Hello fellow Guardians, First of all I hope that you, your friends and your families are happy and healthy in these turbulent times. I’d like to share my thoughts with the community around Bungie’s decision to remove SBMM (Skilled Based Match Making) from all PVP playlists other than Survival, Elimination and Trials of Osiris. I’m a lifelong gamer in my mid-40s. I love all types of games, but competitive First Person Shooters have always been my favourite. I cut my teeth on Counter-Strike back when it was a mod for Half-Life, designed and developed by Gooseman and Cliffe. Since then, I’ve played quite a few FPS’ including Halo, COD, Battlefield, Insurgency: Sandstorm to name just a few. My second favourite type of game is an MMO. I started with Lineage II and played a tonne of WoW and moonlighted with a bunch of others that were all trying to become the cash-cow that WoW was. This is why it’s rather strange that I didn’t play Destiny 1 - I missed that boat for some reason. I think it is because FPS and MMO games were totally separate in my mind at the time. I didn’t start playing Destiny 2 until October of last year. Yup, I’m a New Light player, but I got hooked fast. Admittedly, I was massively late to the party, but all of a sudden, my 2 favourite genres of game were beautifully married (for me) in Destiny 2. I have over 1100 hours in Destiny 2 since I started and most of that time has been spent in the Crucible - I have about 34 000 kills. In terms of PVP skill, I would say that I am average - My win rate this season is 48%, with a KDA of 1.43 and 15 defeats average per match. These numbers have all gone down for me this season with the removal of SBMM. I don’t really care about these numbers and I am only bringing them up as a data point to support my contention that removing SBMM is having a negative impact on PVP players with an average skill level. What kind of negative impact? For me, it is directly impacting my desire to play the game. I play this game to PVP - I really enjoy the PVE content, but it isn’t why I am here and it isn’t what keeps me interested and playing. Why is the removal of SBMM removing my desire to play the aspect of the game I most enjoy? I am a naturally competitive person, and if I feel like I can’t even compete, I’m not interested in the sport or game. This is what is happening in crucible with the removal of SBMM. With SBMM active in previous seasons, the games always felt competitive and now they don’t. Sure, sometimes you’d get steamrolled, but this was the exception and not the rule, whereas now, it is the opposite: steamrolling happens seemingly every. single. game. And for me personally, I don’t like being on either side of that fence - I don’t like getting steamrolled and I don’t like steamrolling - I like fair competition. And with the removal of SBMM, fair competition is gone from the majority of the PVP playlist. Back when Trials of Osiris launched, I was really excited to try it out. I thought that would be where I would find healthy, balanced competition and that it would be the place where I would learn and improve the most. I put my fireteam of average-skilled players together and we headed into Trials in week 2. We got annihilated, literally. We won zero matches that weekend. We tried again in week 3 and the results were the same. We haven’t tried again since. I resigned myself to the fact that Trials of Osiris wasn’t for me - the skill gap was too great and I couldn’t compete. I was ok with this because I could still play, have fun and be competitive in the normal PVP playlist, thanks to SBMM. Now that SBMM has been removed, I’m left wondering where I fit? I know that Survival and Elimination still has SBMM, so I can play there, and I do. However, the so-called sweat lords, the high skill level players are all over those playlists. They are in Trials and they are in Survival and Elimination. SBMM in the regular playlist was the average player’s only refuge in avoiding roflstomps from the sweats. Let’s talk about the sweat lords for a moment. I do not understand why anyone would think that average players have any interest at all in playing against these people. I love watching them play and I’m truly astounded by their skill level and what they can do in this game. I watch guys like Frostbolt, Cerridius, and ZK (to name a few) play all the time and I really enjoy it. I have mad-respect for their skill, but I do NOT want to play against them. So I stay away from Trials. I play Survival, make it up to about 4k rating, run into the sweats and go no further - fine, no problem. Why am I now being forced to play against them in the normal PVP playlist with the removal of SBMM? I’m seeing ridiculous skill gaps in these games now that never used to occur with SBMM. I regularly see people on top with 50+ defeats, while other people have 2 or 3. These people should never be playing against each other. So what is the reason that SBMM was removed? Bungie has stated that: "We want the rest of the Crucible to be less of a high-stakes environment where players can have a more relaxed experience and just enjoy the Destiny multiplayer sandbox.” As an average player being forced to play against sweat lords, my experience is neither relaxed nor enjoyable. Bungie has also stated that they removed SBMM to respond to feedback from the community. Which part of the community, I wonder? I’m pretty confident that average players didn’t ask for SBMM to go away in the regular pvp playlist. As far as PVP is concerned in Destiny 2, it sure feels like the sweat lords have the strongest voice. I’m hoping that Bungie will listen to their average players a little bit more. The sweats literally own Trials and it is incredibly elitist - Aztecross made a great video about this the other day called “The rich get richer.” There is no reason for an average player to play trials unless they are extremely masochistic. The sweats own the top end of Survival and Elimination - that’s fine, those are by definition competitive playlists, they are naturally going to rise to the top. The problem is that they are now owning the regular playlist as well - the last bastion for average PVP players - with the removal of SBMM. In the regular playlist, SBMM sets a necessary boundary between highly skilled and average skilled players. The skill gap is too damned high for it to be any other way. Most of us average players know that we’re going to get crushed by sweats in survival/elimination/trials at some point. Cool, makes sense - those are competitive playlists and the sweats are cream of the crop. But why shouldn’t the average player have somewhere we can play and not have to go up against people that are not just better than us, but orders of magnitude better than us? We want a place to PVP without being destroyed by the sweats over and over again. This is a legitimate ask. Thanks all for reading.