Looking back on the year that has been Destiny, I’ve found myself experiencing something unlike anything I ever have in a video game. I’ve never seen a community expand this quickly and be this passionate about a game franchise so early in its life cycle. Amidst all the hate, and salt, everyone that is still on these forums needs to actually admit that Destiny is far from dead. There is still a very large and very passionate following and player base. That being said, that doesn’t mean the game is in somewhat of a downward spiral right now. I’ve been playing Bungie games since halo 2/very late Halo CE. Over the years, starting with ODST, you see a significant shift in how Bungie reacts to things and a significant shift in game development focus. Reach especially, is a great example of what I call post-Microsoft Bungie. (Post-Microsoft Bungie refers to a developer that seems largely arrogant and doesn’t take into account what the player base truly wants in ways they did with halo CE-Halo 3). Reach, like Destiny, had an incredibly grind focused end game (thanks Luke Smith) with the point system added for unlocks in multiplayer which was a large shift from the Halo 3 armor system. It had broken abilities (armor lock) and didn’t take into largely what the player base was asking for. Armor abilities sucked, bloom sucked even more, and we didn’t get a decent competitive mode until 343 took over and added the TU playlists. Halo 2 and Halo 3 is a great example of the old Bungie that many of us truly loved. They had fun community weekends, they actually took into account what the players wanted, such as the shift from SMG starts to BR starts for a lot of slayer games, fun weekends like griff ball and zombies, etc. Looking back to that Bungie and this current one who seems obsessed with metrics and rather than an enjoyable experience, the differences are striking. We would get free weekend playlists like action sack, dodge ball, zombies, griff ball, etc. What do we get now? Some micro transaction heavy events. Now part of this is the lack of community made game modes due to no forge and no custom games, but still we have gotten 4 new game modes since launch in inferno, rift, ToO, and elimination. Surely it can’t take that long to make some fun new game modes. Whenever Bungie starts to talk about balance changes, they always bring up data. That’s all fine and dandy since raw Data can be very helpful in getting good info but they have become obsessed with it. Skill based matchmaking was added in an attempt to get a global W/L of 50%. Balancing decisions seem to be based entirely upon k/d data which anyone could have told you Thorn, pre 2.0 shotguns with shot package, sun breakers, blade dancers, vanilla mythoclast and autos were overpowered. The community can tell without data why cant they make a decision without first getting what they consider enough statistical data in order to make an “informed” decision. Their obsession is now costing the game in significant and meaningful ways. Skill based matchmaking was bad for three reasons. First because they -blam!-ing lied. They had several tweets from different people blaming SRL for the sudden change in sweat and lag levels that crucible had as soon as the SRL patch dropped in December. Bungie your reasoning was shit. How can you get unbiased data when we knew it was there in the first place? Do you think we are -blam!-ing two year olds that need our hands held or are too stupid to notice a change that large in a game that many of us have played for over 2,000 hours? No. Quit lying. Quit being dipshits and quit being dishonest sacks of shit. That’s what you are when you lie to us. It makes us rage. It makes us not trust you. You have very little good faith at all left with the community as a whole right now and I'm not talking about people who look for anything to hate. I’m talking about the streamers and content creators that PAY THEIR BILLS BY CREATING CONTENT ABOUT DESTINY. They are done with your shit and if they are done that means you have seriously -blam!-ed up. Half the last few Planet Destiny podcasts have been raging at your stupidity. Now that I’ve ranted a bit more than I really wanted, the other reasons why skill based matchmaking is bad. Second, this isn’t a game with ranked playlists. If you want to rank us, then show us our ranks and give us playlists where we can try to increase our ranks like your past, wiser selves did during the Halo days, or like pretty much every other developer does. This game isn’t anywhere near being ready to be competitive yet, so quit trying to make it more competitive especially when your net code was bad even before you started prioritizing skill. I don’t want to sweat my ass off all the time and if I did, I would try and play some sweats. The crucible should be there to relax, dick around, or try your ass off with your friends if you want. What it shouldn’t be there for is to sweat all the time. It’s not fun, it’s wearing, and it’s ruining many players’ crucible experiences including mine. The games in year one were not nearly mismatched enough to warrant this and frankly there are some games that come down to the last few kills, but the majority of my games are still rather large delta’s in terms of final score and overall skill between the two teams. Thirdly, you basically shrugged off our concerns in the last update. Why on earth would you leave something so vehemently hated by the crucible community and just shrug off our concerns? WE are the ones that stick around during PVE content dry spells. The crucible is what people turn to between expansions and it’s just not fun at all right now. LISTEN TO US. Simply reverting the matchmaking back to what it was would add a lot of good faith back with the community and would gives us the game that we loved back. I love this game. I love the potential it has and I love the unique gameplay it brings to the table but this is ruining all of it. The crucible is nightmare right now and it can be fixed quite simply but undoing what EVERYONE IS CONSIDERING TO BE A MISTAKE. Bungie, we play this game for fun. Most people play this game for fun to hang out with their friends and not to sweat their Asses off. The sweaty community is there for that and fixing this shitty matchmaking, which is making it harder for the sweaty community to match with each other, would make the entire crucible community happy. So please, fix it so everyone can stop hating, slinging salt, and threatening poor Deej. On another note: GUYS LAY OFF DEEJ AND COZMO. THEY ARE JUST THE MESSENGERS WHO HAVE A THANKLESS JOB.