TLDR; the trials playlist suffers from an ever-declining player population since there is no reason for low-performing players to continue engaging with the playlist. My solution is to make the requirement for flawless 7 wins with any number of losses. This would bring players into the playlist and it would help retain them, since it would no longer punish players for their losses, while rewarding their time investment by continuing to incentivize wins. It would also eliminate the need for separate matchmaking pools since the requirements for flawless are lower. Hi, long-time destiny pvp player here (since dark below). I have a suggestion for trials. The biggest reason to play trials is the adept loot obtained from flawless. This is only possible if you can reliably string together 7 wins. This is obviously not easy but you all have made some excellent steps forward via passage changes and matchmaking changes. However, these changes fail to fully address what I see as the biggest flaw in trials of Osiris. Every weekend, there is a group of players who lose the vast majority of their games. Sure, these players can earn reputation but reputation doesn’t seem to be enough of an incentive to bring people back to the playlist and keep them there. This is evidenced by how the trials population declines week after week every season. These players maybe play for the first 2 weekends of a season, realize that they have no chance of ever going to the lighthouse, and never return to the playlist. Week after week, we lose the lowest performing group of players from trials, leading to a constantly declining player population. We know that these players can and will return if the incentive is strong enough (i.e. the immortal) however constantly introducing loot that is that powerful would lead to issues of balance and power creep. The question then becomes, how can we motivate players to play trials and how can we keep them playing? My solution is to redefine flawless. If a player gets 7 wins, they get to go to the lighthouse and claim their adept loot no matter how many losses it took to get there. This isn’t the only solution, but whatever the solution may be, it has to reward players for their time investment. My solution has multiple benefits. First, players who currently do not have a reason to seriously pursue lighthouse gear would now have one. Even if they’re only winning 10% of their games, there would now be a light(house) at the end of the tunnel. This would help increase the playlist population as now people don’t get punished for losing, and it would help retain those players since they would have a reason to persevere through their losses. It would also promote higher-skilled players to play more often with lesser-skilled players since the requirements to get flawless would be lower. I don’t need to run stacked with other diamond-elo players if I’m not getting punished for my losses and we just need to get to 7 wins. Secondly, a solution such as this would remove the need for separate matchmaking pools, such as the practice pool, contender pool, freelance node, fireteam based matchmaking, and flawless pool. These things have been helpful in the past, because they were aimed at helping lower-performing groups of players have an easier time in trials. However they came with a huge downside of splitting up the playlist population. Implementing a solution like mine would eliminate the need for such pools because players would not be punished for losing. Previously, if you played solo or duo and you got to your lighthouse game without an intact mercy, you would just pray that you didn’t match a 3 stack because doing so would mean almost certain defeat. And then there goes all the time you spent. You all realized that was a problem and implemented things like the freelance node and fireteam matchmaking to mitigate that sort of thing. If I don’t get punished for a loss though, what does it matter if I’m playing solo and I lose to a team of 3 top-500 players on my lighthouse game? I’ll just queue up another game and move on. This demonstrates why removing the punishment for losses would eliminate the need for various matchmaking pools/systems. Thank you for taking the time to read, and thank you for opening up these channels for feedback. I know you all must be sifting through many angry and mean-spirited comments but hopefully this one finds its way somewhere useful.