[u][b]EDIT - Have made a seperate thread with a better worded version of this post and responses.[/b][/u] https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/218037592?sort=0&page=0 Destiny does NOT match by region first - anyone with a Netduma router can confirm this and the devs have essentially confirmed the below before... Destiny defines a 'skill' range FIRST and will search for acceptable connections within that skill range. However, an acceptable connection can be a 300-500ms ping from a UK player to someone in West Coast US - that is deemed as acceptable by Bungie whereas in other competitive FPS games anything above 50ms would be deemed high latency. It will relax the skill range if it cannot find enough players to start a game within an acceptable time frame. But it will start a game with less than the full quota at the expense of using available players outside of the skill range. It will also favour local connections within that initial skill range (if they exist), but the important part is it does not look for local connections first and then try and find an even skill lobby, it's first filter is the skill range which immediately reduces the available players to connect to. Wouldn't be as much of an issue (from a pure latency perspective) if there was enough players within the skill range (think average skill players in a heavily populated location) but as soon as you get outside of that it becomes a real issue. with high ping cross continent connections. Destiny also operates @ 30 FPS with a tick rate of 10hz - far below the industry average (Overwatch uses 60hz and CS:GO up to 144hz to match with 144 Hz monitors) - that means the 'servers' update the game every 100ms / 3 frames. Combine this with the high latency cross continent connections that Bungie deem acceptable and there you have the major reason why being shot through walls, SG's whiffing in CQB and trading kills is much more common place in Destiny than any other modern FPS game. This is also what is commonly called Skill Based Match Making (SBMM) - although Bungie continue to insist that SBMM does not exist even though it is common term referred to within the gaming community at large and is exactly how Bungie determines MM within Destiny. This is less problematic in a) heavily populated playlists (think IB) and b) for people with average skill. For lower populated playlists and in particular higher skill players this means the following: - Longer queue times - Matches starting with less than full quota (8 for control and 4 in Rumble for example). - Higher latency matches (as there will be less local players in the initial skill range search) - Higher frustration as 'lag' is more central to the outcome of gun fights. - Very competitive matches (think a ranked playlist but without any of the rewards/benefits) - Very meta focused - Inability to play with friends of lower skill quality Players have been voicing their frustrations with the MM ever since it was changed (and the lack of honesty and transparency that surrounded these changes), but these have essentially fallen on deaf ears as Bungie has NEVER acknowledged the above issues that have been voiced time and time again, let alone hold discussions with the community on the topic. Bungie introduced 'Damage Referee' - this essentially tries to stop players with poor connections from obtaining an advantage which of course was common place (due to the MM and netcode issues explained above). It's a form of lag compensation essentially. The game will acknowledge when a player with a bad connection has obtained a kill and will try to compensate for this lag advantage by most of the time giving you the kill post death too i.e. you end up trading kills whereas before you'd just die and they would still live. It's not a real solution to the main issues (i.e. MM and netcode, but of course netcode was an infrastructure design choice made for Destiny 1. There is no way they'll be making those same choices for Destiny 2) and hence why it's inconsistent in it's results. My opinion - trying to force competitive games in a game with essentially below industry standard netcode using a P2P hybrid network and forcing cross continent connections at the expense of local ones is an extremely poor design choice. It's the equivalent of playing in a ranked playlist all the the time (think arena in Halo 5) but without good quality connections, decent netcode and the rewards/ranking such a playlist brings. It also brings issues with class and weapon balance and the lack of frequent tweaks to the fore even more as people are forced to use the meta in order to stand a chance of having an enjoyable experience. EDIT: Also, @Deej the reason why people resort to protest posts and emotional outbursts, is the high level of frustration that this issue causes and the fact that there have been many many forum, Reddit, twitter posts as well as YT vids explaining the issues the MM causes ever since the MM was first changed. People get fed up with their concerns not being acknowledge or addressed, merely re-iterating your design goals whilst essentially ignoring the communities frustrations is not what a community expects from 'communication' on the topic. It would be nice to actually have some proper acknowledgement of the issues that have been stated time and time again and discussions on the subject in an honest and transparent manner (without any flippant responses like play strikes) EDIT 2: IMO the design goal of PvP should be to ensure the best connection quality experience as possible. Having laggy games, with poor hit registration, red bars dominating, being shot through walls is much more frustrating experience than being pubstomped. Pubstomping happens in every FPS game, Bungie seem to have taken it upon themselves to eliminate this from Destiny - all in a game with bad netcode. Pubstomping is never really seen as a real 'issue' amongst gamers because it doesn't happen every game. Some games you do well, some games you do bad...that's the variety that comes with a connection based approach and part of the learning curve. Hell, I'd rather go 30-5 and have some great memorable moments and then go negative for a couple games all using a variety of loadouts than playing the meta in ultra competitive laggy games. Most games (including Destiny) will try and keep players at the extreme ends of the skill curve away from each other. This is how it should be, new and the lowest skilled players would not have an enjoyable experience playing the top 5%. The mercy rule is a good addition to Destiny too - ends very lopsided boring games early. But outside of that connection quality should be the main priority - it gives variety to games, reduces the lag frustration, allows players of varying skill level to more easily play with each other, makes Destiny PvP less meta focused etc etc. It boils down to underlying design choices. Bungie made their choice when they changed MM. The design choice is different to all current successful and past successful FPS games and it's no coincidence that those games don't have the constant MM complaints Destiny has. Asking the devs to re-write their design choices in-line with the vast and constant community feedback as well as spend time/money on amending MM in Destiny 1 is never going to happen. It also doesn't help matters when you have devs like Derek Carroll making flippant comments from time to time. I'm sure he's a nice guy who cares deeply about the game and the community, but he certainly doesn't come across like that in posts and twitter, his 'play strikes' comment as well as his unwillingness to engage in any reasoned debate on the topic just pissed people off and showed a lack of appreciation and understanding of the frustration this topic causes to many players. Just take a look at the recent Reddit post (a post with 92% upvoted with 917 points after 14 hours - these sort of posts have been regular and common place since the MM changes) and see how many people STILL have a bad impression of him which then snowballs to creating a bad image for the PvP team and thus Bungie as an organisation. Anyway that's all I have to say on the topic, Bungie have never listened to the constant feedback before so I see no reason why they would now. Let's just hope they make some better design choices for Destiny 2. In the meantime I'd recommend enjoying other games that have good netcode and MM focusing on providing a good connection experience (pretty much any other popular FPS game), it's certainly a much more fun experience.

