Sooo..don't get me wrong, carrying people through trials is great, as long as the people getting the carry are actually playing on their account. Dear Bungie/Bungie Please: Do you know what Account Recovery "Carries" are? They're terrible. They're happening too much. They're hurting Trials. Basically, someone turns over their account credentials (sign on and password) to another player to play, on their behalf, a Trials ticket. An average player's account is played by a skilled player. Why? The account being carried, "gains access to end game content", per a scummy website selling the "service". Its about loot, Grimoire score, and maybe ill-gotten bragging rights? For the carrier, there are a few reasons... and they're lame. The most common are money and ELO farming. Carries for Cash Yes, people wanting their account carried pay real money to these players to do it for them. Eww. Don't get me wrong, "Donations" or "Fees" for traditional carries, meaning two good players putting a novice third on their team and busting ass 2v3 the whole time, have been a thing since week 1 of trials. LFG sites have had to adopt rules against that. Lots of streamers carry for free but give priority to donors/sponsors. Eh, whatever, in my opinion. But its different when you're making a business out of it. Since business is about efficiency, it more efficient for the "staff" of the services to not have to actually carry an account, risking losses and re-dos, rather control the account via account recovery. Then its 3v3 instead of 2v3. Since three "staff" each recover an account, its 3 very skilled players the whole time, and an overall breeze. Carries ELO Farming ELO is a community created stat by guardian.gg and used by DestinyTrialsReport. ELO is a give-and-take ranking system where a loser gives up points to his winning opponent at the end of a game. ELO used to be a useful gauge stat to determine the skill of your opponent, but as of late, like every other statistic people figured out how to exploit it. Derek Carrol or Lars Bakken tweeted (I'm super sorry, I can't find a link to it, but if you find it PM me and I'll edit it in) that they think ELO isn't good for the game. I agree. Others do too. Its cancerous. Among stats, ELO is associated with the biggest bragging rights. Its also especially easy to manipulate, especially with "account recoveries". With account recoveries, a team of three skilled players can use two low ELO accounts with one of their main accounts to run a ticket together. Since it seems that ELO is calculated and awarded based on team averages, the team average is much lower even though the skill is through the roof. When they handily beat other good teams with naturally earned ELO, a higher portion of ELO is rewarded, padding the best player's stats more than they would if their team had a higher ELO. Sidenote: I'm Not Against "Traditional" Carries If a highly skilled player out there wants to be cool by carrying people to the Lighthouse, that is fine. Whether they do it in private or part of an entertaining stream, its likely fun and rewarding and challenging for them. I'm okay with that, in fact, I've done it! I'm okay as long as the person controlling the account is the person who owns it. When you're carrying an account controlled by the lower-skilled player, you're essentially handicapping your team. Your third can get no kills, no revives, hell, not even fire a single bullet, but they're there. Its different than stacking a team with three highly skilled players. How is this ruining Trials? Beside the fact this is a scummy, borderline cheaters' way to advance in the game, this is ruining Trials. Like other games of skill, we all fall in a spectrum based on our skill. The spectrum isn't linear; the top .1% is significantly better than the top 1%, who are exponentially better than the top 3%. When these highly skilled players play their normal cards a few to several times per week and log off later, it means there is room for persistent lower-skilled teams to eventually succeed. It used to be that Sunday was a lower skilled teams best chance to advance to Mercury. But that isn't what is happening. Instead, some of those most-skilled players in the game are profiting off of their skill and playing non-stop all weekend. Where before, after grabbing loot and running a few cards for fun, they'd stop, now the whole weekend has become their work hours. It makes it increasingly more likely for a lower-skilled team to lose, and more frequently. As those teams lower-skilled teams feel less and less able to claim victory, they'll start to stop playing, lowering the population even further and increasing the saturation of these highly-skilled players. And the problem will continue to snowball. Sidenote: The Sharing of Passwords Is Also Bad For the Game You might remember this guy. tl;dr: He blamed Bungie for his vanishing characters. It later became clear he allowed an account recovery and something went sour. Hell hath no fury than the ego of a teenager being paid via PayPal to play a video game for you. That said, as long as said teenagers have an environment where this is possible, this will happen again. A Few Anecdotes I have two top-1% friends' who drive my opinion of this. On one side is a weekend-time streamer. He gets a small but loyal following on Twitch each weekend carrying viewers to the Lighthouse. He doesn't "account-recover" his carries, he grabs another highly skilled friend and loads his viewer into his fireteam. He used to average 30 carries a weekend, now he struggles to get to 10. He'll does an ELO-lookup and see a team of "average" ELOs, only to be stomped by them. He is so frustrated he even took Saturday off this weekend in protest. Meanwhile, another friend made $125 last weekend doing "account-recovery" carries. Yes, he is my friend even though his behavior is deplorable to me. Please Don't Tell Me to 'Git Good' I'm not advocating against competitiveness. I love the competition of Trials. I've loved it since day one. I'm no stranger to Mercury, but I'm not a frequent flyer either. I'm no God but I'm no scrub lord. Yes, I want to win, because winning is fun, but I accept the Lighthouse isn't a breeze and will never be. But I'm seeing the bar being raised artificially by a scummy behavior. As the already small percentage of players who play gets smaller, in part due to this growing cancer, it becomes less and less fun. I also know that lots of DTR readers never succeeded at Trials. This is for you too. If it gets harder to win for artificial reasons, it hurts us all. What Can Be Done?/Bungie Please! I think this is a rather easy fix. We know Bungie keeps track of data, which totally includes IP address, username, console MAC address, etc. If Bungie sees multiple accounts on the same IP address/console MAC address playing only an hour-ish at a time just to play Trials, there you go. It doesn't seem too hard to indentify the IP addresses/MAC addresses recovering accounts versus households with many consoles/accounts. A simple warning system initially with a later punishment of banning consoles and accounts and/or degrading loot to zero light would do a trick. (re-post from reddit page that i 100% agree with)