So, I haven't messed with Crucible this season until today, and after a few games where I rerolled every lobby I really want to give some feedback on SBMM. Now typically I don't play much Crucible until later in the season apart from Iron Banner and Trials, just so I can farm out new weapon rolls and grind out some builds to try out when things start slowing down, and I hopped into Crucible today just to try and work out what I want to run in IB after reset. Typically, I don't prefer to run things that are meta, specifically the best of the best, outside of trials. For instance, I seldom run my desperado pulse rifles, and I haven't touched NTTE since it came out, but I do enjoy using Stars in Shadow or Legal Action some days. However my most enjoyable Crucible time is when I can slap on some random gun that nobody talks about but on paper its solid, its just that its not the best so you'd never hear of it. Sidearm/Shotty Smg/Sidearm Sturm/Drang and whatever else is taking up all the space in my vault at the time, and I switch loadouts A LOT, almost every game unless I'm having a really fun time with something so off meta bad that it's good (I.E. first Iron Banner last season I ran Rat King/Retold Tale on Arcstrider for probably close to 2 hours.) The only way any of it ever felt like it worked was because I could be fighting anybody. If every match had one top meta player some guys who were average and a lesser skilled player, then me running a Drang Forgiveness loadout had the potential to work if I could just move and take the right fights, but there was so much randomness you never knew just when things would work out right, or you'd get stomped by a 5 stack clan from halfway across the world with 5 SMGs and a controller sniper and everything is so laggy you'd turn a corner and spontaneously combust. Either way there was always the next game and it was fun rolling the dice to see who was going to be in the next lobby. After some time today however.. I don't know exactly where whatever MMR system would drop me, I spent a long time playing competitive FPS's at the end of high school and early college, and got tired of it, but I never lost that drive to try and win, just to do it in my own style that I could enjoy. But whatever "bracket" it's at currently, really isn't flexible. I've experienced consistently more players per lobby with connections so bad they're teleporting backwards and hitting special shots or grenades a full second or two after my client registers they were dead. Apart from one mercy where the entire other team left, almost every game has either gone to time, or had score hit in the last minute. A good number of those turned into 5v5s or lower numbers in under 3 minutes, and EVERY lobby was people playing their lives, as if K/D suddenly mattered for anything over trying to win as fast as possible, hope for a prosperity proc, and go next. Had a disjunction match where my team stayed in our spawn and the enemy team stayed in there's apart from maybe once every 2 minutes when someone decided they'd had enough. I'd have to run for longer than it would take for me to have won 4 gunfights, but if I got into pulse range there would always be people just waiting, crouched on corners together with whatever their longest range option would be. No one would even move to pick up green off my body if they sniped me on their side of the map. But its the same story EVERY game, I've NEVER seen a slower match of Twilight Gap, Pacifica, or Distant Shore, there's no variety, there's no gunfights you weren't expecting at an angle you weren't ready for, its all gunfights you can predict because "everyone knows this is where you can take a fight with the best cover and they're obviously waiting for you, you can't take a risky peak." Hell the only person I saw actually trying to haul -blam!- to take fights was a controller player using opulent beloved and only going for jump shots with stompies and honestly he was the only person in any of these matches that stood out as someone who was trying to have fun instead of trying to have good stats. At the end of the day, I thought that even though crucible has always had its share of connection issues and unbalanced things, I could always hop into it and have fun ( in retrospect, even though I was always tilted by laggy stacks of console players or Brazilian clans on East Coast for whatever form of "connection based" matchmaking it was) because I was free to run whatever I wanted whenever I felt like because I'd probably be in an overall average lobby where on average, everything had a chance. Vs now where it seems that if I want to be able to go from playing with Stars in Shadow to maining boudica and a shotgun, I'd have a more entertaining experience playing solo trials during zone capture without freelance using Stubborn Oak. I always felt the thing that made Destiny PvP special was that it was NOT a competitive shooter, it was a pvp sandbox with a meta that only really mattered if you were in an endgame mode or seeking organized play. Don't know if this is anything revelation invoking in other players or in the Bungie forum employees, but it [u]really[/u] bothered me that this is how I feel after enjoying Crucible since I got back into playing in Shadowkeep.