lostsolsdestinyblog

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Cayde 6 Ace of Spades

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Ways Bungie can begin to right the ship again.

1. Start not just listening to, but actually engaging in conversations with the average player. We all understand the power and influence that the big names have with their massive followings, but they aren't the entire community and 100% have proven to not share the regular player's thoughts on the direction this game should have headed.

We are 4 days into Season of the Drifter and these forums have been filled with posts giving feedback on why players have been disappointed with it and where the game is right now, and there isn't a single Bungie reply to any of them. I have huge respect for the community team and everything I know they have done for this community and I think they get a ton of grief that isn't deserved, but I also think it's beyond time to retire "we're listening'' and to start talking with the players on the forums and asking follow up questions and engaging throughout threads.

Drive-by community management didn't work in 2014 and it's not working in 2019. When a big name influencer can post complaining about snipers and there's a pinned post asking for sniper feedback the next day and we constantly see big names engaged with when they complain about things, but then 7 months of infusion complaints get ignored outside of one statement 6 1/2 months in, that's not a healthy, functioning feedback loop.

2. Get rid of meaningful infusion. I don't care how many people go into the complaint posts to call others lazy or to say it's not an issue. It is an issue and it's cost you thousands of players for literally no added value in-game. If anyone wants to wear and try whatever drops for them, they can. We don't need how we play constantly dictated and forced.

3. Stop constantly dictating and forcing how we play. I loved D1 and D2 Y1 where I could play what I enjoyed. Sometimes it was strikes, sometimes raids, sometimes crucible, sometimes patrol, sometimes a bit of all of it, but when I really got into an activity, I loved being able to log on and play what I enjoyed at the time. Now we have to play everything to level.

"Oh it's just Bungie getting people to try different things''

I've played the game since launch. I'm not a child and I don't need Bungie to force me to sit at the table and eat my veggies if I don't like my veggies. If we like Crucible or strikes or whatever, we should be able to get lost in those activities for hours, days and weeks if we want and not be punished for it by not being able to keep progressing in leveling.

4. Fix the leveling system. This new model of constantly having to go back and grind the same content over and over for another 50 levels is not good and there's literally no point to a level increase this season. Tier 3 Reckoning? All three tiers could've been tuned to be endgame without raising the power cap.

The initial grind was insane. It took me 2 1/2 months to get to 600 and I played hundreds of hours. I said then that I was okay with it if we didn't have to immediately turn around and do it again, and sure enough, I got 2 weeks at 600 before it went to 650. That's not why I play this game. I'm not here to constantly grind levels. I haven't played my Titan or Warlock since the end of November because it's too much and the game doesn't respect my time.

Now there are the bounties to allow us to level lower characters quickly, but then it's a 24 Infusion core investment just to equip the PL 640 gear once players get there. Hope players had stockpiles when they stopped playing. Oh and then good luck with everything dropping one PL over character level/

The way we level and the power drop system has been broken since Forsaken launched as well. Its great there are powerful bounties everywhere to let players have lots of options to play, but we should also be able to keep progressing by playing what we want. The fact that rank rewards for valor and infamy (that take hours to rank up) drop 20-30 power below or character is a joke and one more thing that doesn't respect our time.

Right now there's backlash over powerful drops and even big names are starting to complain about drops in general. Regular legendaries have been token blues since Forsaken launched. They give us nothing. Why would they drop so low that they can't even raise up gear pieces that won't drop for us elsewhere? It's insanely frustrating to get 7, 8, 9 powerful drops in a row that aren't ups because they're lower than the equipped spot, but still one higher that our character level because a Class item refused to drop and is 10-12 power below our level.

If regular legendaries could drop within 5 of our character level, they could still have meaning and help us progress. Also to the drops one over our character level, that's great for daily bounties, but weeklies should have been at least 3 over since launch. It was ridiculous that the Dreaming City was the only place outside of the raid to get decent level drops for so long and made me hate going there after months grinding it.

5. Give PvE a Valor/Infamy equivalent and again, give substantial rewards for ranking up and not some garbage legendary 30 below our power that we've gotten a hundred times.

6. Fix matchmaking across all of PvP and start building the crucible for everyone and not just the top 10%. 4 1/2 years of listening to the people with the highest kds and the rest of us not getting a say because apparently kds=knowledge has shown pretty definitively that the more influence they have; the more everyone hates the Crucible.

7. Recognize that a hell of a lot of people log on and play this game solo and start factoring that into design decisions. I understand it's a multiplayer game and that's wonderful, but building in better playability, be it solo matchmaking, better/more matchmaking for endgame activities like Nightfalls and raids, or endgame content tuned to be equally challenging run solo or in fireteams as D1 Y1 Nightfalls were as the difficulty scaled to team size, it can be better.

8. Stop defaulting to RNG for everything and respect player’s time more. Whether in titles, gear, weapons, leveling, whatever, RNG has a place and function, but it is not and should not be the end-all-be-all.

9. Update the Planet vendors and bring back the Faction vendors with either new gear or at the very least year one gear updated with year 2 perks and new rolls. I have no issue with the Eververse changes that were made this season, but I do have an issue with EV getting new armor, ships, ghosts, sparrows, shaders and emotes every single season and the actual game Planet vendors haven't gotten a single new gear piece since launch.

This game is starved for loot and there's more new content in the EV store this season than in the actual game itself. That's a really big problem.

10. Let us re-roll our armor. It's insane that it's basically impossible to ever get an exotic armor piece with perks that benefit how we play, but it's not just exotics that need to be able to be rerolled. The current system is one of many that exist to just be ultra-punishing thinking it will make us want to grind forever to get a perfect set. It doesn't.

What's more, rerolling would be an incredible way to have an actual rewarding material sink if done right. Infusion as a mat sink is hot garbage. Rerolling would be an actual reward for effort.

11. I know that players gave feedback in the past that we liked arenas and it's great there have been more, but we don't need a new one every single content release. Again, it's another example of Bungie and extremes. PoE was cool, CoE was awesome. CoO was meh. Archon's Forge was cool. Escalation Protocol was great if we could get more than 3 together in it. Blind Well was fun for a couple months. Haunted Forest was actually one of the best things the game has ever seen and a brilliant rework of the lackluster Infinite Forest. The Forges were okay for a few runs each. Now we have the Reckoning.

I sense a pattern here. Destiny is all in on Arenas, but what do all of them have in common?

They're all activities that took up I'm guessing a ton of development time and resources to ultimately all be left behind shockingly fast. I'm not saying we shouldn't have them or more of them, but I am saying that they should stay relevant a hell of a lot longer and we shouldn't need a new one every single content release, especially when we don't see things like more Dungeons and Whisper type quests that have been genuine highlights across the full community spectrum.

12. K.I.S.S. Destiny is a game and at the end of the day the point is to have fun, to be entertained and to escape to its worlds; not to be bottlenecked, spoon fed, hand held, and made to feel like it's a job or punishment and the minute players start giving feedback that things just aren't fun, take a step back and ask if things are being over-complicated and what it is that makes it FUN (for everyone), and then ask questions and engage with everyone and not just the ones everyone knows.

Thank you.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

D2 has a growing loot problem

Destiny 2 has a loot problem. It's been building for awhile now, but each progressive dlc in year 2 is pushing it further towards critical mass.

The game is a looter-shooter and while I understand some players thought random rolls was the answer and the magic that was missing, I think we can lay that to rest at this point.

My 50th Better Devil's or Prodigal armor piece aren't any more exciting or interesting because of random rolls. When D2 came out, I immensely enjoyed grinding the different planet vendor gear sets.

17 months later they have the EXACT SAME GEAR.

In year one, Vanguard, Crucible, IB, Trials and Factions all got new armor ornaments each season. Maybe it wasn't entire new sets, but it kept them interesting. Year 2?

We're in the 2nd of 3 DLC and Trials and Factions are gone and Vanguard, Crucible and IB have the same gear they did in Sept 4, 2018.

I get that it takes a lot of time to create new content, but this should have been made a priority long before now. Random rolls was never the answer outside of a band-aid and the game would've been much better off giving each variation a slightly different skin design and name rather than 20 versions of Better Devil's.

Destiny 2 has a leveling problem. This is particularly exposed by this new expansion that, with no raid as a guise to level up to, lays bare how pointless another 50 level grind is. The numbers are literally meaningless as we just are progressing to where we just were.

Beyond that, the entire leveling system is counter-productive to the rest of this expansion. This loop was created of playing Gambit Prime and the Reckoning, but here's the thing; if we do find that content loop enjoyable, we're punished for playing it because we stop progressing on leveling.

I have ZERO interest in playing this content solo, but I did just play a few hours of it with a friend and I have to say that it was fun. Reckoning was kinda meh at first blush (not the best or worst arena mode they've done), but Prime is much better than OG Gambit and actually pretty fun. Unfortunately outside of any Prime Engrams that might drop, there's the weekly Gambit bounty and then nothing.

Played 3 hours, started at 650 and finished at 651. Everything drops 20-30 power below our character level including the Infamy rank up packages! It's insane that a drop that takes hours of play time investment isn't even an up. Even the full rank reset packages aren't ups. They drop at our character PL.

It's awesome that there are lots of powerful bounties for those that like variety, but I've been here since D1 day 1 and I don't need the game forcing me to "experience everything", just like I don't need it forcing me to try new weapons with a horrid infusion system.

I can't speak for anyone else, but if the level cap had stayed 650 or only gone up 15-20 levels like expansions of old, I'd have a different perspective on things, but I think another 50 levels was a mistake.

Destiny 2 has a matchmaking problem. I've already written thousands of words on this so I'm not going to rehash it here, but I will say it's extremely disappointing that there not only were no adjustments this season, but that it hasn't ever even really been addressed or discussed.

Yesterday was a DLC release day and for the first time that I can remember, there were less PvE players than Gambit/Crucible.

Yesterday saw:

563.1k PvE

366.9k Gambit

213k Crucible

Again, this is on a major content release day. Those numbers are frightening and I think it clearly shows that players aren't excited to go grind the same content we've already grinded for 265 levels since Forsaken dropped for another 50 meaningless levels.

I also think it clearly shows that listening to the top 10% on how to save the game and particularly Crucible has not panned out. 90% of the population have walked away and washed their hands of PvP. It's great Truevanguard and Gigz can put up all their highlight videos to get retweeted or put in #motw, but the players getting farmed are over it.

It's really sad that we're here again with so much ambivalence for the game because there's a ton of cool things in this game and it's still there best feel of any shooter I've ever played. The problem is it's equally good at shooting itself in the foot and for all the incredibly cool/fun things, there's a pointless forced/micromanaged experience that sucks all the fun out of it.

D2 Y1 had plenty of flaws, but it was a cohesive unified vision and all the parts for together. Year 2 is a bunch of square pegs in round holes.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

D2 PvP dropped below 500k players yesterday. Is it time to discuss player population and the state of the game yet?

