[u]Part Two[/u] Then there's matchmaking. With the return of 6v6 came a bug that disabled skill in matchmaking. While everyone was originally praising 6’s as the return of the Crucible fun factor, once the news got out on sbmm, players seized the opportunity to demonize it more and beg for it to be left out in Forsaken. Bungie acquiesced. I really thought the Y2 sandbox was incredible at launch, but I don't think we ever really got to experience it properly because of the decision to leave skill out of QP. That one call cut the legs out from under so much of what should have been great in Y2, but instead created a farming ground for the top level players and a stomp or get stomped Crucible that wasn't fun or accessible for solo, average skill or new players. It was just game after game of 1 or 2 players going off while everyone else struggled to go positive (even on the winning teams). Players were told if they didn't like getting stomped, to just quit and re-queue… then quitting and being dropped into games in-progress became a huge issue again. Comp and ranked play never really panned out. Pinnacle weapons were a success, but once acquired, players abandoned Comp to go farm QuickPlay, and suddenly QP became the preferred mode for the high skilled instead of a feeder into the PvP “endgame” of Comp. Then there was balancing and the return of the nerfs. Weapons and supers once more started to get cut down and PvE once more became affected by PvP, but how can you assess or begin to know how to balance the sandbox when your primary Crucible playlist doesn't factor skill? How do you establish a baseline for what is weapon/ability/super performance vs what is just extreme skill discrepancies of combatants? How counterable is Luna's when it's used by a player of similar skill vs a player or team of players 500-1000 Elo above us or anyone on our team? One positive in year 2 is that Iron Banner did include the best skill matchmaking the franchise has ever seen, but even IB games are undone by rules and scoring, as well as the decision to make power matter which to a degree negates the positive gains from skill factoring. So here we are with a PvP population struggling to maintain 300k across all platforms, national media and high profile streamers suggesting Destiny could drop PvP and Bungie having to confirm that no, they're not getting rid of it. I don't know where Bungie are going to take it from here. I know that it really needs to be rebuild the foundation because this square peg/round hole doesn't work. I see a couple directions that I would love to see the game evolve. One I've written extensively in the past on is moving away from the current format for the base Crucible and expanding on private matches by adding optional matchmaking and allowing players to host or join lobbies. IB and Trials type content could still exist as PvP endgame with current matchmaking formats. The other option I wouldn't mind seeing is just the simplification of the Crucible and a focus on what worked and made it fun to begin with. Return to a regular (skill based) Crucible with set choices of Clash, Control, Rumble and one rotating weekly playlist. Drop Comp and 4v4 completely and return a 3 player Trials type ranked PvP endgame for the hard core players to go along with IB as the PvP endgame for everyone else. I think this is the easiest solution they could implement at this juncture and I think getting back to the roots of what made us love the Crucible to begin with would be a good thing. Just my thoughts on things. Don't know where it will end up, but I firmly believe that a fun and accessible Crucible is integral to the success of this franchise as it heads into its future.