 2, stats will also be available online, through Bungie.net. They are now live on Bungie.net with more detail, more information and more flexibility than ever before. It is a massively feature-rich environment for stat-watchers everywhere.