14 million people/accounts have played D2 since launch. Yesterday's population:

PvP- 490.5k

PvE- 570.9k

Edit: shout-out to Bungie.Net member TattooedOni who pointed out that DTR numbers include Gambit. I did not know that. Yesterday's Crucible was actually 345,415 and hit a low water mark of 268,000 on February 9. Those are as bad as the game has ever seen.

It will be interesting to see what they bump back up to with the release of the Season of the Drifter, but these numbers are reaching the same lows the game saw in D1 year 3 and D2 year 1.

One could obviously make the argument that it's just players siphoning off as the game gets further into each content release, but here's the issue with that; we have been told repeatedly by the anti-sbmm crowd that SBMM was there reason population numbers dropped in D1 and D2 Y1. We also saw the game bombarded by all the "dead game", "D2 sucks", etc comments all throughout year 1 from both community in general as well as from the major influencers.

Yet here we are, after an expansion in Forsaken that was extremely well received at launch and generally hailed as one of the best Destiny content releases and one that "brought back the hobby", and yet we're approaching half-way through the annual pass and not only are people not logging on in droves, there's not even a hint of excitement for season 6.

This isn't indicative of a game that's returned to "hobby" status and it's incredibly worrying for the remainder of the year. So my question is, what went wrong and why are so many leaving the game?

Obviously there's a lot going on right now with Apex having it's huge surprise launch, as well as Anthem and Division 2 out/about to release, and we are in the final week of the season. Those things taken at a glance and in a vacuum would definitely explain away a lot, but it doesn't come close to telling the entire story.

For as much as Forsaken added to the game in terms of investment and things to do/chase/grind for, the numbers have been in a decline since before this season began and have continued to fall throughout. This is something that all these changes to progression and the amount we have to grind for everything was supposed to curb.

"SBMM makes people stop playing", so Bungie removed it and people have stopped playing faster than than they ever did in D1 and considering the current lack of a massive anti-Destiny campaign like the big name influencers waged in year one to help drive people away, it's staggering how quickly players have left what should have been a light-years better Crucible experience over year one with the complete sandbox overhaul and return to 6v6.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Summit and I know the narrative players had going in, the quality of interaction we experienced and now I've seen where we are and there's a massive disconnect for me. I know most of the people in the rooms wanted a far more grindy game, but I never thought that every positive change vanilla D2 gave the game and franchise would be shuttered and we'd see another massive overcorrect; and yet that's what has happened in my opinion. Forsaken and subsequently Black Armory went too far.

I'll start with matchmaking because I've already mentioned it as well as written volumes on the topic over the course of the season. I think we can finally dispel the notion that skill in matchmaking is what's driven population declines, again particularly seeing how well received the sandbox is now vs year one.

I've said this many times already, but we never got to experience year 2 PvP and all the positive changes with any semblance of fair matchmaking in QP or Comp. Comp has its own fair share of issues there, but QP was easy. Just don't remove skill factoring. Yet that's exactly what happened and in a season where I have ranked up valor 9 times, only 1 of those ranks has been in QP because it's so freaking brutal. It's also made my friends stop playing it outside of needed bounties or quests. No one I know wants to log in just play QP because it's fun, like we did throughout D1 and even in D2 Y1.

It also says something that as broken as IB is with rules and scoring, that it's still so incredibly fun with the new Sandbox paired with decent matchmaking and more fair player vs player engagements, that I've ranked up almost 9 Valor ranks playing it.

Then there's the sandbox that is admittedly a lot better than year one and at one point in Forsaken, I thought maybe the best ever. I've dialed back from that a bit as year 2 has progressed and we start to see a rippling of little issues that grew throughout D1 with balancing.

I never thought year 2 needed kill times dialed to 11 and I think that's starting to be an issue with no ceiling for great weapons without breaking play. Special weapons were really well balanced in year one and just simply adjusting the ammo economy and reworking the slotting would have been a huge start there. They didn't need to have best-in-slot weapons in every slot though or the massive performance boosts to shotguns.

Primaries were in a very good place as well by the end with exotics showing how kill times could be quickened without removing the ceiling across the board.

Grenades and ability cool downs needed the biggest buff going into year 2 and those were nailed perfectly. I still contend that had year one had the grenades and CDs we have now, it wouldn't have tanked nearly as badly.

Heavy was too prevalent in year 1, but it had to be to break up team shooting since that was the only way to use special weapons and again, grenades and abilities were so poor that there were no real neutral games.

Then we got fun new supers in year 2, but inexplicably they were given insane damage resistance, durations and/or damage, as well as mods to get them faster. Players with supers in the first minute isn't uncommon. They were too slow charging at launch, but buffing them up to D1 rates would've been great. Instead we went well beyond.

Then finally there's PvE that I used to play all 3 characters every week for years. Now I have played less an hour of PvE in the last month. I haven't played my Titan or Warlock since last November and I'm not looking forward to SotD pushing power to 700 and having to regrind another 50 levels and deal with the ridiculous infusion economy to just be able to wear and use what I like and already have again.

Beyond that, the further up the cap goes, the less and less desire I have to ever even think about leveling one of my other characters again. As long as the current infusion economy exists and forces me to play wearing and using gear I don't like, I won't be touching another character; and for all the awesome content Forsaken did bring to D2 PvE, the experience of playing it was really soured by not getting to use what I had and loved and absolutely hating my characters because they looked like such garbage.

I'll never understand the hard stance taken on this or what meaningful infusion adds to the game. It's the single worst change to PvE ever made.

Then there's the oversaturation of RNG. Grind is fine. Things like Titles were great. RNG dialed to 11 in everything? Not so much.

And finally, I think random rolls were done wrong. I don't think they're bad with the variety of weapons they've added, but making them random rolls of each was a mistake.

Destiny is a looter-shooter and so lots of loot is good. Destiny does in a sense have a lot more loot now, but it's completely undermined by how it was implemented. My 10th version of Better Devil's is still just another Better Devil's dropping. Cashing in a pile of Crucible tokens and getting 6-7 Anonymous Autumn's isn't any more interesting.

What could have been a lot more interesting is if instead of making the different rolls random versions of the same weapon, is had they been their own named weapons. Even if they had the exact same skins, seeing all the different weapon names all with their own unique set rolls would have been way more interesting.

It also could have solved the collections problem for not being able to pull random rolled weapons out. If each was it's own unique named weapon, that isn't a problem anymore. It also gives more clear rewards to chase with a specific named weapon vs a random variation of one, and yeah not all would be as good and there would be standouts, but it would also make kill feeds a hell of a lot more diverse which would go a long way to curbing nerf requests, and if a particular weapon was way too prevalent or good, it would be a hell of a lot easier to tune that one gun vs tuning Better Devil's and having that affect all variations, which seemed to me the entire point of static rolls to begin with.

I hope that these and other player concerns are at least topics of conversation within the studio. I really feel a huge disconnect from this game that I still do love and think could very easily be course-corrected to a game that truly is a hobby game that has something for all levels of investment, but that starts with understanding that the balance needs to fall in-between what D2 was at launch and is currently and ending the cycle of pushing too far when all that's needed is a light touch or digging in and refusing to acknowledge issues as players leave in waves.

We're all here because we love the game and franchise and want it to succeed. I hope the future is bright.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

The 15 Biggest Issues I See with Crucible After 9 Valor Resets in Season 5 So Far

Removing sbmm from QP was a mistake. The games are too uneven too often, not only in team skill and compositions, but also in weapon loadouts with only one team usually having multiple players running full Comp meta (Luna's/NF/etc).

Snipers are going to be an issue again. I'm seeing a lot of tweets from dmg, Gigz and others of insane sniper kills and also got quick-scoped more in the last week than I had in the last 6 months. Bungie needs to draw a line on buffing them. Still see influencers calling for flinch reduction while simultaneously posting videos clowning with them.

Shotguns currently have no weaknesses and account for too high a percentage of kills. I'm not saying they should be nerfed, but there's a huge balance divide between shotguns and other special weapons. In my opinion, having top end shotguns like DRB in the kinetic slot is the biggest issue. Kinetic shotguns should not have that range/effectiveness. That should be a choice between a high range shotgun or a weapon like Luna's; much like Fusion rifle users have to make that choice. If a fusion ever ends up in the kinetic slot, it should be the same. Good/effective, but not great. Great should be limited to the energy slot on all Special weapons. This also applies to snipers. Legendary snipers that can body OHK or have short range scopes should be limited to the energy slot.

Spawns are broken. Not only in-game spawning where the game drops us in the middle of the enemy team or into a super that just killed us, but starting locations as well. Starting at A on Solitude, I can get to C faster than is possible from the C spawn location. The Fortress is another where the A team (no B.A.) spawns right outside B.

Equinox is just a bad map.

There's too much heavy ammo and way too early in matches (QP and IB). I've had a lot of debates on what breaks Iron Banner games and feeds so many mercies; and where the rules and scoring with the lockdown mechanic and triple points is the main contributor (as well as a mercy triggering at much closer scores than QP), another factor I realized during this last week of IB is the effect heavy ammo plays. If one team gets an early team wipe and triple-cap, they very often also get the early heavy drop and those early heavy kills boost super energy and add up to players being able to have supers by the next round of teams trying to recapture the zones. It all adds up to one team being able to steamroll and I honestly wish Bungie would revert heavy to TTK functionality.

The Telesto nerf makes no sense if shotguns are fine.

Power should not matter in PvP. I get players want their grind to feel “meaningful”, but that should be in their weapons, perk/mod sets they've built, masterworked gear, etc. It's a cheap advantage and not only does it punish players who don't have as much time to level; it also punishes their teammates who are fully leveled.

Top-tree tether is the least effective super in the game and a liability. I've detailed why elsewhere.

Supers should not have additional damage resistance, especially roaming supers. They should be high risk/reward abilities like the OG Arcblade and not free-kill buttons.

Nova Warp’s AoE range is too large, but I think this is getting addressed for the quick burst attacks.

Hand cannons shouldn't 2-tap.

Comp and QP should be rethought or at the very least rebranded. I just don't think they'll ever be able to function as a symbiotic pair with the current setups/configurations. They're too different in format to be real choices for type of play experience for average players and both playlists are dictated by the top tier players. Comp is a mode built for them and QP has been turned into a safe zone for them to only play lesser opponents.

Scouts need love. I saw a lot of variety in weapons this IB, including a good amount of ARs (Misfit and Ringing Nail mostly), but scouts were virtually non-existent.

Iron Banner is fun because it's a more skill-balanced experience than QP with way less extremely mismatched teams/players and pinnacle weapons in every match, but it's still a really broken game mode with the current rules and scoring. I wish I would keep the aesthetic with the fire pits, but would revert to D1 Control rules.

Thank you.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

What is Destiny and Who is it For?

What is Destiny and who is it for?

Such a weird question for people to be asking 4 years and 4 months into the life of this franchise, and yet that’s what is happening after another complete meltdown day yesterday. I’ve written tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of words on the game on the forums over the last 4 years. I spent 2 ½ years discussing it on a podcast. This game, this franchise, have been an integral part of my life and I’ve made (and lost) friendships over it as well as experienced things I never would have dreamed possible when I first logged in back in September 2014.

