I missed it yesterday considering all the series were crazy, congratulations to CommandStation, that is awesome!

This guy is such a gem, dude. He’s so kind to his fans and just a down right good person. So glad to see so much support for him through his transition from Optic. So happy I was part of this moment.

“This is the greatest stream I’ve ever had” - Brad

Renegade: https://twitter.com/Renegade_JW/status/1499170454166065155

Spartan: https://twitter.com/Spartan/status/1499502821175181313

Lucid: https://twitter.com/Lucid_TW/status/1499234907855462402

Snakebite: https://twitter.com/SnakeBiteFPS/status/1499467028482211848

Snip3down: https://twitter.com/Snip3down/status/1498921019599372289

Frosty: https://twitter.com/FrostyBB/status/1499272201362710528

• Called teaming with them the “Worst experience ever”

• Said they had the “Weakest mental ever”

• Renegade never wanted to be on the team. He wanted to go to Sentinels, when that fell through C9 wouldn’t take him back and he joined FaZe but never wanted to be there.

• Also said he didn’t feel respected by Renegade

• The team wanted Bubu over him so he never felt respected by them

• Personalities were very different. Snipe said he tries to be positive (direct quote was “I’m not a negative person and not a fking hater and didn’t fit in with that group in game and in life”) and the team around him was very negative, both in and out of game. Since they weren’t friends or got along, it made every day harder.

Fuck cancer.

Hi there, the great r/CompetitiveHalo community! My name is Leo, and I work as the Community Manager at GameSir. To introduce ourselves, we’re an official Microsoft partner and the team behind Xbox controllers like the popular G7 SE and the newly released G7 Pro, featuring TMR sticks built for competitive play while keeping the sticks anti-drift.

We often hear voices from Halo players, and we’ve been honored to see so many members of r/CompetitiveHalo sharing their experiences with the G7 lineup! However, our previous G7 SE was just not premium enough imo - now with the G7 Pro available, with all the great features & the best sticks on Xbox - we feel it’s the perfect time to be here directly with the Halo community and talk to experienced players like you!

We’ve recently partnered with Complexity and sponsored events like WomenOfHalo and the upcoming HaloWC Warmup III; We're also working with LVT Halo to engage with the incoming HaloWC! Although Halo Infinite is in the later stages of its lifecycle, we want you comp Halo players to put the GameSir & G7 Pro to the test— so we can craft better gear for you guys in future Halo releases!

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🎤 AMA & Giveaway:

We’re here to answer all your questions, or we can just chat — about controller design, TMR stick performance, which controller to choose based on your preference, what's the best setting for your gameplay, our work with Halo pros, what is needed for Halo Players, future products, or anything else random! Just leave a comment below, and you’ll automatically be entered into the giveaway!

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Giveaway Prizes:

5 × GameSir G7 Pro Controllers (Shadow Ember/Mech White)

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How to Enter:

1. Your Reddit account must be at least 30 days old

2. Be a member of r/CompetitiveHalo & r/Gamesir 

3. Upvote & leave a comment below — ask us a question, share your thoughts, or just say hi!

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Winners announced:

October 30th, 2025 PDT

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How will the giveaway work:

through https://www.redditraffler.com/

GameSir reserves final interpretation rights. Good luck Spartans!

On behalf of everyone on the HCS team, 343, and all of our partners thank you to everyone for making this year of Halo esports such a special one. That's all, just wanted to say thank you. <3

I labored through 40ish games on a test account, playing in a very particular way to test the system. For reference, I'm just a low onyx player, nothing special, but good enough to notice what I'm facing. But no need to take my word for it, we have full breakdowns from the Halo Infinite MM API, organized amazingly courtesy of leafapp.co (shoutout!)

Let's get started.

Hypothesis: there is a hidden MMR rank that affects all of your games, social and ranked, and therefore it should be possible to tank your MMR in social games to give yourself easier ranked games.
(Side hypothesis: this effect occurs *even after* placement matches.)

Method: I started a brand new fresh account, and did the following:

1. Go into 10 quick play games and lose all of them terribly, going 0-10 or worse.

2. Play Ranked and actually try, raise get placed.

3. After placements, play a few more Ranked games to see where the system is putting me.

4. Now go back to social, and tank another 10 games with abysmal performances.

5. Finally, go back into Ranked and see what happens.

For reference, here is my test account. Every match you can see the average CSR (the gold/plat/diamond/onyx rank number) and MMR, but these are only team averages, as the API available does not provide individual hidden MMRs.

https://leafapp.co/player/II+Ryot+II/matches

Phase 1: Tank 10 social games
Not much to say here. I had to waste about 2 hrs to do this properly, I wanted to really make sure that I ran out and died. My teammates and opponents progressively got worse and worse, but on average my teammates got better than my opponents. In fact, it got lopsided to the point where around game 7 or so it became *hard* to lose, because even if I went 0-20 in oddball, the system gave me good enough teammates to 3v4.

