: ...apart from saying that they're going to reset it every once in a while.
: Which basically equates to faking a " hill-climbing experience "
: and trying to side-step the issue of the fact that many people's actual
: skill level WILL plateau after a short while. I somewhat believe (based on
: Halo 2 and Reach experience) that arbitrary CSR resets will only come
: across as frustrating - wiping out your 'progress' - and replacing it with
: cheap re-acquisition of what you already had.

H4 was already hardly built for competitive gameplay, even with the core mechanics being so solid. They've made the game far less competitive, and even the handling of CSR appears to show it. They don't know what they're doing. Bungie didn't help anything either in Reach with their whack attempt at making competitive gameplay with Arena (even though the standard gaming environment worked just fine and should have continued a ranked hopper). Also, Bungie and 343 never seemed to get that, even though eventually people would plateau, they were usually topping out at their actual skill. I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I don't believe that in H3 I could have been or maybe should have been a 48 or a 49, but a margin of error of a level or two is hardly something worthy of resetting ranks about or doing away with the entire system. It was a pretty accurate indication from H2 on up (give or take the cheating in H2).

: Making the 50s all extra-flamey reinforces the notion of it as an end-goal:
: something to be achieved (that you should achieve) and then you stop.
: Halo 3 suffered from this; high-end player bleed-out.

I disagree. The best of the best didn't just stop because they hit the number 50. Not even close. As I said above, the high-end player bleed-out and exodus started in Reach, and I think it's pretty clear that it's continued through H4, and it's due to the overall system change (not to mention the many many problems H4 has).

: I'm still curious how this system is actually going to work. All they've
: shown is badges so far. Trueskill-based? ELO? Glicko? Custom?

Same. I'm all but done with multiplayer, but the thought of some sort of ranked and competitive environment that hopefully doesn't play as terrible as multiplayer has been playing with all of its problems really intrigues me. A few of us went on H3 about a month ago and went back into ranked and there are still some really awesome and good players around playing in there, and it was such a good time. It's nice getting that competitive gameplay going again, and Reach lacks that in a lot of ways. Arena was a bust. I'm sort of getting this feeling that this CSR is going to be a bust, but time will tell I suppose.