It’s been a journey filled with ups and downs, not only for myself, but for the game, the company, and the community as a whole. Anyone who’s spent a modicum of time on these forums know the trials and tribulations and how the game has constantly been in a state of flux, reinventing itself as the decision makers at Bungie (and Activision) try to figure out what it is they want this game to be and what they think we want it to be.

I’m not going to recount the story for the hundredth time of how they came to make decisions they did throughout D1 and into D2 or the part the community itself played in sabotaging ourselves with the way we’ve handled giving feedback and communication on our end, but I want to look at yesterday and the meltdown that began 24 hours ago with a single tweet that ignited all the anger and resentment that has been building up within the everyday player population since Forsaken released.

I don’t know what anyone else was expecting Niobe Labs to be. Bungie had stated that it wasn’t going to be a Dungeon, but that was all the information that we had gotten ahead of time. From the way the quest chains to unlock the first 3 Forges worked and then into the 3 week break between Izanami and Niobe Labs, I was expecting another quest chain, but deeper and on a more epic scale. Where the first 3 forges had ended up being more leveling content rather than endgame, I expected Niobe and the next Forge to get into the real meat of this content release.

My friends and I were genuinely excited to log on yesterday morning and speculated how difficult whatever tasks we had to run would be in a fireteam with a random or run solo or in twos. So we log on and I fly to the tower just as soon as reset happens and before I even landed Bungie’s tweet goes out.

“Niobe Labs is waiting to be discovered with a puzzle that needs solving.

Once completed by a fireteam, Bergusia, the final forge, will be unlocked for all.

Watch the best and brightest attempt the puzzle”

And just like that I knew it was a failure and what the day would become, but what I can’t figure out is how this keeps happening and where the disconnect is between the studio and the silent majority of their player base.

I was fortunate enough to have been at the Summit. I listened to the backlash about who was invited and the speculation of what the purpose of it was. I had my own thoughts on why it was happening and from what I experienced over 3 days in Bellevue, I was really happy with the experience and thought it was exactly what I’d hoped it would be, which was step to healing the giant rift that had developed between the developers and the community over the previous year. I understood the community concerns over the presence of mostly streamers and high profile content creators, but I also knew they were integral to repairing that relationship as they have so much influence and their negative takes had been so amplified and damaging to the game on a PR level year one.

I didn’t expect a complete 180 from all the progress D2 had made in creating a game that was so accessible to everyone. A game that I had spent 850 hours playing year one and still enjoyed the hell out of. Destiny 2 year 1 was not a dead game and it didn’t suck, but that was the mantra we heard repeatedly throughout the year from players that streamed the game or were heavy content creators, including leading up to and going into the Summit.

Destiny 2 was not perfect and had a laundry list of areas it needed to improve and had been improving since launch. It needed

·         a better story and a return to lore

·         more extended endgame content with rewards to chase after the initial content was finished and just more things to do with the gear and weapons we had

·         most players felt a return to rng weapon rolls, I still contend that just more unique weapons would have been a better option as seeing our 10th Better Devils is still our 10th Better Devils regardless of the random roll

·         a return to 6v6 in Crucible and a new sandbox

·         more new cool content and less bringing back things taken away when D2 reset the franchise

·         a better mod/perk system for weapons and armor

·         better realized content like Iron Banner and Faction Rallies

·         better raid development for hard/prestige mode. These excelled in D1, but got progressively worse throughout D2

·         more accessibility and thought to solo players

And here’s the thing. Forsaken delivered on most of that in spades.

·         It has a much better story and incredibly deep lore.

·         It not only had the more expanded endgame with content like the Shattered Throne and constantly evolving Dreaming City, but a 2-3 month climb just to level to endgame to begin with. Then add in all the exotic quests and pinnacle weapons, titles, etc and there is a ton more to do.

·         Random rolls are back and they do make us look at drops again, I’m not sure how much more exciting they are, but it didn’t take anything away from the game really and has been a plus.

·         6v6 returned to QP and the new sandbox might be the best ever in my opinion.

·         There are tons of new cool things in the game from the Shattered Throne, to the Dreaming City itself, bows, new supers, and even the forges can be cool

·         The mod system is light-years better than year one and weapon perks much better. Armor still needs work and desperately needs the ability to re-roll perks, especially on exotics

·         Faction Rallies hasn’t returned, but Iron Banner has been so much better than year one and even events like Festival of the Lost and The Dawning have been incredible steps forward from what we saw in previous iterations

The only areas on the list we didn’t see things get better was with the raids and solo experience, but they tie directly into my next point. We had all that positive change and all those things to make what was already a very good base with D2 (despite the over-the-top hate), and yet Bungie also decided to add a bunch of changes that seem geared completely to the streamer crowd that significantly in some cases and completely in others, undermined all the positive changes that had been made.

·         “Meaningful infusion” requiring Masterhancement Cores was the biggest mistake. For all we needed more to do with the cool weapons and armor we had year one, once we got those cool new things to do, we couldn’t play any of it with the weapons and armor we love. So honestly what was the point and why are we playing and grinding for “sweet loot” if we can’t even freaking use it? And all the comments of “just wear lower gear and don’t infuse everything” are bullshit. I’m sorry, but constantly getting and holding onto weapons and armor in my inventory to maybe eventually be able to use or infuse is goddamn ridiculous. I don’t play this game to carry crap around in my inventory; I play to use the things I find fun.

Add in the fact that apparently it was Gothalion who championed meaningful infusion while at the Summit (must have been in his groups sessions) as well as he and Broman’s responses to infusion compliants that “we need to wear trash to appreciate good drops” and “it’s good that players get bottlenecked by infusion” and yeah, you can start to see where yesterdays tweet wouldn’t sit well with the community.

·         The leveling system and 2-3 month grind were different and not necessarily a bad thing, but combined with the constant battle to be able to infuse and use anything, along with the decisions to make regular legendaries drop way too low and to not allow us the choice to just play the content we love, be it Crucible, Strikes, Gambit, patrols, adventures, whatever, and still make progress leveling, ultimately made leveling more of a chore and less fluid than it could have been. Add in the decision to then immediately make us start leveling again as soon as we finally got to 600 and it was too much. For myself the fallout from that is I don’t play my Titan or Warlock anymore and doubt I will for a long time, if ever again. It’s too much. I hate playing when I don’t like how my character looks or feels and I have a fully leveled Hunter with weapons and armor I like and I’m done with the BS that is infusion.

·         RNG. RNG. RNG. On top of RNG. Titles were an awesome addition and something that had been suggested going back to D1. The RNG nature of the requirements really soured the experience. Getting exotics to drop is ridiculous. Some got them all in weeks and others went over a month between drops. It’s awesome we have all these cool perks on armor, but it’s almost impossible to put together sets of gear we actually want to wear with perks that work for how we want to play (Auto Rifle perks on arms that let you hold a bow drawn indefinitely isn’t ideal)

·         Freaking power-gating and the raids. D1 raids were awesome. They were challenging, but the normal modes were still incredibly accessible and seasoned raiders could take new players into any of them and teach them the mechanics and allow them to experience that content too. Then there were the hard modes with the challenges for the hardcore raiders and they were all on point and true endgame for the most hardcore. Leviathan still hit that combination pretty well although the tuning made it where the Prestige mode never got any easier even when we got full sets of drops from the raid. The Lairs then turned gimmicky to handle Prestige modes, but even that was better than what Forsaken brought. One difficulty that isn’t even really that difficult at level, but the fights are ridiculously mechanic heavy to where they take 5 time longer to explain than to actually do the encounters and the only real difficulty is in the power-gating. Power-gating which kept 99.99% of the community from being able to even beat boss #1 on release day whilst setting up the Chase for the World’s First for the big name streamers. It’s a decision that not only made raid release day, which was basically Destiny Christmas for tens of thousands of players, into a massive letdown, but it ultimately transformed Destiny raids from the true endgame they were with VoG, Crota, King’s Fall and Wrath, to mid-tier leveling content that was pointless after hitting 600 outside players grinding 1KV. We all took off work only to not be able to do shit in the raid and those complaints were met with disregard and/or disdain, but then what happened? Black Armory release day did the exact same thing. Here’s the release day for the first DLC of the year 2 season pass and “Oh sorry, you can’t play it for a couple weeks, but hey let’s go watch the streamers who can insti-level and have limitless time and resources go run it while we go back to leveling the same content we just got done leveling. Players were pissed and it was yet another embarrassing black eye for the studio that they had to address and walk back. I have tons of respect for the people who work at Bungie. I have been given tremendous opportunities by them and have friends within the studio. I feel guilty and bad in my critiques at times because I know they genuinely care about Destiny and the community, but I also hate seeing the game and the studio constantly trip over their own feet like they did yesterday and I hate that this game is being so dictated by trying to appeal to and appease such a small segment of the population. After the Last Wish and Black Armory release day failures and disappointments, how did yesterday happen? Like I said, the instant I read that tweet, I knew exactly what damage had been done and where this was going to go, so how did it get sent? How did this “event” get put into a timeline as upcoming content to play, rather than left unannounced for player to discover and dig into? Or if Bungie wanted to still announce it, why not give details stating it would be a massive (and massively difficult) community ARG to figure out how to unlock the final forge? No one went into yesterday expecting what we got, not even the streamers; and I know they’re getting a lot of heat, but honestly after all the shit-takes from them year one and the cesspool they turned the community into, I don’t feel much sympathy for the negative reactions they’re getting to this game they have apparently pressured Bungie into making Destiny now.

·         PvP. I have no qualms saying pressured because we’re living with a Crucible that is the product of a massive high profile player campaign to keep sbmm out of QuickPlay so the top players could have a farming ground to stream 7th Columns and 50 kill games. I’ve put up the statistics of how only 7.8% of the players I face or top 10%, but in 195 games 7.8% is still 193 top 10% players and they’re in over half our games running full pinnacle meta in most cases. It makes me not want to play and none of my friends want to play it, but the streamers are happy.

So yeah, that’s why people are pissed and that’s why yesterday’s tweet went over like a lead zeppelin. Yesterday never should have played out like that and by simply communicating what the event would be or leaving it a secret to be randomly discovered would have avoided all the drama, anger and resentment. Hyping it up and then posting a link to go watch it streamed made it appear to be a set-up to boost the streamers and not actually an event for actual players.

Destiny 2 is still a great game and it would not take much to make it a great game for everyone and not just the top 10%. I really hope that Bungie is listening; paying attention and learning, and I hope that someone with decision making abilities starts advocating for the silent majority again. 

Thank you.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

195 Games of QuickPlay vs 195 Games of Iron Banner

So guardian.gg got whatever the issue it was having with not showing post-match rankings since last Saturday sorted out, so I decided to go through and compare the full stats of my entire week of Iron Banner vs the same number of QuickPlay games. In doing so I found an insane statistic, I thought I’d played 196 games of IB last week, but it was actually 195 and when I went to get stats for my last 195 QuickPlay games, I found out I’ve played EXACTLY 195 since SBMM was removed. The odds of those numbers being identical had to be stupidly small, but it works out perfectly to show the comparison between my experiences with and without.