Reasons I personally don't like SBMM and think it's bad for the community: -Lag. I also play other pvp game like rainbow 6. A game with 1/100th if destiny's player base yet I experience no lag whatsoever. Rainbow only takes connection into consideration. -the top 10% of pvp players are confined to a sweat box. We are constantly sweating our balls off just to break even. Everyone I play against is using top tier weapons with god rolls. If I dare to use anything apart from top of the meta weapons with builds that I am extremely experienced with I get absolutely destroyed. I would love to be able to learn how to snipe or use a fusion or side arm, but as I don't have experience with these weapons I am going to struggle. -the top 10% are constantly getting better, because they are sweating all the time. The bad players are just staying worse and everyone has a 1.0 kd and there is no sense of progression. My kd is lower than it was last year, yet I know I am twice the player I was then. -as the top 10% are constantly sweating yet everyone has a 1.0 kd, trials turns into a stomp for the top players and they just annihilate everyone. I have a 1.1kd in regular playlists with a 50% win rate. In trials I have a 1.8 and 80% win rate. Trials of Osiris is now the most relaxed and casual playlist in the game for me. That's kind of messed up. -due to SBMM kd is irrelevant. So when you are looking for trials partners it has resulted in LFG elitism, Elo and stat farming. If you feel like getting Ebola , look at LFG for trials for a Friday night. It's a wasteland of desperation and depression with misguided elitism and outright lying and offers of cheating. -I don't recommend destiny to my friends. When I try to play with friends, the game matches us against players on my level with thousands of hours played and they get destroyed. It's not fun and they don't play anymore. -it's not fun to constantly sweat. Yeah it can be enjoyable to have a close game every now and then, but the game is feeling like a job. -when I win a lot I am actively punished when the matchmaking puts me against better players. I played for a few hours with a 6 man team in iron banner and won 90% of my games. I solo cued and SBMM clamped down on me. The next few games were beyond awful. You can say that cozmo summarises what he sees all you like, but we just aren't seeing change. Seeing the forums in revolt like this gives me real hope that you will remove SBMM and excited for the future of destiny in more than a year. According to DTR I exist in the top 6% of destiny pvp players. I have played with 1% players and I thought that what I had to deal with was bad, but what they go through every single game is abhorrent. Cool guy, an excellent content creator and streamer who also creates a lot of content for planet destiny made a really well thought out and eloquent video about this. If you don't agree with me or listen to a word I said, at least watch the video. He makes a very good argument.

All these comments and all I hear people are crying that they dont want to play against people as good or better than they are.

You know what i say to all this? ill deal with it.

I really think people are just bad at this game, has anyone ever thought that maybe the reason people on the other team are beating you is because they are better and not because of lag or the matchmaking system? And everyone likes to describe others as sweaty and give that a reason to switch it as well.. Is that so you can be matched against some poorly skilled players that you can butcher? Sounds a lot like bad players who want an easier time playing. I've experienced lag in this game, and very few cases would have changed the outcome of a match. On such occasions I would shoot at someone lagging and they wouldn't even take damage and just kill me, but that has been happening always across all games and platforms. I wish my ego was large enough to want to take down an entire video game's matchmaking system.

My FIRST Iron Banner match this week: Put in a game already started. My team had half the other teams score. 4 people were red bar, and several others were yellow. You know how I ended up being matched into this trainwreck? SBMM. Connection should absolutely come first. Any discrepancies in skill should be dealt with by balancing the teams against each other. If there's 6 destiny veterans and 6 new players, split them up 3 and 3. I know that's a super basic example and can't always be done because of fireteams and such, but the amount of lag that happens in Destiny is just unbearable. Stop catering to the new players. Let them get stomped, how else are they going to learn and get better?

4. The answer is to actively remove red bar players from their current activity if it had any type of matchmaking. If you keep entering matchmaking activities as a red bar it will then move on to disabling those type of activities for you.

You're wrong. We've also seen a rise in the numbers of lagging "green bars" since match making was changed.

U forgot #satire

You sir are wrong, and my NetDuma agrees with me. As soon as I click "start" for matchmaking I'm instantly blocking prolly from all over the world so there no way it looks locally first. So to everyone who was in an iron banner lobby with me this weekend you're welcome for the lag free game. ;-)