Top 6% here. Absolutely hit the nail right on the head with this one my friend. Back when sbmm was active, I wouldn't have to worry about running with my friends as we'd get people that were as good as us. Nowadays, its difficult to run crucible just to have fun, as I either get stat farmers or people who dont know their left from their right. Sbmm is that perfect balance, where you've always got a chance to win, even if you're just playing for fun. Its really annoying for some of my buddies to get match made with sweats 24/7 simply because they get unlucky. While I might be able to beat them, they just end up feeling defeated and frustrated. Trust me, it would take me 5 minutes to get a 6 stack of sweats to just mercy people and farm stats with cbmm, but that's not fun for me nor the enemies. I'm praying that with Bungie's "renewed focus on pvp" they'll look into matchmaking again, along with giving me more damn crucible maps.

Nah bruh, I just wanna chill and play some quick play and vibe. If you even do slightly above your skill level in one game, you get sent into a lobby of tryhards. Just make freelance quick play.

The PVP experience in this game has slowly pushed me to the point where I don’t want to play the game period anymore, I took some time away from the game last season into the current one in hopes that I would come back and feel refreshed and energised to play, alas it was not to be. I have decided that this season (even though I paid for the 4 seasons) will be my last, I don’t see, at least in the short term, how the game the game becomes better. I do look back at D1 PVP and wonder how we got here; this game isn’t enjoyable anymore. This isn’t me throwing the toys out of the pram, screaming “your game sucks” or anything, this is me saying, Bungie you have a vision for your game, I don’t like it so I’m not going to play your game. I do hope that the game and Bungie do go on to achieve great things though. I commend you on your post and think it makes some really good points, will it change anything? Probably not, but it needs to be said, the game isn’t dying at any sort of rapid rate, you’ll always lose players but, I do think that if they aren’t careful, they will end up that way, look at COD as a good example. That game was abandoned en-masse because of the design decisions and general direction they have taken things.

I like connection bases because I see less stasis hunters and chaperone. Back in the "skilled based match making" days you start to see more cheese then skill. I don't know maybe I'm just a hypocrite.

[quote]I've made this post before but after a few months I wanted to make it again just to reaffirm my stance and to get people talking about this topic. A lot of you on the forum know me as ben, I play on pc and I pretty much only play PvP. I spend pretty much all of my time in rumble - I am #1 in rumble on pc according to guardian.gg and #5 across all platforms according to destinytracker. If you want to look at my stats in detail you can look up "6 god ben" on the website of your choice, it will be my steam name for a while and I should be the only one with it. After a lot of time in PvP, it has become abundantly clear to me that purely connection-based matchmaking is not good for destiny's PvP. From what I can tell from playing a lot and from spending a lot of time on here reading what people have to say, the current algorithm that is present in most crucible playlists does a very good job at pushing casual/average players away from the game. As an example, please look at the PGCR from a rumble game I played today: https://guardian.gg/2/pgcr/8966356596 . This is one of the most flagrantly unfair lobbies I have been in in a very long time. I joined this game down 9 and won the game in 3 minutes - these players were very clearly brand new to the game and were not even trying to shoot back. As you can see from their elo ratings, this lobby had 2 bronze, 3 iron, 1 gold, and 1 DIAMOND player. Im willing to bet everyone in this lobby had less than 300 hours on the game compared to me with 2000 on steam alone. When lobbies like this happen, people stop wanting to play. They are left with the notion that PvP is a place for tryhards, and that casuals or new players like them do not belong. I don't care how good you are at the game, how much of an ego you have, how much you enjoy shitstomping people who don't shoot back at you - this is unhealthy for the game, period. You can say the game caters to casuals and I agree that it does; the sandbox has a lot of very forgiving and easy to use weapons and abilities that definitely cater to the low skilled player. But this doesn't matter because they still don't stand a chance against someone who has been playing way longer than them and who is way better. And the thing is, I don't even think this matchmaking is beneficial to the skilled player's experience either. I understand the appeal of pubstomping, don't get me wrong, but is it REALLY worth jeopardizing the casual experience so that you can absolutely stomp every lobby without even trying? Does it not get old? Because I think it gets old. Rumble is a time passer for me, but it is not engaging or intense or demanding whatsoever. The rumble games that I enjoy the most are lobbies with 1 or 2 other good players, on a small map where you can't run away from eachother and can only win by proving that you are better in 1v1 scenarios and better at controlling the map. I win just about every single game, this week my record is 119 wins and 3 losses, and Id say maybe one out of every ten games is one where I actually have to try? Very, very rarely do I really have to fully go for it and go full focus in order to win a game. Winning games is rarely satisfying, it is just normal and the satisfying games are ones against good players. There is nothing satisfying to me about demolishing new players, and I wish people of my skill level felt the same because your pubstomping is not worth the death of the game because everyone gets pushed away. It is especially problematic when you consider the fact that, for the casual player, there is no where they can go in the crucible director to escape this unfair experience. Every single playlist is extremely CBMM heavy. You can make the argument that we have seen what destiny was like with skill based matchmaking being so intense that lobbies were way too laggy and I am not going to act like I forgot. Putting skill based back into the algorithm and making the connection based matchmaking a little less intense is definitely risky with destiny's playerbase. But I think it is worth the risk, just to try. Even if its just in a couple playlists. I don't have any statistics handy regarding the average crucible player count across every season and frankly I do not care. If it is true that the crucible player count is the highest it has ever been, regardless of how bad matchmaking is for the casual player, then so be it. I find it hard to believe but I know the numbers don't lie. I just want to make the point that, even from my perspective, it is clear that the matchmaking is unfair. Thanks for reading my rant. TL:DR Crucible matchmaking is too punishing to the casual player, it leaves them with no where to go if they want to improve without playing against people leagues ahead of them in skill and experience. Edit: In regards to the "you improve from losing against better players" argument, it is a good point but it only applies to a certain extent and is somewhat flawed in destiny specifically. My detailed reply to this argument is here - https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/259430040/0/0/1 I also deleted a bunch of text because I typed this on my computer and didnt realize how brutal the walls of text looked on mobile[/quote] Well stated, ben. I appreciate someone standing up for the rest of the players!