Iron Banner (skill matchmaking enabled)

Games = 195

Players = 2379

Player Par = 2340

Extra Players = 39

Bronze = 301 (12.6%)

Silver = 1339 (56%)

Gold = 677 (28.3%)

Platinum = 57 (2.4%)

Diamond = 5 (0.2%)

Master = 0

Total Players Platinum-Diamond = 62 (2.6%)

Games with Platinum-Diamond = 46 (23.5% or 1 out of every 4.2 games)

Games with P/D on both teams = 5 (2.5% or 1 out of every 40 games)

Games with P/D on one team = 41 (21% or 1 out of every 4.7 games)

Games with on P/D on winning team = 23 (11.7% or 1 out of every 8.5 games)

Games with only P/D on losing team = 18 (9.2% or 1 out of every 10.9 games)

Team with P/D advantage won 56% Lost 44%

Team skill breakdowns

Losing teams: 161 Bronze, 714 Silver, 295 Gold, 29 Platinum

Winning teams: 140 Bronze, 625 silver, 382 Gold, 28  Platinum, 5 Diamond

QuickPlay (skill matchmaking disabled)

Games = 195

Players = 2455

Player Par = 2340

Extra Players = 115

Bronze = 322 (13.1%)

Silver = 1462 (59.6%)

Gold = 478 (19.5%)

Platinum = 117 (4.8%)

Diamond = 63 (2.6%)

Master = 13 (0.5%)

Total Players Platinum-Master = 193 (7.8%)

Games with Platinum-Master = 102 (52.3% or 1 out of every 1.9 games)

Games with P/D/M on both teams = 23 (11.7% or 1 out of every 8.5 games)

Games with P/D/M on one team = 79 (40.5% or 1 out of every 2.5 games)

Games with on P/D/M on winning team = 61 (31.2% or 1 out of every 3.2 games)

Games with only P/D/M on losing team = 18 (9.2% or 1 out of every 10.8 games)

Team with P/D/M advantage won 77.2% lost 22.8%

Team skill breakdowns

Losing teams: 197 Bronze, 770 Silver, 204 Gold, 40 Platinum, 12 Diamond

Winning teams: 125 Bronze, 692 Silver, 274 Gold, 77 Platinum, 51 Diamond, 13 Master

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So there are the numbers and I don’t need to really say much as they show the extreme discrepancy in the play experience between Having and not having skill enabled in matchmaking from team compositions, who wins and loses and how many players quit matches. Once again I hope that this is something that is really looked at by the developers at Bungie and that both QuickPlay and Competitive undergo major changes to how they work and players are matched. Iron Banner is exceptional and a real blueprint to improving the player experience. Thank you.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

I Played 196 games and over 33 hours of Iron Banner and it made me love Crucible again for a week

It is now the day after Iron Banner and, as I did after the last IB, I’ve gone through the numbers and what a story they have to tell. I will start off by saying that I played a lot of Iron Banner; in fact I played a total of 196 games over the 7 days. At an average of about 10 minutes per game, that’s about 33 hours just in the actual games. That is really significant because I was tweeting the days before that I was ready to uninstall the game, I was so pissed off and aggravated playing QuickPlay.

So I have a lot of information here from both IB and QP to go over and it really gets to the heart of why IB was so fun and QP is so not fun. Unfortunately I only have statistics from 113 of the 196 games because guardian.gg stopped showing player ranking from games at some point Saturday night. So I have the numbers from the 113 games it did record, as well as my last 113 QuickPlay games. So let’s dive in!

Iron Banner (sbmm enabled)

Games = 113

Players = 1370 (+14 over base 1356)

Bronze = 181 (13.2%)

Silver = 780 (56.9%)

Gold = 384 (28%)

Platinum = 25 (1.8%)

Diamond = 0

Master = 0

Games with Platinum players = 20 (17%)

Team skill breakdowns

Losing Teams: 98 Bronze, 430 Silver, 155 Gold, 15 Platinum

Winning Teams: 83 Bronze, 350 Silver, 229 Gold, 10 Platinum

QuickPlay (sbmm disabled)

Games = 113

Players = 1410 (+56 over base 1356)

Bronze = 181 (12.8%)

Silver = 829 (58.7%)

Gold = 277 (19.6%)

Platinum = 75 (5.3%)

Diamond = 40 (2.8%)

Master = 8 (0.6%)

Total players Platinum thru Master = 123 (8.7%)

Games with Platinum, Diamond and/or Master Players = 63 (55.7%)

Games with Platinum, Diamond and/or Master on both teams = 18 (16%)

Games with Platinum, Diamond and/or Master on one team = 45 (40%)

Team skill breakdowns

Losing teams: 106 Bronze, 443 Silver, 122 Gold, 28 Platinum, 8 Diamond

Winning teams: 75 bronze, 386 Silver, 155 Gold, 47 Platinum, 32 Diamond, 8 Master

Now this is where a lot of the arguments against sbmm fall apart. There is a common myth that because the top 6-10% (Platinum), 3% (Diamond) and 1% (Master) are such a small percentage of the player population, that we will very rarely see them in games. This has always been flawed for a number of reasons. First, they may only make up about 10-14% of the actual PvP player base, but they are on and playing more than everyone else and so they’re a higher percentage of who is actually on and playing at any given time. Secondly, there are 12 people in each match. With no skill considerations, it stands that the overall makeup of those lineups will ultimately reflect the full spectrum. Out of every 10 players in games, over the course of all our games, close to 14% are going to end up being top 14% Players.

So what you get is the numbers above. Platinum thru master might only be 8.7% of the players in those games, but they are in 55% of the games. That’s 1 out of every 1.79 games that I’m playing in QP where there is a top 10% player running the floor with opponents and 1 out of every 2.5 that it’s just one team with the ringer(s). It’s not fun for anyone on the losing ends and even when they’re on my team it sucks just picking up scraps against a team that has no chance while one of my teammates dumps 35-45 kills.

So compare that to my Iron Banner experience with no Diamond or Master players and only having to face a Platinum tier 1 out of every 10 games. The difference is playing 3-4 games and being so pissed I want to uninstall the game, to playing 196 games over a week and having the most fun I’ve had playing Destiny PvP in 3 years.

It cannot be overstated how much skill in matchmaking benefits 90% of the player base, and the kicker is that it’s basically a wash for the Platinum tier. Their sbmm experience is going to look a lot like QP now, and even the Diamond and Master tier still play the lion’s share of their games against Silver and Gold opponents, but they will face less Bronze and more teams with at least a player their skill. They will also face more fireteams and less solo players.

Another false notion that is set forth over sbmm is that is forces players into 50/50 win-loss ratios. That’s not true. Winning and losing is still in the individual player’s control, the difference is that sbmm seeks to put each team’s odds of winning closer to 50/50. It’s never going to be exact and one team will always have a bit more of an advantage going in, either on skill or fireteam size, but I’d rather have my odds closer to 50/50 than a 10% or 90% chance of winning going in.

Also to the ever repeated comments that sbmm causes lag, Out of over 2352 players in my 196 IB games, I saw about 6-8 that were laggy and only 3-4 that were really bad.

I hope this continues to show how much skill in matchmaking is a wonderful thing for the overall health of the game and I really hope that Bungie put it back into QuickPlay. It’s a real shame that we never got to experience how fun D2 PvP could have been from just the return to 6v6 and the new sandbox. I’m actually dreading going back to QuickPlay and as much as I loved the game last week, I hope I don’t hate it again by the end of this one.

Also, this isn’t to say that Iron Banner is perfect either and can’t still be improved upon.One out of every four games being a mercy is way too high. I don’t think removing the lockdown mechanic is the answer as it does give a uniqueness to IB, but it could definitely use some love. Maybe disabling lockdowns until both teams hit 25 or adjusting the score multipliers or cap times. I’m sure there is a solution that can lead to less early blowouts though.

Here are links to previous posts and videos I’ve done on the topic if you’d like to hear more. Thank you.

A Beginner's Guide to Destiny PvP Matchmaking https://youtu.be/s6ilnUPwiPE

A Deeper Dive Into Destiny 2 PvP Matchmaking https://youtu.be/4dqWoyy52Ho

Last Iron Banner Blog Post https://lostsolsdestinyblog.tumblr.com/post/180254236110/iron-banner-by-the-numbers-and-a-deep-dive-into-d2

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

A Deeper Dive Into Destiny 2 PvP Matchmaking

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

A Beginner's Guide to Destiny PvP Matchmaking

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Whose woods these are I think I know. 

Destiny has been for me, more than I ever could have dreamed when I first logged in back in September of 2014. It came into my life at a time when not a lot was really in the best place for me and it gave me an escape and a world I could throw myself into and, for a little while at least, forget about the problems of the real world.

I've experienced Destiny a lot of different ways over the last 4+ years. I dabbled in Crucible in Vanilla but strikes were really my jam. I would grind them for hours and hours as I leveled, trying to get the highest kill count and I loved how diverse and incredible they all were. I remember when Queen's Wrath dropped and I was still under-leveled for it and there was the strike in Winter's Run and I tried to do it but wasn't able to get past about halfway. I was disappointed and so I started really trying to level up more to be able to experience endgame and the next Queen's Wrath when it came around.

Of course there weren't more Queen's Wrath events, but there were the Nightfalls with their chances to get exotic drops and I wanted exotic drops. So at level 26 I headed into my first level 30 Nightfall solo. It was The Summoning Pits and the depth of the challenge was felt immediately upon walking to the first doorway and facing the Knights and Wizard. I don't know how many times I RTOd before putting together a successful run, but when I did, that run took me over 4 hours, but it was one of the greatest gaming experiences I'd ever had and I was hooked.

One of the coolest things looking back on those early days is again, seeing all the different ways I would play, level and progress. While soloing the Nightfall on all 3 characters would become the first thing I'd do each week thoughout year one, as we got to the end of vanilla and into TDB, I became completely hooked on Crucible and Iron Banner. I started in Crucible when I first got Suros and it was Dumbo's feather for me, giving me the confidence to feel I could compete. I almost immediately switched to MIDA and then in TDB found Coiled Hiss and Fusion Rifles.

Not everything was roses back then of course. The game had a lot of issues and growing pains, from the initial backlash to what shipped verses what players expected from pre-release hype, to TDB locking players out of Nightfalls, to the desire for matchmaking in raids because come on, Vault of Glass. Then HoW released and suddenly, as a solo player, it became much harder to play Destiny.

With the inclusion of Trials, there was endgame PvP with no matchmaking and Prison of Elders added even more PvE endgame that required fireteams but didn't add ways to be matched in-game. This was the first time I really felt like, as a solo player, that I really didn't have a place in the game in PvE and it sucked. I still did my Nightfalls, but outside of that, I was only playing PvP by the end of the expansion. The PvP itself was phenomenal and truly the Golden Age of the Crucible with everything at pretty much the height of its D1 power.

