Most players that are already making use of the online multiplayer feature on Gears of War 2 must have noticed how the game assigns hierarchy “ranks”, in a military style, to players. It wasn’t really clear how those ranks worked, in fact, hence the positivity of Epic’s explanation on the matter, published on the official game site.

Apparently, there are five total ranks, and they do not work through a simple progression related to wins / losses. Everything’s based on Microsoft’s TrueSkill system, which is modelled on the ELO system, used, for example, on chess matches in order to evaluate the player’s ability considering a number of statistics, such as the match’s difficulty when compared to the opponent: the more difficult this is, the more valuable the victory will be.

The first rank is achieved, thus, after the first online match, but in order to reach the following ranks, players must be aware that a series of parameters will be calculated by the TrueSkill system, with the possibility that it might “..probably take tens of Public Xbox LIVE matches for your rank to move in one direction or another, and it may even take hundreds of matches to achieve a skill with the highest rank we offer, assuming you are good enough to get there”.

In a nutshell, it’s still not completely clear what elements are used in order to calculate the ranks, but it’s easy to understand, at least, that it doesn’t take a standard number of victories in order to go from one rank to the other. The other clear fact is that “quitting will lower your rank”.