I'm no statistician, although I have taken my fair share of stats courses back in University...so hopefully I don't make any flawed assumptions here. Also, I know this thread is for explaining True Skill, rather than critcize it. I'm not going to criticize it here, but rather suggest a small tweak that may fix some problems. I could be totally wrong, but I'll give it a shot: It seems one of the biggest gripes about the True Skill system comes down to Team Slayer. In the perfect world of Lone Wolves, you pretty much control your own destiny (with the exception of a poor matchup which happens from time to time and dropped connections). After the system collects enough info on everyone, sigmas will plummet. People's Lone Wolves rank should somewhat fall into place . It won't be perfect due to new players or players that retired before playing enough, but pretty damn close. However, In Team Slayer over the long term, you eventually get teamed with your fair share of guys that may be good players, but cannot play well on a team. What's flawed here is that guys that know each other and play slayer are less likely to experience this vs. the average player that just lets the system pick his teammates. In the short term, you lose your fair share of game sbecause of these guys, and your sigma drops quick. Over the long run that average player quite simply will have a large number of losses due to "muppets" on their team, even if they personally are kicking arse. Obviously the higher you rank, the less muppets are likely to end up on your team....but in the very important beginning of your ranking process, People that get stalled out early due to sigma are less likely to keep playing ranked. So you end up having a situation where the guys that start of slow quit playing team slayer early, and skewing the overall ranking process. So basically you have a situation where the system is trying to come up with your personal rank, but in reality it is severley watered down by the rest of the populations performance. In other words, you can't rank super high in Team Slayer unless you actually have an official team of guys. Maybe that is Bungie's point to Team Slayer? I don't know....but something tells me if you can be the best guy on the losing team, you should at minimum not be penalized. Been reading the forums a lot lately, and this seems to be the biggest ranking gripe against the system. The thing that was good about Halo 2's system (correct me if I am wrong), was that the MVP got treated like they got 2 wins and the 4th place guy on the losing team got treated like he got 2 losses. I also believe the guys that got 4th (winning team) and 5th (losing team) had no effects on the ranking. Maybe if this small adjustment was added back into the system (True Skill would still be the system), it might fix a lot of the gripes.