I’m a 32 year old professional. I have a deep understanding of trends, statistics, goals, and direction. It’s what I do to allow me to afford Destiny, related gear, the connection to other Destiny players, etc. With that said, I understand that Trials of the Nine represents the pinnacle of crucible competition. I will still plainly state that Trials of the Nine is broken. No, shattered. Actually, it feels like an alpha product in the middle of a final AAA release. Here are the facts I base this statement upon: 1. Bungie, thank you for providing an API for sites to collect and analyze performance stats. It encourages me and my group to seek improvement. This tool allows for certain claims to be quantified. 2. I am a good player, but not top 1% by any means. I would put myself in the top 25% based on Destiny 1 experience and Destiny 2 (broken) experience. 3. This week, with Trials being survival, it illustrates this point well: I play crucible occasionally... approximately 15-20% of my Destiny 2 playtime. In the survival game mode, I win approximately 69% of the time, and operate with a 1.46 KDA. My clan is comprised of other players roughly equal to my skill. However, when we engaged Trials of the Nine, we were met with some completely absurd matchups... 4. Weeks 1-3: 22 total matches, 29% win (6 matches ever won). Most notably, I was matched against Zympyy (Rank 96 overall for wins with 449 as of October 9, 2017) and comparable players. I don’t understand how this matchup makes sense even in the context of competitive gameplay. Zympyy is great. He is like Major League Baseball. I am more like collegiate intramural baseball. Of course, the Dodgers would beat a co-ed marketing club team. The Dodgers should play the Mets, and the marketing club team should be playing the rotary club. Does that analogy make sense? 5. This week: 13 total matches, 7.7% win (1 match out of 13). Now, this week makes it particularly weird as it is survival. Against the general player population, I win 69% of the time, that doesn’t go down 10%, 20%, or even 50%. It falls by almost 89%! Why? Well, my clan of comparably skilled players got paired up with vynal, Rezeky and their team, as a representative example. Who are they? Great question. They are the 5th and 8th highest ranked players on Xbox for Trials of the Nine as of October 9th, 2017 with 765 wins and 712 wins respectively. Where my encounter with Zympyy was overkill, this was thermonuclear annihilation. As you can imagine, we were celebrating the 4 total kills we collectively landed that game. Were we on some crazy win streak? No. Actually, we hadn’t won a game yet. How do you think this is an acceptable scenario? 6. The video is telling. I am establishing a casual stream, and happened to record the entire encounter including my webcam to allow you to see facial expressions during this sacrifice. This video shows, very clearly, the issues plaguing Trials and the crucible as a whole: incredible lack of balance, “penalty” to players with good connections (175+Mbps down, 24+ Mbps up, <25ms ping, wired connection, no dropped packets, open NAT, etc), impossible deaths, and classes having insane advantages over others. I would be happy to provide it at your (Bungie) request. Trials makes no sense. The saying “steel sharpens steel” is a great way to describe how competition pushes players to improve. While this is true, there is no “lesson” when the matchup is so skewed. The only thing that happens is these excellent players get to advance to 766 wins, get even more Trials tokens, earn more end-game loot (which statistically, they probably already have earned many times over) while a good player feels like your product is flawed, sentiment shifts to negativity, and another player regrets spending $100 up front on your product and future content. What makes this even crazier is that I’ve read several responses to questions about chests in PvE having a “cooldown” period where the game will limit payout from chests (traditionally 1 local token) for whatever reason. This is beyond absurd to the point of offensive. Ghosts can have perks that AID a guardian in locating chests. A guardian can buy scout reports to find these chests more easily. Despite this, planetary resources and tokens have been deemed “so highly valuable” that a guardian who makes an effort in the open world, despite paying for and using a consumable, shouldn’t deserve the spoils from locating caches. This kind of “farming” doesn’t really pose much risk to the community as there really isn’t an item from localities that are considered part of the end game “meta.” I argue that Trials tokens are substantially more valuable than an EDZ token, for example. Why would there be a restriction on very low value tokens where the rewards aren’t particularly noteworthy, yet, you allow a subset of professional-class players to earn literally thousands of Trials tokens, “farm” players who have no business ever being matched with their type, and penalize the “average Joe player” who just wants to play similarly skilled/decently challenging opponents? Destinytracker.com reports over 2 million daily crucible players. I have a hard time believing there wasn’t a better matchup within a population roughly that of Jamaica. -gregnm369 (XBL) *stats found via destinytracker.com [spoiler]Moderator edit: This thread has been moved to #Feedback forum so that other Destiny players can weigh in. See [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/139533839/0/0]Cozmo's thread[/url] for more information about the #Feedback tag and its uses. Feel free to private message the moderator who moved your post, link to topic for further clarification about why this topic was moved.[/spoiler]