TTK was another shift. It made sweeping and dramatic improvements to the PvE experience. Grinding, leveling, getting gear and all the QoL changes were incredible, but it also marked the beginning of the end for what was D1 PvP. All our favorite year one legendary weapons were left behind and the great nerfening really began as Thorn, Red Death, MIDA and on and on found themselves neutered to shells of their former glory.

I had loved the TTK content release, but I found myself really struggling to find the same feeling HoW had given Crucible. Where I'd had weapons that felt so perfect and fit how I played so well in HoW, I couldn't find anything I liked in TTK and it got to the point where I took about a month off from the game and just wasn't sure if I'd keep playing, but then something happened. We'd started a community podcast to bring on everyday forum community members to talk Destiny and on our 6th episode I met RedWingGirl1999 when one of my co-hosts invited her on as a guest.

Once I met RWG, we became friends and the way I played Destiny changed again as I joined her raid team and we raided or chased Triumphs and Exotic quests pretty much every day through the second half of TTK. It was also from that point until the end of D1 that I started cycling through favorite characters. I really got back into my Hunter after we started playing together, then Rise of Iron was all about my Warlock and Age of Triumph saw me playing a bit of everything.

And Destiny evolved and devolved along the way as well. PvE got better and better, but the state of weapon balance and PvP continued to implode and those implosions all too often bled into PvE as well with the nerfs to ammo economies, artifacts and anything that players could blame for them not succeeding in the Crucible.

I want to take a moment to recognize that throughout this process, the developers were really trying to build the game they thought we wanted and while communication was not optimal in 2014, there were tremendous strides over the lifespan of D1. I know I have a special and more unique take on this because of the relationships and friendships I was able to make within the studio and I'm truly blessed to have gotten to experience, but from those experiences I've gotten a much more humanizing insight into the people who create this game.

RWG and I got to experience the D2 reveal event and all the hope and excitement going into the sequel and though there was the immediate uh-oh we had when they said PvP would all be 4v4 (we feared it would hurt 6 player raid teams that would no longer be able to stay together and play PvP, and unfortunately it did just that), overall the gameplay had been incredibly fun and felt like a genuine evolution of play.

At this point a thousand things can be said about what year one was and there were a lot of issues and things that didn't work how the developers had envisioned, but it was always extremely unfair to say the game was trash or a dead game. No one who still played and enjoyed year one ever said the game was perfect and everyone knew and everyone acknowledged it needed to be much better, but while there wasn't enough to chase and grind for, D2 was incredibly welcoming to be played how and when we wanted and also a lot of things that the studio felt would keep players invested with timed content to keep things fresh- Faction Rallies, IB, etc, just fell flat, and PvP that had been so reworked to be the best Crucible experience ever based on D1 feedback, turned out to not be what anyone really wanted.

Things went south.

When Bungie began to lose the streamers and YouTubers everything hit the fan and suddenly Destiny 2 found itself with the most toxic community in gaming and after initially turtling a bit (I'm sure out of shock as things went sideways), we started to see one of the most honest and open outreaches from a game company to their community as Bungie acknowledged the mistakes they'd made and started working feverishly to correct them, giving us road maps of what we could expect and when.

I got to be a part of the Community Summit and though there was a lot of mistrust in the community as to its goals and motivations, I felt very strongly that though it was mostly high profile content creators, that the fact that players like myself, Mercules, Aer0knight and others were invited showed that it wasn't just about the streamers and what they wanted.

I am incredibly grateful to this day for the opportunity to experience that and get to have so many face to face conversations about the game with the people who make it and these are really, really incredibly down to Earth and just awesome people. Anyone who thinks the developers don't care or that Bungie is just a greedy corporation just don't get it. They're just like you and me. They're human beings with lives, families, passions, dreams, loves, fears and hopes, and like us they are capable of success and failure, good days and bad.

That's called being human, and to be human is to understand that sometimes things don't turn out the way we or others want or expect, but life goes on and it's up to each of us to decide how to keep going forward and when we or others fail or succeed, we have a choice; to support and work to elevate them, ourselves and everyone to try to better things or as is all too common these days, try to bring people down to our level or keep them below us when we succeed.

I 100% know that everyone's voices are heard within the studio and that Forsaken has been a monumental turnaround for Destiny 2 and in many ways a real love letter from the Devs to the community, but I think that there has also been a larger focus on the community that play and stream Destiny for a living and I don't think it's a case of the studio trying to consciously cater the game more that direction, but rather an overcorrection in the desire to have them back onboard, because let's face reality, they have tremendous influence over how the game is perceived not just on forums, but also in print and social media.

Which brings me to why I'm writing all this today. Yeah, I write a lot about Destiny and I've covered a lot of this is past posts, but things are different for me in the game and I'm not sure the game Destiny is becoming has a place for me in it. It's so weird to actually write that, but I also know it's becoming increasingly difficult to feel like I can experience this game and universe how I want.

I play Destiny much differently these days from the last couple years and strangely, my experience has almost been a perfect bell up and back down to where I began. Our raid team mostly survived year one to the end, but our 6 player groups that used to PvP the rest of the weeks were no more and things really began falling apart with Spire and all its excessive mechanics.

We weren't a coordinated team anymore. We weren't a cohesive group of friends traveling the Destiny universe together and failures led to frustrations and tensions that didn't exist before, or were more muted by the ability to say “let's stop for the night and just play Crucible”. When suddenly the raid ends and people are left behind for new activities, it's a recipe for disaster, but Forsaken brought the hope of a new beginning and what ultimately did turn out to be an incredible Destiny experience and worlds, but again, just not for everyone.

The raid release was the end for our raid team. The pressure to grind 10+ hours a day trying to get ready (and for me getting drop after drop in spots I didn't need and below what was equipped because of the harsh return of RNG caused huge anxiety going in that I'd let everyone down not being high enough light). Still we all took off work and were incredibly excited to go into the raid, and the first forays in were just beautiful, but then like 99.999% of the players who stepped into Last Wish that day, we were all power checked.

We actually figured out the mechanics and understood how to beat the first boss about 20 minutes in, but after a couple hours of attempts, we knew we just weren't high enough light and that was it. We never raided as a group together again.

Of those of us there that day, everyone but myself has gone on to complete the raid. I've finished it up to Riven, but never completed that fight and it's just sad, and certainly there's more to our falling outs than how the game has been designed and content released, but it's also very true that for what Destiny wants to be a far as a social experience bringing people together, it has never done the best job of translating that into the actual in-game experience.

I kept playing after that, though mostly solo since and I do truly love the content in Forsaken, but I never really got to experience any of it how I wanted or felt excitement about drops that I knew I wouldn't be able to use consistently because of the incredibly punishing infusion system.

I loved year one and that I could play so many different ways, but always how I wanted and I could experiment with different weapons and armor at my choosing and not things I know I hate, but had to use because it's what I had at level.

A day into Forsaken, I stopped using shaders. There was no point when nothing has permanence and it was frustrating that here we had the content and things to do with the gear we loved that was so missing in year one and I couldn't play it with the gear I loved.

I don't know how others experience the game, but I played 850 hours of D2 Y1 and a large part of what kept it fresh for me was cycling through maining different characters and subclasses, as well as using all the countless new loadouts D2 allowed. So I continued playing all 3 classes into Forsaken. For the first 5 weeks, I ran almost every single powerful bounty in the game on all 3 characters and I found myself hating everything.

I didn't like any of my characters. I didn't like my weapons half the time and I started seriously questioning what I was grinding for if I couldn't ever use any of the things I got that I loved. So I took a big step back and started just focusing the Dreaming City each week since those were the highest drops and not running much else outside of teaming up with friends for Gambit, Crucible or a Nightfall occasionally.

All throughout Destiny up to Forsaken, I'd loved and played different aspects of the game and leveled up in different ways as those interests changed. Forsaken changed that. We couldn't just play strikes if that's what we loved, or PvP or Gambit, and I'm not saying that was necessarily a bad thing, but when it was combined with all the insane RNG (titles? Yikes!), punishing infusion and 100 level endgame grind, it was just too much.

I finally hit 600 halfway through November. I got there on my Hunter and Warlock and I hit 596 on my Titan and I just couldn't do it anymore. I hated my Titan desperately at this point, and not because the new subclasses aren't fun, but because I was tired of looking like a clown. I got a really good gear set on my Hunter, put the mods and shaders I wanted on him and I was done. With my other characters and with PvE. Destiny just isn't a game I feel I can keep 3 characters going anymore, and that's kinda how it began and I've thought that, well maybe over the next year, there will be time to go back...

Then Black Armory released and not only raised the power level another 50 levels, but brought back "meaningful infusion". This system championed by streamers who play for a living and has ultimately little too no effect on them. Most of them are already at 650, while 9-10 hours in, I'm up to 604 and I refuse to wear the higher gear I hate and I'm not burning my infusion cores. I'm up to 60 of them. I buy them everyday from Spider, but I refuse to grind for ghost fragments to then grind bounties for them.

I've played 280ish hours of Forsaken and probably 30 of those playing how I wanted using what I wanted, I'm not spending even more hours grinding content I have no desire to play just to be able to use what I want.

Even PvP as incredible as the sandbox is, is completely RNG who wins and loses as no sbmm means uneven teams and one team usually with one or two much higher skilled players than the rest.

Matchmaking was just addressed in the TWaB, but it's only Comp and the complaints of solo vs fireteams and low glory facing much higher glory and I don't understand how it's an issue in Comp, but solo vs fireteams and lower skill vs much higher in QuickPlay is perfectly okay.

I love the game. I love the community. I love Bungie and have friends there and care about everyone who makes this game and it hurts when days like Tuesday happen and things go sideways and there's more negative press, but that never should have happened. It's the exact same mistake that was made with the Last Wish raid release and power locking everyone but Joe and Jane streamer out of it.

So here I am, writing one more novel hoping for the best and maybe that is where we are and this is what Destiny needs to be going forward and maybe it's just not a game for a player like me anymore, but I still believe it can be everything it's wanting to be for the players it's trying to cater to without leaving a player like myself behind, and I don't think it would take a lot to get there.

I'm burned out on PvE and leveling because of infusion that adds NOTHING to the game and the inability to just play what I want and continue to level.

The daily and weekly bounties are fine, although the weeklies should drop higher gear than the dailies, but regular legendaries are deflating now. They are blues for all intents and purposes and they need to at least have a chance to drop higher.

Valor now gives Legendary drops every rank and it's tiered like Gambit, but those drops are meaningless because 1) I already have the gear/perks I want and 2) they drop 15-20 levels below my character power. Why not make them powerful drops? Who cares if I play an hour or two in Crucible for a powerful drop verses run around doing other bounties? To me it just adds to the experience. If you want variety and to experience a lot of different things in smaller portions, all those bounties are there. If we just love PvP, why can't we just play it and get drops at about the same rate (or a bit slower). Strikes could be tiered the same with ranks and resets.

I think about what it would be like to walk into the Destiny franchise for the first time right now and I can't even imagine how a player could ever begin to experience all of what the game has to offer with 150 levels to grind to endgame and starting with no materials, no cores, no Legendary shards, and yes games like WoW have those heavy investments and focusing on one character for a long time, but the way D2 is currently formatted, I don't see a near future where I'm able to or would want to go through this leveling experience again on my other characters if I'm going to hate them and (by proxy) the game because I can't play and use what I want.

