343 Industries is launching Halo 5’s biggest update since launch tomorrow, December 8th. Not only will forge be a big part of it , but updating matchmaking and making it fair for competitive and casual players.
For the first time since Halo 3, they are splitting Arena into Ranked and Social Playlists.
“We want to continue fostering and embracing player choice, and this is a big step towards that. This new split gives us a nice suite where people can go – do they want to ‘lean forward’ or do they want to ‘lean back’? If they want to ‘lean forward,’ we’ve got the Ranked experience for them. Maybe you’re in there for a couple hours one night and then you want to cool down, then you can jump over to Social for more of a relaxed experience. The current plan is to keep both sides living and updated, and do everything we can to keep both as fresh as possible. We’re going to engage the community, especially in the social playlists, and experiment more to see what people like, what people don’t like, and listen to their feedback.
Team Arena will continue to reflect the existing maps and modes played in the Halo Championship Series.
Here are the playlists being added to Ranked:
Team Arena
Slayer
Doubles
Snipers – New playlist
Swat
Breakout
FFA
Social playlist:
Team Skirmish
Action Sack
Infection
Big Team Battle
Triple Team
Super Fiesta
Shotty Snipers
Grifball
They also updated the Grifball playlists with brand new maps and they are pretty hot looking
You can read more about the update here