I play alone, no fire team. I don’t know anyone personally who plays and I’d rather set fire to my testicles than join a voice channel with strangers. My son used to share the account and all his mates used to do raids etc. He doesn’t play anymore. I completely understand that Destiny is fundamentally a game people play together but it has content you can do solo. Every time someone posts about the lack of new PvP content there is a tsunami of commenters pointing out that it’s a PvE game that has a little add on called the Crucible. Okay, fine with me, although nearly 2 years without a completely new map is genuinely taking the p1ss. I played the Beyond Light campaign (or whatever you call it). I enjoyed it, it was clever, it was interesting and it was fun. But when it’s done it’s back to PvP. I can’t do vaults, Grandmasters, raid or get my light level (or my actual skill level) high enough to solo a lost sector to get the new exotic armour pieces and there were things I couldn’t do in the past to get certain exotic weapons. Same for Trials. Not doing it. As a solo player who pretty much these days only plays PvE content to get weapons for Crucible I am limited. So here’s an idea, if PvP (Crucible) is “just a little add on” to a PvE game then why not have PvP where players have access to all weapons, all armour, all mods and all perks to chose from. If it’s really a PvE game then PvE players will have no issue grinding for weapons and exotic armour to use in PvE. But I think it would be cool if I could build whatever guardian I wanted to run in PvP. Then it really would be about who was the best, who picked the right load out and used it best. So I don’t run into adept/raid/trials weapons I can never own. I can use whatever exotic armour I want also. There are no pinnacle PvP weapons anymore for individual players, Trials is Trials, as a solo player I’m not going there. So all weapons should be on the table - including everything they sunset. However, all behind the paywall. You don’t pay for content you don’t get to use it. Then skill match people. I’ve played this game since D1 launched, I hardly played PvP in D1 but played solid in D2 and I’ve never seen so many one sided matches as a proportion of matches played. It’s not all bad but it’s plainly not working the way it is. I’m not interested in KDA, or even how many kills, but I want an even match. If I am on the side stomping I barely get a shot off, if I’m getting stomped I barely get a shot off. There’s no difference to me. PvE players can’t really object to this, after all crucible is just a little side activity, it’s not the main game after all.

[quote]If it is true that the crucible player count is the highest it has ever been, regardless of how bad matchmaking is for the casual player, then so be it.[/quote] PvP player count only tells you that a player played at least one match of Crucible [b]or Gambit[/b]. There is no data available from the Bungie API that only reports Crucible play in the same way. You can get data about the number of players who played at least one match in each playlist, but then a player who plays some Rumble, Control, Survival, and Mayhem gets counted 4 times. This also means that a player who spends 4 hours straight in Crucible counts exactly the same as one who jumps into a match to complete a few bounties. So, you cannot tell whether Crucible has a "healthy" population or not from the numbers Bungie provides. You can only tell that X number of players played a PvP activity on a particular day. I think the easiest way to see that there is almost no real diversity of players (in other words, lots of players of all different skills playing lots of matches) is that even in very popular events (like Mayhem and Iron Banner), you do not see many players with KDA less than 1. The average KDA in Destiny 2 is around 1, which means that if there were a balance of players of all skill, every match should have half above 1 and half below. [quote]You can make the argument that we have seen what destiny was like with skill based matchmaking being so intense that lobbies were way too laggy and I am not going to act like I forgot[/quote] This is not what it was like for the vast majority of the player base. Only the top 25% or so thought that lobbies were "intense" and laggy. Most of us felt that it was an even match where you had to do good to get kills/win, but you had a chance to do that every match. And, most lobbies weren't laggy, because there were a lot more players in the "average" category playing then.

Pvp has always been shocking & pve is going the same way

While SBMM needs to return it might be too late to really fix anything

Nothin like a match between a 6-stack of gilded unbroken/flawless players, and a team of randoms! Nothin like getting spawn trapped and farmed due to wack spawns, and small maps! Nothin like having half your team leave in the first minute because it's immeadiately obvious that the match is going to be awful in every regard!

Its either stomp or be stompped right now and ots just boring on either side, there's no challenge in any game

Agreed. CBMM may work to the short term benefit of players looking to pubstomp, but it is not in the long term interests of keeping the game healthy. Which is why SBMM is becoming industry-standard.

Submissive Breedable Married Mommies

I've been wondering why Rumble isn't SBMM. Being in a one-on-one gunfight with a top-tier player doesn't interest me. I have limited time for gaming and don't want to spend it being a fish in a barrel. I hop in for a game here and there because I enjoyed the mode when it was SBMM. I do like playing both CBMM and SBMM, though, and I like to skip between both. I think Crucible would be best if we had a better balance of SBMM and CBMM. The main Valor mode (Control, Clash, Classic mix, whatever) should definitely have both options. I'd probably play both daily. For now, my favorite mode is Elimination. I prefer the slower and more strategic game style, having fewer connection/lag/latency issues, and the more balanced teams. Plus, it is less stressful than Survival.