So that's it and I'm not trying to bash or say the game is bad because it's not and when the teams are remotely fair, PvP is the greatest thing since HoW, but this world is really fucked up right now and my life outside the game is in an as bad or worse place than it was when I first stepped into these worlds, but I'm not finding escape and freedom anymore. I'm finding I'm stepping into a job that I don't want to be at and I wish things were different. Thank you.

  Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow. 

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year. 

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

-R Frost

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

What in God's name is wrong with Auto Rifles? (A bungie.net forum question answered)

So saw this posted on the forums this morning along with this comment in the post body:

"Auto Rifles seem to be total trash now, and not sure why.

Please address."

I'm going to post my reply here and you can let me know what you think, but here's where I believe the issue lies.

When giving weapons much faster kill times in the new sandbox, the devs came up with the solution of doing it by raising critical damage. This meant people could get the D1 kill times, but they'd have to land precision shots to do it.

Auto Rifles aren't precision weapons.

You'll surely have noticed the new pinnacle AR from Gambit is described as a "precision Auto Rifle". That's the work-around to the problem currently. I'm not sure why body damage couldn't just be increased across the board on them, but obviously they have reasons to not want to do that (my guess is a fear of making them too close to precision weapons in kill times because we've seen how that played in year one. People tend to use what kills fastest and easiest. ARs definitely top ease of use and year one Crucible showed this all year long.

Something else, I also believe this is why Scouts are so lackluster as well. Scouts body damage is already trash versus hand cannons and about even on precision damage. That's been a problem since D2's launch and it's a big reason Nameless Midnight was actually so much better than any others because the explosive rounds made up for the missing body damage.

Now however, there's almost no benefits to using a Scout over a good ranged Hand Cannon because again, the HCs do just as much precision damage and actually do more body damage at scout range lol.

Also, and this is the kicker for PvP, it's easier to land precision shots the closer you are and it's easier to actually ADS a hand cannon than a scoped scout rifle.

If you miss a precision shot with a hand cannon, you're still okay. Miss with a scout and you're completely hosed.

It takes 6 body shots and 2 seconds to kill with a High Impact scout. That's insane. It's by far the slowest non-critical TTK in the game and to put it in even more perspective as to why High Impact scouts are so awful overall, even the other scouts kill faster on all body shots. 180 RoF are the same 6 body shots at 1.67 seconds.

Auto Rifles are 1.33 seconds on body damage. That is much better than scouts, but when you take into account they're spray-and-pray weapons that by nature aren't precision weapons, that doesn't really compete in Crucible versus hand cannons that are killing in .67-.80 seconds.

Yes hand cannons have slower body shot TTKs at 1.33-1.73 seconds, but they're precision weapons and the easiest to land those precision shots in the game, particularly when weapons like Trust have basically zero recoil.

Hope this helps and hopefully Bungie finds a solution.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Everything Wrong with No SBMM in 5 Pictures (Edit added)

This is a typical QP match

Here's my team

Opposing team

Yeah my team won, but it wasn't remotely close to fun. It was just 2 players running end to end flipping and spawn trapping the other team, then wiping them rinse/repeat.

This is how almost every single match plays out. People who far outclass everyone else just ruin the game for everyone.

10 people had garbage games so that 2 high level players wouldn't have to "always sweat". Why they can't be matched against players within a couple hundred of their own level and still have a skill margin makes no sense at all.

There is no getting better for anyone else in these games and again, I just cannot understand how the experience of 9-11 people per match is less important than giving the Crucible jockeys a public stomping ground.

Edit:

This is the very next game I queued for after I finished posting this. This is 45 minutes after the previous game.

Dropped into another mercy one kill before the game was called and the dude with the 25 KDA from my team the previous match is now on the other team with a 28 KDA.

Versus my team of 5 seconds

There isn't a single argument against SBMM that can make this acceptable.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Thoughts on Redefining Crucible to be a More Holistic/Feng Shui Experience

This started out as a Twitter response to Handsomdragon's tweet here

https://twitter.com/Hands0meDrag0n/status/1064944738824937474?s=19

Once I got into it, realized I had too much to say for Twitter, so posing my thoughts and questions here.

I do not play Comp and have no real desire to in its current format, but as you know, I feel like all of the playlists/game modes need revamped to fit the new sandbox.

While ultimately I wish private matches could have mm added to fill lobbies, I don't ever see that happening. I'm curious though, if you do play Comp, what your thoughts on this?

The first thing is, right now it feels there's really no place for a casual and fun PvP experience for everyone. QP only fills that role for Comp players looking to not be skill/rank matched.

Another issue is how fragmented play still is 6v6 and 4v4. Casual players who want more even opponents are told to play Comp, but it's a different format and game modes and even with Clash and Control back, they are still paired with Survival and Countdown in ultimately a much different style playlist overall.

The last puzzle piece is Trials when it returns. Trials and Comp have a huge overlap as Trials basically existed in Comp year 1, just with different rewards.

So from all that, what if countdown/survival were only Trials (rotating weeks again). Comp and QP straight Clash/Control. QP individual playlists for each, Comp one random playlist. Trials could remain 4's or go to 3's. Comp could remain 4's if Trials stayed 4 or go to 6 to match QP if Trials went to 3's.

This gives symmetry across QP/Comp while allowing Trials to be its own unique thing again. It also allows each mode to exist more purely as its own entity and as such let them be defined better.

Trials could be rank or skill based through round 5 and round based after that much like D1.

Comp could be a true rank based game mode and QP a better implementation of SBMM than what we saw previously (how it worked in Iron Banner last week was incredible).

I believe this would all allow a much healthier split of the different game modes and a more fluid and feng shui Crucible.

Having QP/Comp both the same game modes adds a consistency that allows players to better go back and forth between them, thus encouraging more participation in both. It also allows for players to choose what level of experience they want there as far as challenge and reward with QP being a true practicing grounds for Comp, while again allowing Trials to be a completely unique and separate challenge with its round/eliminations based game modes.

I also believe by redefining each of the modes, it would lead to healthier player populations in each as they're all much more simplified and easily defined.

With Comp currently tied more to Trials than QP, it makes it very unappealing to the QP/casual crowd who aren't into elimination/round based play.

If Comp were instead tired to QP as a rung up the ladder, it would make more sense as a natural progression when you got into QP and developed and learned to play there.

The most difficult question for me would be team sizing for Comp and QP. If Trials went 3’s, again I would consider matching Comp/QP at 6’s and removing 4’s completely. However, if Trials stays 4’s I could see where having Comp as 4’s would give a healthy crossover between all 3 playlists as the 6 player QP could condense to 4’s for Comp, and 4 player Comp teams could them move into Trials if they wanted.

Either way, I think this all would give much more definition and less chaos to the overall Crucible experience and I'm curious what Comp and Trials players think about this as you've experienced those modes much more than I have. Thank you.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Iron Banner by the Numbers and a Deep Dive Into D2 Matchmaking, Balance, Framework and Why PvP Currently is Not Competitive

So now that I am level 600 and able to run PvP how I want (without any level disadvantages), I have been playing a lot of Iron Banner. I’ve played 40 games since Tuesday and I think the numbers and experience tell a very interesting story. So I am going to go through the numbers and then talk a bit about my thoughts on it all. Hope you find this all as fascinating as I do :)

Games Played (win-loss)  40 (21-19)

Solo 18 (10-8)

Duo 14 (9-5)

3 Stack 1 (0-1)

4 Stack 7 (2-7)

Average Victory Margin 45.4

Average Score 106-61

Closest Game 126-116

Biggest Loss 126-51

Mercies (win-loss) 16 (11-5)

Average Mercy Victory Margin 54.81

Average Mercy Score 79-24

Full Games (win-loss) 24 (10-14)

Average Full Game Victory Margin 39.12

Average Full Game Score 125-86

Games Within Point Margins

  0-10  One

11-20  Four

21-30  Four

31-40  Seven

41-50  Five

51-60  Ten

61-70  Eight

71-80  One

31 of 40 games decided by 31 or more points

24 if 40 games decided by 41 points or more

So my take away from this is exactly the same as it has been since 6v6 returned to D2 and that is D2 Control is not good outside of 4v4. I thought it should have returned to D1 rules and scoring when 6′s returned and it’s been even worse since Forsaken dropped the new sandbox.

Iron Banner is interesting because unlike QuickPlay, it uses SBMM. This is important because that should by definition lead to closer and better quality matches, but it hasn’t and that isn’t just my experience. A quick trip to the bungie.net forums will show a good amount of posts not happy with the lopsided play. Now a lot of them also erroneously attribute it to just matchmaking and blame it on SBMM, but that of course isn’t how it works. Here are some more interesting numbers from my last 40 games of QuickPlay Control since Forsaken has been out.

Games Played 40

Average Score 145-93

Average Victory Margin 52.4

Mercies 2

So the average margin of victory is 7 points higher in QP versus Iron Banner over my last 40 games of each and neither one of them is anything resembling competitive.

So what that immediately tells us is that there is more wrong with the competitive balance of the game than just the matchmaking algorithms. It also tells us that they are most likely multiple layers to what is currently wrong with play.

I also ran some more numbers yesterday. These do not cover as wide a range of games as it would just be stupid time consuming, but I took a random cross section of 6 games from both Iron Banner and QuickPlay and looked at the the team compositions in each playlist and those number tell an interesting story as well.

Starting with Iron Banner where SBMM is enabled these were the numbers.

Game #1 

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1237-1228 

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1492/972

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1467/1127

Game #2

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1156-1203

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1349-1081

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1297/1150

Game #3

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1216-1173

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1339/1112

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1334/1062

Game #4

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1161-1199

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1334/1062

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1392/1031

Game #5

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1245-1173

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1359/1171

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1363/1051

Game #6

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1198-1229

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1346/1142

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1305/1191

Average Overall Team Elo Difference 40 points

Largest Opposing Player Elo Difference 365 points

Now lets compare that vs 6 games in Quickplay

Game #1

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1525-1243

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 2309/1101

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1337/1102

Game #2

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1258-1221

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1388/1120

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1336/1170

Game #3

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1551-1187

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 2116/1116

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1301/1076

Game #4

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1298-1224

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1766/1056

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1332/1062

Game #5

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1482-1206

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1746/1326

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1332/1062

Game #6

Avg Elo Winning Team-Losing Team 1290-1146

Highest/Lowest Elo Winning Team 1371/1072

Highest/Lowest Elo Losing Team 1326/981

Average Overall Team Elo Difference 196 Points

Largest Opposing Player Elo Difference 1207 points

These are staggering differences in team vs team skill match-ups both in the overall differences in team averages (156 points higher in QP) as well as individual match-ups (842 points higher in QP).

