Sorry it's been a bad week OP. My take is this. Play Trials bc you want to. If it gets to be too much, stop. Sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn't. After much internal debate I think the current system is probably as good as it will ever get. I support a freelance play list, but not every week. Your chances for success are best with a team, but I understand wanting to play solo dolo as well. Solo flawless is a bigger challenge. Flawless either way has an rng element just like the rest of the game. I think the best approach is to accept what it is overall and play it when you're feeling it, don't play when you aren't. If we're real here about the loot, most of the guns are trash tier to A tier. The armor is quite nice, and you don't need flawless to get it. The best guns rn are probz Summoner and maybe Eye of Sol. Neither are anything you're truly missing out on if you don't have an adept. Both of the new trials guns (sidearm and fusion) are basically garbage tier unless you get an extremely good roll, and even then they're never going to be even top 3 choices in their respective slot, or among other guns of the same type. Better sidearms and fusions in other places. Therefore, you have to just play it for fun. If that's not happening, then why aren't you having dun? Could be [u]when[/u] you play, how your loadout matches up against most teams etc. I think we've all had bad runs like OP has. That's when it's time to walk away for maybe a few hours, maybe a few days, maybe until the next time trials is up. In a way I'm saying "adapt, cope, git gud," but what I really mean is [u][b]ACCEPTEANCE[/b][/u]. It's a huge key to dealing with real life and is crucial in Trials. Don't try to enact change that won't happen. Accept it for what it is, and make it happen. I do think some elements of matchmaking need some very slight tweaks. Like 2.0 kd should never face sub 1.0s. However, I don't necessarily support sbmm. Those of us that remember those days can tell you that is the LAST thing you want. It will be even worse. Some sort of kd tier or something would be nice, but sbmm is a no-no. That would eliminate a lot of toxic stuff in LFG. Imagaine they implement kd based tiered matchmaking. The people will no longer want LFGs with "2.0 only checking stats." It would open things up a lot for all skill levels. I think stats in Destiny should only be viewable to yourself and nobody else. It just breeds toxic bs, and encourages padding and elitist nonsense. I personally hide my stats. I hate ppl judging me positively or negatively based on basiaclly arbitrary numbers. In some cases I have astounding stats, and in other cases abysmal. I don't want thw compliments or the trash talk. Both are equally stupid.

I went flawless 10 times in freelance this week in less than 100 games, which sounds like I had a good time, but I nearly lost my sanity because of my teammates. The only way to have multiple flawlesses on a week in freelance is using the cheesiest meta builds and weapons, and be better than entire enemy team, because teambalancing doesn't exist in trials. Had a game versus two 2+kd overall players and 0.9 kd guy, while I had 0.6 and 0.3 teammates, even in destiny tracker I was in top 500 in terms of trials elo and I had 8% win chance in that game. And sometimes I had a guy of my skill level in my team and we played against 2 guys with double primaries. Freelance can be rough even for the best players, but at least we can carry on our own in most games

Not going to lie ur stats look like u get Carrie’s or recoveries . Ur barely possitive in reg pvp and in competitive u are negative same for trials but u have a lot of flawless and ur complaining when solo trials are the easiest way to hit flawless with 51% win rate and especially when flawless pool is active . U don’t make sense. And ur matches are on private that’s a lot of red flags for recovs

I believe without Messenger and Solas Scar around, there's less reason for PvE mains to do trials. Shayuras used to be cool, but we have Recluse 2.0 now in Funnelweb so, meh. I know I at least have no reason to go there this season. Also, people may have been grinding Gambit rep. So probably more PvP diehards than normal remaining and fewer in general who have no chance for flawless.

If you're struggling to win in freelance, maybe you should consider shadowing a teammate? I'm not sure why you're losing but I would say most of the time 99% of the time it's because people aren't playing together. When people tend to do flanks with no comms, you're gonna have a bad time. Stick together.

Trials is for the best of the best So if you’re not the best, please just keep playing so that the best can get easy wins

Flawless pool was enabled? I've matched with Flawless folks before going Flawless this week, when I started playing yesterday.

People who have a good understanding of the game and are generally good pvp players were already warning everyone, prior to freelance trials ever being a thing, that freelance trials would NOT be the saving grace that so many bad players thought it would be. Going into freelance, you have to accept you probably will lose games because you got two bad teammates. Because it will happen. I played a bit of freelance this weekend and each time, loading into the game and inspecting players as we loaded in, I knew that if I didn’t get X player on my team, I’d be doing a hard double carry and will probably lose if I didn’t put numbers on the board. Freelance trials is a ridiculous concept, it shouldn’t be a playlist, and all it serves is to split the playerbase of a playlist that is already low on players. No, I don’t need solos in the team playlist to get easy wins. Go look at my trials report. I played a few cards each day from Friday to Sunday and like 5 of my few losses are from my teammates getting error coded out the game. Nobody who is good at the game already needs solos to farm and get wins, as the people on these forums so often want to claim. I genuinely think that trials should go back to how it was basically in D1. No solo queuing, you must have a team, as that’s your most realistic chance of having success and going flawless. We even have the numbers to prove it. The weekend of June 10th 2022 when trials was on Burning Shrine, due to some bugs causing players to not match based on wins, bungie decided to disable flawless pool for that weekend. Those two conditions: 1) Not matchmaking based on wins, and 2) No flawless pool, are EXACTLY how D1 trials functioned. I think a bungie employee said so on Twitter as well. Anyway, the point here is that you only need to look at the trials statistics from that weekend to see how much more success individual unique players had at going flawless, compared to any other average trials weekend. There were simply more. Far more. Those conditions will let more people go flawless and if you’re going flawless I would think you’re having a not so bad time. It’s better than what we have now. People got their freelance playlist and they’re STILL whining. At the end of the day, whatever implementation of trials bungie goes with doesn’t matter to me. I’ll still have a good time playing the playlist. I have no skin in the game. It’s pretty clear, though, that even with the freelance playlist every solo player has whined for, they’re still unhappy. Short of simply handing them adept loot for participating, they won’t ever be happy, because most only want to play casual games and get their loot and not have to improve at the game. Just get rid of solo queuing altogether. Trials was never meant to be a solo friendly playlist.

Lobby balancing isn't good, for sure. I ran two deep cards Friday and Saturday before finally going flawless yesterday. I looked at most of my losses, and there was a pattern where I was the 3rd best player (by ELO and K/D) and got matched with the 2 worst players. Then the 1st, 2nd, and 4th players (on average) got matched. I'm not the best and don't expect to always go flawless, but it'd be nice to have fair lobbies. Maybe players 1, 3, and 6 against 2, 4, and 5 (not exact but something similar).

Furthest i’ve reached this weekend in Freelance is 5 wins before a lost. Game 5 or 6 is where matchmaking takes a dump from my experience. Thank goodness GM Nightfalls exist for Adept Rewards.