While playing Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, I hear a lot of questions about rank. My bud Jimmy888 suggested I make a post about it, and I also got a question in email over the weekend, so here goes.

To rank up in GRAW, win. That’s it.

Most of us play team games in GRAW, so that’s what my focus is.

When playing a team game, it’s all about the win. It doesn’t matter if you got 47 kills and 2 deaths, 44,700 points for seige or domination, or if you won by 1 point. A win is a win is a win.

The win and who is on each team are the only factors in rank scoring for team games.

Here it is straight from the horse’s mouth:

“Q: Does the TrueSkill ranking system reward individual players in a team game?

A: The only information the TrueSkill ranking system will process is

1. Which team won.
2. Who were the members of the participating teams.

The TrueSkill ranking system takes neither the underlying exact scores (flag captures, kills, time etc.) for each team into account nor which particular team member performed how well. As a consequence, the only way players can influence their skill updates is by promoting the probability that their team wins. Hence, “ball &*%@#”, “hill &*%^”, “flag fruits”, “territory twits”, and “bomb &^$$#@” will hurt their individual TrueSkill ranks unless what they are doing helps their team. Obviously, it is difficult to update individual players’ skills from team results only. To understand the difficulty and the solution consider the following analogy: Suppose you have four objects (players), each having an unknown weight (skill). Suppose further that you have a balance scale (game) to measure weight (skill) but are always only allowed to put two objects on each side of the balance. If you always combine the same pair of objects, the only information you can get is which pair of objects is heavier. But if you recombine the players into different pairs you can find out about their individual skills. As a consequence, the TrueSkill ranking system will be able to find out about individual players’ skills from team outcomes given that players not only play in one and the same team all the time but in varying team combinations.”

Microsoft TrueSkill Ranking FAQ

So, in a team game, does it matter if you’re a 3 and you kill a 12? Nope, unless you win. And then it doesn’t matter who you killed or who killed you, it just matters who won. However, a team full of low ranks beating a team full of high ranks will gain much more rank than vice versa.