None of this is new information and falls right in line with how SBMM actually works in Destiny versus all the misinformation spread on the topic. SBMM does not force players into only playing others their exact same skill level and as you can clearly see from the numbers, players still routinely face opponents both more and less skilled when SBMM is active. What SBMM does do is limit the extreme mismatches. There is no reason a level 1109 should ever have to face a level 2309 in any kind of fun-casual play environment and this is again where I think that QuickPlay is completely miscast as to what it is supposed to be.

There is also no reason why a team should be so mismatched that they can go into QP Control and not cap a single zone or use any weapons and still only lose 150-149 because they so outclass their opponents. It makes a great internet post, but it doesn’t make people who lose want to keep playing.

Comp (and Trials when it exists) are where players who are really into PvP go to play and be challenged. QuickPlay should be where everyone else can just go and have fun playing fair competition, but instead QuickPlay is where the Comp and Trials players can go to not have to play close matches and “relax”.

The problem there is self-evident as it leaves no place in the game for new, inexperienced, solo, small team, casual, or PvE players just trying to do PvP aspects of quests/grinds. QuickPlay is not fun or competitive right now in my opinion and yes it is great for streamers and content creators (and the image of the game they send forth), but I don’t think it’s any healthier for the overall population of the game than year one and I don’t see it making players who aren’t that into it or get sick of constantly getting smashed, want to stick around.

It also in my opinion is really undermining what is the absolute best sandbox that has ever existed in D1 or D2 once we hit level cap and can fully take advantage of everything (weapons, abilities, supers, perks, mods). People hated year one because it was so heavily favored towards teams and team-shooting. The switch to 6v6 and the new sandbox should have eliminated those things and made solo/lone wolf play viable again, but it hasn’t really done that in QP because the matchmaking is so lopsided and players so badly out-skilled.

Which brings me back to Iron Banner because it is in an extremely weird spot right now. The games are still just awful as far as being competitive, but the actual match-ups are extremely balanced game-to-game and so it doesn’t make sense from a matchmaking standpoint that the games aren’t much closer than QuickPlay... Until you look at how the modes actually work, and this has been completely validated for me over these 40 games that I have experienced.

I have not had very much fun playing QP in Forsaken and have basically done my daily and weekly bounties and then not had any desire to go back in; but despite the overall bad quality of match results, I am having the best time I’ve had in Destiny since House of Wolves in actual player engagements versus opponents in this Iron Banner. Yeah, the games are blowouts, but the match-ups feel really good and I don’t feel like I’m hopelessly mismatched or worlds better than my opponents.

Which brings me back to what is wrong with this Iron Banner from a competitive perspective and I think it is quite simply that D2 Iron Banner doesn’t work with 6v6 or the new sandbox. I think that D2 Control in general probably plays a factor in QP being so lopsided as Clash tends to feel somewhat less brutal, but the lock-down mechanic can just instantly tilt games beyond any chance of comeback and that is evident in the extreme number of mercies. 40% of my IB games have ended in a mercy versus 2% in QuickPlay where the teams are far more unfair.

I have felt for a long time now that the answer is to revert to D1 rules and scoring for both Control and Clash. There was nothing wrong with how they worked in D1 and those were the modes that made people fall in love with Destiny PvP to begin with. Bring them back. Iron Banner can still have its’ fire pits and maybe even the lock down mechanics would work with players having to neutralize zones before capping, but what we have right now isn’t working.

I’ve written a lot here again, but I think this is a topic that is very important to the health of the game overall and forward and to that end I would like to add two more quick thoughts to all of this. 

First to the the ever present solo vs fireteam debate that rages on the forums. It is a fact that SBMM makes the game much more accessible for solo players and those in small teams and that has 100% been my experience in this Iron Banner. What I can’t show with any statistics, but I am convinced would play out as well is the difference having to neutralize and then cap would have on the health of the sandbox by making ranged play more viable and curbing maybe not the presence, but certainly the overall necessity of CQC play.

D2 Control is and has always been musical chairs with zones. When it switched to 6v6 is just dialed that up to 11 and without having to neutralize, players are able to very quickly run zone to zone to zone capping, losing, capping with very limited risk vs what existed in D1. This is a big reason D2 launched with all roaming supers. Put the neutralize aspect back in and watch supers like Nova Bomb, the new Solar and Arc Titan supers and the new Void Hunter suddenly become really valuable and effective in a D1 Control format.

Also watch as scouts, snipers and primaries in general become far more effective as players are able to defend zones more since their harder to take.

Hope this has been useful, educational or interesting and I hope that we see changes to Destiny PvP’s framework to really fit the new sandbox and make the game even better. Thank you.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

The Potential Benefits of Hosted Lobbies in Destiny 2 PvP and PvE

I’ve been thinking about Destiny and matchmaking for a long time now and I’ve written and spoken tens of thousands of words on the topic. I think what Bungie has achieved thus far with Destiny has been incredible and even through the ups and down, they as a company have managed to create a franchise unlike anything we’ve seen before.

One of the biggest challenges the studio faced early on was in how to build and match players in an online, persistent and seamlessly matchmade universe. There is a great video from GDC a few years back of Justin Truman breaking down how the developers achieved this. I’m not going to go into too many specifics here, but I encourage anyone interested to watch the video as it is really fascinating. The end result was a PvE experience of planets made of a collection of connecting zones of “public bubbles’’ each of which were for the most part built in a circle with sections between that allowed the game to match us and our fireteam members with new guardians as we moved zone to zone. There are also off-shoot “private bubbles” which are the branching off story missions, strikes, etc, accessible by just us and/or our fireteam.

PvP meanwhile remained mostly unchanged from Halo in the general setup and approach. We and our teammates still queue for matches and are then matched by different variables (region, connection, skill, etc) with other players. This was done in D1 on a peer-to-peer network and in D2 a hybrid system in which every activity is hosted on Bungie servers vs player consoles in D1. All told these systems for PvE and PvP have performed well enough to make Destiny one of the top game franchises in the world and as well crafted as the systems have been overall, there is always room for improvement with anything and I believe after 4 years of experiencing this game, the cracks in both systems have started to show through.

I believe of the two environments, PvE has been much more successful in achieving the goals the developers had for what they wanted Destiny to be. That said we have seen areas where the current architecture leaves more to be desired. In my opinion the most glaring examples would be:

The ability to match larger groups of friends for activities like Court of Oryx, Archon Forge, Escalation Protocol, and Blind Well.

The ability for players to easily group up and find other random players within the game to do higher endgame PvE content such as Nightfalls and Raids.

Create an experience within an online, open world, multiplayer game in which players are able to meet, connect and easily communicate with the other players we come across within the game.

PvP has fared much worse and I think that, while applying the general principals and format of Halo PvP to Destiny has not been a failure by any stretch of the imagination, it has also led to many of the biggest problems that Destiny has faced over the last four years in both PvP and PvE. Those issues include:

It is incredibly anti-social as we are continuously matched with new groups of players who we never speak to and most of the time don’t see for more than one or two games (if they don’t leave the queue between games and the game doesn’t break up the teams)

SBMM vs CBMM the eternal debate

Solo player (and small fireteam) vs full fireteams

The struggle to maintain healthy player populations to be able to implement the best overall matchmaking experience for everyone

Playlists instead of playing the game modes we want to play

A PvP experience that the devs have tried to condense populations through aforementioned playlists, but has then been re-fragmented by separate Quickplay and Competitive modes, as well special PvP events like Iron Banner and Trials, plus the addition of Gambit, weekly game modes and Crucible Labs.

Difficulty maintaining healthy weapon, class, ability and super balance in both PvP and PvE as things are deemed to be “too good” and/or “overused” by the community in single game modes/playlists, but would suffer performance issues in other PvP modes and PvE if modified.

Having a more difficult time overall with the balance of PvP vs PvE

All of these things are known issues and nothing I’m writing here is anything I haven’t written before, but with teams inside Bungie’s studio now confirmed working on the next iteration of the game, I think it’s one of the biggest issues that need to be looked at in the continued growth and development of the game and franchise. I know there are constant discussions within the studio on these things and the goal is always to make the game the best that it can be and the matchmaking experience as a whole and particularly in PvP can be better and I think the solution is the same today as it could have been for raid matchmaking from the beginning.

I believe Destiny would be a much better game with a Perfect Dark Zero/ Gear of War approach to matchmaking for some of PvP and PvE endgame and the basic systems and functionality are already built into the game through private matches and Guided Games.

To start with PvE first, this is the same thing I’ve advocated for over the last 3 ½ years and while Guided Games is a limited approximation, it hasn’t really panned out as an easy way to meet up with and group with random players to run raids. I understand why the clan limitations are in place as well as limiting it to only one random joining, but I think there are ways to do a full lobby system and still allow for protections for players and teams. The other benefit to going with a full lobby system for endgame PvE matchmaking is that it could be used to allow for larger groups of friends as well as friends + matchmade teammates for endgame activities like EP, Blind Well, etc. Future activities of that nature could easily be set up to be in zones specifically designed for a group lobby.

What has changed in my opinion in how this could work over the last year in particular is in how PvP really should be integrated into this system to a degree as well. To that end I firmly believe that the base Destiny PvP experience should be a hosted lobby system and Quickplay should be removed completely. The framework already exists to do this with private matches. The only thing missing is the ability to fill out those hosted lobbies through matchmaking. I believe the benefits of doing this would be immediately felt across the entire game.

It would eliminate having to play random game modes and allow players to play exactly what they want and love

It would allow players to choose what maps they want to play as well as set scoring and rules. This system could also be set up to allow for curated weapon loadout rules (thus letting players decide to prohibit weapons deemed “op” or “unfair” for particular modes or maps rather than petitioning for them to be nerfed or altered.

It would make the game infinitely more social and allow more opportunities for players to communicate and develop bonds and friendships in healthy ways. One of the big issues with the way PvP is currently setup is that we are always opted-out of chat by default. The reasons for this are quite obvious given the history of toxicity and abuse in games that have open chats, however it’s much more difficult to constantly be toxic when joining lobbies that stay together game-to-game with a single host, as toxic behavior would just get players removed from the lobby.

The other big takeaway from that is that it would be a set lobby going game-to-game together and as such would offer a much better chance for social interaction. This took place in both PDZ and Gears when I played as even players who would join and not talk would almost always end up speaking after playing within the group enough games to get comfortable with the personalities within the lobby.

If we want gaming and gamers to be better to each other and to enjoy these things we love without all the negativity and hatred, it has to start with having tools in place to actually build positive relationships and this has been in the past I believe would be within Destiny a wonderful way to achieve that.

It eliminates the SBMM/CBMM debate as lobby hosts would have oversight over team composition and rules as well as the fact that a group all playing together in a hosted lobby would be much less likely to accuse each other of nefarious behavior. A healthy mix of Region/Connection/Skill could be built into the matchmaking for the lobbies and if players were lagging, either on the host/party end or those joining, players would have the ability to leave or hosts remove lagging players and allowing each to look for a better match to stick with.

It also eliminates the solo vs fireteam issues as in a hosted lobby system players tend to actually be communicating (including the randoms who join) and hosts have the option to require mics as well as to restructure team compositions match-to-match if it’s lopsided one way or the other.

It instantly eliminates issues for player populations outside of competitive play.