Phase 2: Play my 10 placement matches
Oh boy, this was crazy. My very first ranked game, I went 45-1, and that one death I'm pretty sure was from a team nade. I got medals I've never seen in my life.
https://leafapp.co/game/c3df0b9e-9748-4ce6-b88e-51b320ed6843

But what actually matters over these 10 games is the following: the average team MMRs, both mine and opponents', kept going up. The games also got harder, and my K/d got worse and worse. Here's the sequence of 10 games summarized:

Game 1: my team MMR = 293, opponent team MMR = 298, my K/D = 45:1
Game 2: my team MMR = 407, opponent team MMR = 411, my K/D = 8.67:1
Game 3: my team MMR = 566, opponent team MMR = 623, my K/D = 8:1
Game 4: my team MMR = 545, opponent team MMR = 552, my K/D = 11:1
Game 5: my team MMR = 430, opponent team MMR = 430, my K/D = 9:1
Game 6: my team MMR = 565, opponent team MMR = 593, my K/D = 5.5:1
Game 7: my team MMR = 530, opponent team MMR = 522, my K/D = 12:1
Game 8: my team MMR = 784, opponent team MMR = 782, my K/D = 13:1
Game 9: my team MMR = 891, opponent team MMR = 909, my K/D = 16:1
Game 10: my team MMR = 1107, opponent team MMR = 1301, my K/D = 3.57:1

You get the idea, as the MMR goes up it gets marginally harder because opponents get better to the point where they can catch me making mistakes.

Phase 3: Post Placement Matches - and I got placed Platinum 3

Alright here's where it gets interesting. The CSR I got at Plat3 is around 1000-something. But the MMRs I played my next few games in were really tough! In fact, at Plat 3, I lost the next 3 of 4 games. I still slayed really well, but the system gave me teammates that were *much worse* than the opponents. But guess what? Because my losses were all big slay games, I lost no CSR. Here's how the next 4 games went:

Game 1: my team MMR = 1304, opponent team MMR = 1245, my K/D = 2.73:1 (loss, -0 CSR.)
Game 2: my team MMR = 1225, opponent team MMR = 1151, my K/D = 3.67:1 (win, +15 CSR)
Game 3: my team MMR = 1320, opponent team MMR = 1368, my K/D = 2:1 (loss, -0 CSR)
Game 4: my team MMR = 1405, opponent team MMR = 1411, my K/D = 2.32:1 (loss, -0 CSR)

See what's happening here? My individual performance has the system constantly putting me on and against higher MMR teams (meaning my hidden MMR is definitely rising). What we also see: as a Plat 3 I'm playing more Diamonds than Plats, and in every case I'm top frag by quite a bit. My losses lose me nothing, my wins give me huge gains.

Phase 4: Tank more social games. Let's see if this works after placement. I lost about a dozen or so fiesta games. Or rather, I tried to lose them, eventually the system started giving me really good teammates who could carry me going 0-16. Sometimes it was a fun race trying to lose faster than they could win. We won a 50-49 and I was pissed. Lol, sorry for ruining a bunch of ppl's MM experiences lately, but it's for science.

Phase 5: Let's go back to ranked and see what happens.

Game 1: my team MMR = 1050, opponent team MMR = 1034, my K/D = 18.5:1 (win, +13 CSR)
Game 2: my team MMR = 1218, opponent team MMR = 1199, my K/D = 9.5:1 (win, +14 CSR)

Wow, and there you have it. I had a ranked and placed account, I then threw a dozen social games, and I'm playing in lobbies 400 MMR lower where I'm fragging like I'm playing bots. Interesting that the next game quickly jumped up the average MMRs involved after I dropped a 33:2 performance lol.

We can't figure out the exact numbers involved here though. MMR seems to move down more slowly, and re-adjust to your good performances quickly. For example, throwing those 12 or so fiesta games moved me down from 1400ish lobbies to 1000ish lobbies (400 pts over 12 games). But as we saw in Phase 5, I quickly went up 150 MMR pts on average after just 1 high performance.

Results and Analysis:

Yes, this is broken. You can sandbag in socials to get easier ranked. How much easier? It's hard to say. If I'm a 1600 Onyx on my main, can I use this method to get to 2000 Onyx (CSR)? Maybe with a lot of grinding, maybe not. I don't really care personally. But there's 2 interesting implications here:

From a game theory perspective, if you want the highest CSR possible (e.g. rank, Diamond, Onyx, etc) then you want to use this sandbag method, and you want to avoid slaying hard in bot matches. You want to be *better* than the average MMR games you're playing, that way, if you win, you win big (because you'll probably be top frag), and if you lose, you'll lose very small as top frag. Also, if you throw in social, because of the team MMR matching, chances are you'll start getting better teammates (relative to your opponents) because the system wants to give you help.

The other interesting idea is that if you want to play against pros in matchmaking, go slay a bunch of bots on a new account then get into ranked. Your 2000+ MMR might get you matched up against Optic or C9 players ;) Well, the system probably has some breaks in place to not be *that* extreme, but I've definitely seen unranked accounts who have tested this bot method match against the likes of Cratos, Swish, and other pros.

Conclusion:

Matchmaking by 343 is really stupid. Tons of players who over-played casual games will be having a lower CSR than they should in ranked, and a terrible experience getting dunked on. This linkage of social and ranked global MMR means that now we know for a fact that sandbagging works.

If you're reading this particular reddit, I'd recommend just not giving a shit and playing your games to improve. Maybe try shooting a bunch of bots with 20:1 K/Ds if you want a higher chance of placing into pro or semi-pro matchmaking lobbies lol.

Don't have much more to say than that. She's been amazing, I hope she's still there for the next title.
Her husband is playing these tournaments everytime and she never flinched when he got eliminated, even today, this is the last HCS tournament for infinite. Just straight to business and professionalism every event.

Analysts and casters have been perfect too. The infinite era is over, I think it's a good time to celebrate people that have been working crazy to entertain us