Just another tired Matchmaking complaint onto the pile
"Just git gud"
"Just play with LFG"
"Just play with friends"
"It's a skill issue"
"mad cuz bad"
"You should be able to 1v3 a trials team"
"It's a skill issue"
Is this really all to say? It feels like it is. Every week, without fail. While there's plenty of discussion trying to push Bungie towards some way of balancing the PvP, there's just far too many comments hand-waving it away. "There's no problem but you". "I'm getting great matches, sounds like a skill issue" says the top 3% player to the bottom 40%.
"CoD SBMM exists, and it's garbage" without even acknowledging the deeper issue that is Activision manipulating their info to guarantee a 50% win rate, bouncing the players around like Yo-Yos in order to do so.
I'm feeling the issue isn't the average player skill, it's the massive divide between top and average skills. Those in the top do NOT want to let that go. And I get it, it's nice to feel like you're a god. But even in the "Endgame" events, there's hardly any competition and it's destroying the crucible playerbase. Nobody returns after their bounties / pinnacle unless they have brain rot like I do.
It also feels like a cause for Weapon Nerf crying. Top player got creamed by a fusion shot? Nerf it. Bottom players getting destroyed by hand cannons and shotguns? Nerf it. But never touch the stomp lobbies, no, the top players need their daily We Rans. It makes me sad that there's even an "I made you this" medal that people legitimately have on their accounts.
I'm no top-skill. I'm aggressively average at best. That middle ground trying their best to find the fun in PvP, but the uncompetitive matchups take that fun away. I can improve, but in the moment when I'm matched against someone DestinyTracker labels as a Top 500 LEGEND while I'm still around Gold or Silver, that's just not happening. Same goes for stomping people who are less skilled, it's not fun. I feel bad because there's no competition. I'm creaming them, and not even trying. It's not fun.
We need to address the issue in PvP that is an entire lack of matchmaking and lobby balance. And before anyone says "Well just go work for Bungie then", they don't hire Canadians. I tried. Would absolutely love to get hired and rip out the entire weapons sandbox to start fresh again and implement SBMM. But can't, I don't live in the States.
So, for those sweaty-balled shitlords out there, lobby balancing is a known issue. Bungie knows about it and has admitted that it is a problem and they don't know what to do about it.
Do you know what else is a problem? The PvP community.
The PvP community has a long and storied tradition of putting Bungie in double-binds and generally being a toxic cesspit of unpleasant individuals hell-bent on gatekeeping the crucible. Making playlists and activities fundamentally unplayable and unrewarding by being insufferable, toxic, and genuinely unreasonable only turns the gamemode into a broken and unplayable hellscape like Trials was before Bungie's revamp in Season of the Lost. When you tell your casuals and your low skill players to go play strikes, and they do, in droves, you end up in a matchmaking pool and a culture even less healthy and less approachable than Trials of the Nine. Making the lighthouse inaccessible to most is one thing, making the entire PvP landscape an unplayable, unpleasant, and inaccessible hellscape for both noobs and low to mid-tier veteran players alike is another matter entirely. Half of my friends list refuses, flat-out, to play PvP because it is both too inaccessible and the community is just too toxic to deal with. I only play the Crucible to get challenges done, pinnacles, and Iron Banner, and only as long as I need to in order to accomplish the set objectives. After that, if I want to play PvP, I play Apex Legends, which is far more balanced and far less dysfunctional than the Crucible despite the hackers and smurfs currently plaguing the game.
I'm not going to go into exhaustive detail about reasonable and effective steps Bungie could take to improve the overall landscape and experience. That subject has been brought up and rehashed by more intelligent, articulate, and technologically savvy individuals than myself. I recommend Kujay's video on unfucking the Crucible. The simple fact of the matter remains that so long as PvP is simultaneously unrewarding and fundamentally unfun for solos, casuals, noobs, and players at low to mid-tier skill levels, the Crucible and Trials will continue suffer. The PvP community needs to pull its head out of its -blam!- and start recognising that sometimes K|D is not an accurate reflection of skill. A solo player is fundamentally at a disadvantage as they are relying on a team of complete strangers to actually know what they're doing and to execute targets and objectives effectively. As is so often the experience, this is anything but the case, leading to players who can land consistent 1.4-2.2 K|D games with solid teammates, consistently bottom-fragging in QP when matched with disorganised, self-centred, or hopeless blueberries with little to no sense of teamwork or mechanics.
Beyond all of this, stating "0.5 K|D ergo you're wrong" is simply an ad hominem and I would like anyone who makes this point to articulate precisely in what way that invalidates any criticism of the overall dysfunctionality rooted in the heart of the Crucible. Additionally, I would like you to articulate precisely what productive purpose such statements make and what they add to the discourse.
While the current broken system serves the PvP community now, as they are the ones chiefly benefitting from it, I can't help but remind the PvP community that we've been down this road many a time before. The result has always been that by making the experience unbearable for lower-skilled players, noobs, and casuals, you only serve to diminish and depopulate the matchmaking pools by pushing them out of the playlists, thereby creating precisely the conditions that completely broke the Crucible during Beyond Light. Cheaters, carry services, account recoveries, endless sweaty matches full of nothing but sweatlords, all of those things high skilled players hate having to deal with every single game thrive in a PvP ecosystem that is as difficult, exclusionary, and intolerable as it is quickly devolving its way into being.
When lower skill players are expressing deep frustration and dissatisfaction and migrating to other games for a better, more balanced, and more engaging PvP experience, instead of being a -blam!- about it, recognise that this is the brontide rumbling in the distance before the shitstorm that was Beyond Light makes landfall. Take this as a warning of what's to come. I love the Crucible, I love the gunplay of it, I love the variety in it, but right now, I can't bring myself to play PvP in this game because it is so janky, broken, unbalanced, and buggy.
When your mid-tier players are stating "I would rather play Arenas in Apex Legends than Trials because at least Arenas is fun" there's a problem. Bungie can fix the game all they like, but if the community doesn't learn from its own mistakes, the crucible will never change.
I'll be making a separate forum post about this, because, frankly, I am sick to death of the dismissive, flippant, and disrespectful attitude the PvP community has toward everyone who does not meet the particular and perpetually shifting requirements of their no-true-scotsman nonsense.