It allows a format where new game modes can be added to the lobby choices for both casual play and also testing for competitive modes without requiring a separate weekly mode like we currently have for doubles, Breakthrough, Survival and Rumble, as well as Crucible Labs. It could all be rolled into the hosted lobby system allowing play and testing without splitting populations.

It frees up the developers to refine the current PvP matchmaking system for ranked competitive and tournament play like Iron Banner, Gambit and Trials.

The possibilities here in particular are really interesting in a myriad of ways, not the least of which is in limiting the current PvP matchmaking format to those modes, I’m curious if it could potentially be within a more reasonable cost range to allow for dedicated servers or at least a more secure ecosystem for Comp, Trials, Gambit and IB, while running the current hybrid p2p system for the hosted lobbies that would replace QP.

It would also allow the devs to incentivize those modes more and make them the place players need to go to play for XP and rewards (thus giving everyone reason to actually want to participate there still), while also having the hosted lobby system where players could learn modes, maps and weapons as well as find friends and teammates in a more laid back environment (which D2’s ultra sweatfest QP currently is not) to then go into Competitive play with.

It would not only allow Trials to be the premier endgame PvP activity it was intended to be, Iron Banner could also be the true endgame tournament it was envisioned as.

It would also allow the developers greater freedom to curate those experiences as well by possibly enacting loadout restrictions and even making adjustments to balance specifically within comp/tournament play.

It could potentially take a huge load off of the PvE vs PvP balancing dilemmas through the aforementioned benefits, but it also could be a place where players who meet and group to play PvP could also then go to raids and EP type PvE events and vice versa.

It’s funny that as I have been contemplating writing this all up the last few days, I was actually recording a feedback video yesterday on my day-to-day Destiny experience lately and I met a player who had just bought Destiny for the first time the day before and it was interesting hearing his experience as someone who’d never played before.

The fact that we actually met and started talking in-game was pretty remarkable in and of itself. I barely ever stream, but I was streaming my play and recording my commentary on the game and as I did so, I got a viewer and they stuck around. I’d never had that, so after I finished my thoughts for the video, I decided to play some PvP and shoot people with Telesto. Then as I’m playing and talking I started hearing an echo. It took me probably 2 minutes to realize what was going on and that someone else was in the game chat. I’m always opted-in and it’s only the second time in D2 I’ve come across another player with a mic (happened about 5 times in 3 years of D1).

So I said hello and we started talking and partied up and he’d just got D2 the day before and had never played D1. I told him how shocked I was to hear another player and how rare it is and asked him what his experience had been with chat. Turns out I was the first person he’d spoken to in the game and he’d had the same experience I did 4 years ago when I logged in on launch day and went around saying hello to everyone in the Tower, on patrol and in the Crucible and wondering why no one had mics.

The last Bungie game he’d played was Halo 3 and he’d been surprised there was no chat in the Farm and on patrol, but had expected to have the lobby full of colorful chat in Crucible that was Halo 3 PvP and he said that the lack of communication is off-putting as a new player, particularly when he’d been trying to do PvE content that seemed to him to be more team-oriented like public events, etc.

The point of that is Destiny is a social game that isn’t the best at allowing us to be social. It’s a game that thrives on and works best when we are playing with other player and in fireteams and yet it doesn’t give any tools to encourage or enable forming the connections to build them. So whether a system like I’ve described or something completely different, I think that the game needs to evolve and grow in these areas and that it will ultimately lead to a better experience for players of all levels and investment as well as for the developers themselves, Bungie and the Destiny franchise.

Thank you.

[lostsolsdestinyblog]

Thoughts on the Rumored D3 and 5 Areas It Can Improve on Past Experiences

Greetings fellow Guardians, there has been a lot of talk the last 2 days about D3 being in development and with it, a lot of speculation on what it will be and how it will be done. Destiny as a franchise has been in a near constant state of evolution (and de-evolution at times) since launch and while I know that whichever direction Bungie goes with it, the next version of Destiny will be awesome and a success, I also strongly believe that there are things that should be changed, improved or added to the game to help it be the absolute best game it can be.

1.       D3 needs to not be D3. The D2 reset happened and while we may never know the full story of what went into that decision, I believe ultimately it hurt the game as much as it allowed for the fresh slate that D2 gave the devs to ultimately shape into Forsaken.

The game lost too much with the reset. It invalidated 3 years of investment into the grind and chase that the game revolves so much around, only to end up spending vast amounts of time and resources bringing D1 content back. We didn’t just lose our weapons and armor though, we lost destinations we loved in both PvE and PvP that, had it been built onto with D2, would have given us such a deep and rich universe to explore.

Possibly the worst thing it did though was fracturing the community with different versions of the game. Destiny by design thrives when it is the most populated and when you load up D1 and still see so many players everywhere you go, it makes you think of the effect that’s had on D2’s issues with low populations in PvP. I don’t think another fracturing of the player base would work. If players are given the decision to log in and play D1, D2 or D3, I don’t think there is any way that can be sustained outside of the addition of cross-play to boost player pools.

I believe Forsaken has shown pretty emphatically that Bungie is now capable of going forward with new versions of the game without a full reset. The changes from D1 to D2 may have necessitated the reset to give the devs the foundation they need to really build the game they want, but with that foundation in place Forsaken showed they can give us an expansion full of as many fundamental changes as the base game without resetting again.

2.       Rethink how content is released. This is something I’ve been writing for a couple of years now and it is something I still feel needs to be better. From the way things are initially rolled out at launch to the timed events that keep us invested along the way, I think the game is much better than it has been, but I believe if the intended philosophy is now about Destiny as a journey, then the way that is presented to us needs to work to foster that and there are too many areas within Forsaken that are diametrically opposed to what the game is trying to be.

The Dreaming City is incredible and people who’ve gotten into it love the raid, but I can’t help but think that they became the focus too soon and the Tangled Shore lost relevance much sooner than it needed too. Certainly this wasn’t all down to how the content was released, but I think it could have been better for the game to make the Tangled Shore the focus for a few weeks before opening up the Dreaming City and then a week or two later the raid.

Speaking as someone with 2100 hours in D1, over 1000 in D2 and 200 in Forsaken, I think Forsaken is easily the best version of Destiny we’ve ever seen as far as the overall state of the game, content, things to do, the overall leveling experience, a fun sandbox, etc, but for as great as it is, I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed the first 7 weeks of Forsaken as much as I did vanilla D2 or even vanilla D1 and I’m playing less right now than I have at any point in the franchise history.

3.       This I think more than anything needs to be stated because I am not alone in this and there are more people who log in and play the game like I do than there are people who make a living playing the game; I understand why Forsaken needed the grind back and needed to have too much to do instead of not enough, but it went too far.

When I log into D2, I look at the director and I don’t see things I can do, I see things I have to do and that isn’t because of the long leveling process, but rather the way infusion has been handled.

I’ve played Destiny a lot of different ways the past 4 years. I’ve no-life’d strikes and Nightfalls in vanilla D1. I’ve lived in the Crucible in TDB and HoW. I’ve been a heavy raider in TTK, RoI and D2 Y1, and with so many options to play in Forsaken, I don’t find myself wanting to do any of it. That is just crazy because I love the sandbox now. I love Crucible and Gambit. I think the Tangled Shore and the Dreaming City are incredible and the story is the best it’s ever been. Throw in the awesome addition of heroic story missions, heroic adventures, tons of daily and weekly things to get rewards… it’s all awesome, but it’s all been completely undone for me because people who can play for a living feel infusion needs to be a meaningful decision and that I shouldn’t be able to actually use any of the weapons and armor I do get to drop with decent rolls now without having to spend hours trying to get materials to actually equip them.

It’s made what should have been the best Destiny experience ever, one of the most frustrating instead. I’m up to a high of 588 and I’m ambivalent about getting to 600 at this point. I don’t raid anymore (more on raids in a minute). I haven’t tried the Shattered Throne. I didn’t set foot in IB this past week, and even though I think the Haunted Forest is one of the best things Bungie has ever put out, I got the Auto Rifle (that I can’t infuse into something I want to use) and I haven’t been back in because it’s all been turned into this job of getting to 600 to finally be able to play all this content how I want because of “meaningful infusion’’ and my apparent need to use trash (4 years into Destiny) to appreciate something good when I’m allowed to equip it.

4.       The raid. I understand the decisions that went into Last Wish, both in the way it was initially released and power-gated, to the decision to go with one definitive version/difficulty. I think both were made in good faith and I think both have ultimately not lived up to what Destiny raids should be.

It can’t be easy making raids for Destiny and with the expectation of a new raid with every expansion/DLC release that gets much harder to do. No one was happy when HoW released without a raid and the development of Lairs allowed for mini-raids to carry us through DLC releases instead of the devs having to make full raids for each. I think the definitive edition LW was an attempt to build on that, but ultimately I think it’s made raiding less accessible for the community as a whole.

The launch of LW was a smashing success with the hugely covered chase for world’s first and I’ve stated already my thoughts on that and how it could’ve been achieved without excluding 99.9% of the community from clearing anything in the raid that weekend, but the single tier difficulty and the ultra-mechanic heavy nature of the last two raid releases (Spire and LW) don’t bode well for the non-hardcore raiders who just want to experience that content at some point.

I think it would ultimately be much better for the community as a whole to release fun, challenging raids that everyone can get in and play and then throw the mechanics and über challenge in via hard modes and boss challenges like WotM, Leviathan and the reworked D1 raids had. To me, that was the best implementation of added challenge as well as depth to keep the hardcore invested while still keeping the raids fun and accessible for the community as a whole. Also, just leave the hard mode and challenges for the initial raid and let the Lairs be the one off difficulties since they’re just mini-raids to begin with.

5.       I know there is a lot of work going on right now on how to bring back Trials and make it the premier hardcore PvP endgame it was intended to be (and hopefully thought is going in to how to make it a mode that doesn’t dictate the balance of the rest of the game as we’re starting to see tons of nerf requests from  single game modes again) and it will be interesting to see what the devs come up with, but honestly I think that one of the top priorities for whatever D3 ends up being should be to completely rethink the Crucible and how it functions.

I don’t think the Comp/QP split has been what anyone envisioned overall. Comp has some cool rewards but QP is where everyone wants to play because it’s the Wild West. The flip side of that is that right now if you’re an average player going in alone or in a smaller team, QP is going to be a very schizophrenic experience and those average players just looking to have fun aren’t going to be interested in going to Comp to play.

I think the QP/Comp split is another thing that sounded great on paper but just hasn’t worked in the best interests of the game overall so far and I don’t know the answer to fixing that, but I think there needs to be one. I still would love to see QP removed and matchmaking added to private matches. Then the regular Crucible as it exists now could be built solely around ranked play, IB and Trials.

 I hope once again that this isn’t coming across as bashing the game or what has been achieved over the last four years as well as with Forsaken. I still love the game even if I’m not playing as much right now and I know the work, effort, and love that go into making it. D3 will be great whichever road it goes down, but these are just thoughts on how it can be better for a player like me and keep me not only invested, but having fun doing it. Thank you.