[quote]Quote #9 Things are on the uptick. Over the last few months the game has improved in a myriad of ways thanks to improved communication from the devs, and more importantly; a willingness to harness community feedback better than ever before. Now, on the eve of Forsaken it seems like Bungie is building momentum toward turning a corner with D2 with significant structural changes. Bungie needs to make a choice: do you want a larger, healthier population? Or do you want to segregate groups of players in a playlist that was specifically designed to be “low intensity”? Given the effect we’ve seen on Crucible ever since Taken King introduced SBMM back in 2015, I think the correct choice is self-evident.[/quote] QuickPlay is “low-intensity” for about 10% of the player base. For the rest of us it’s a f****** nightmare half of our games. There is nothing low intensity about facing these players all running full comp loadouts and trying to kick the shit out of everyone. TrueVanguard is a good dude, but he posted last week about getting two 55 kill games. His opponents those two games were all 1000+ ELO below him. That’s like LeBron James going to the local park and throwing down 60 in a pick-up game with the locals. And also no, The Taken King did not introduce sbmm. It was weighted higher in the algorithm because one of the top player complaints D1 year 1 was uneven matches and players quitting out, which is ironic because here we are right back in that same boat. [quote]Quote #10 It’s no secret that Crucible is a major part of why millions invested themselves with Destiny. A strong argument can be made that it essentially carried Destiny 1 through numerous content droughts. As such, I strongly feel that it’s imperative to the health of the franchise for PvP to not just be present, but for it to be great. This “bug” with Quick Play matchmaking is a powerful example in teaching us the impact one singular improvement can make. People are feeling good, hype is returning, and so are players. Please discard SBMM in Quick Play permanently and instead focus on good connections and per-lobby team balancing whenever possible.[/quote] Players were returning for the hope of Forsaken and all the changes on the horizon to PvE and the sandbox in PvP. Also, a lot of players never left or only put the game down between DLCs because D2 Y1 allowed that. The removal of sbmm has not had any discernible positive effect on the game that can’t just be chalked up to the switch to 6v6 and the changes to the sandbox. I can say for a fact that it has had a very real and very large impact on my enjoyment of the game and makes me not want to play and I am not alone in that. The real tragedy of that is Iron Banner’s matchmaking really would drastically improve game quality for most of the population and for most of the top tier it would be a wash versus what they have now. I hope Bungie is looking very hard at the internal data, because this game is not just played by the vocal minority streaming, on YouTube, or posting on forums and twitter. There need to be voices within the studio advocating for the silent majority who have to deal with the consequences of catering the entire game to 10% of the population. [quote]Quote #11 EDIT: I appreciate the multitude of responses and the many who engaged in this discussion. Recognizing that tangible player choice highly important along with providing a good experience to as many people as possible, I propose the following: · Better per-lobby team balancing · A system to protect new players for a period of time · Introducing a new playlist variant of Quick Play with SBMM (perhaps make it solo/duo-queue only?)[/quote] We already had the first two, it was called skill based matchmaking and no thanks to a new playlist that we can’t play with our friends. That’s the reality of QuickPlay and SBMM.