Destiny has had a long road to where it is now. After constant nerfs, buffs, and renerfs, the subclasses and weapons largely as a whole feel balanced which is nice and all. However, despite the meta game being at one of it’s healthies points, the game itself continues to go down hill because of game design choices that are largely unpopular and that negatively affect the player experience largely because Bungie seems to fail to recognize the short comings of their own work. Netcode: Destiny, despite Bungie constantly changing things, has the worst netcode of any major AAA FPS game in the past 10 years. It was clearly designed with PVE in mind and then slapped on PVP modes where the lack of packet loss cancelation like other games and the continued God mode from lagging players negatively effects the player experience for whole lobbies. Couple that with the current attempt to make one of the most casual games competitive (seriously it cant be competitive when aim assist is a rollable stat) by continued HEAVY emphasis on skill based matchmaking. SBMM: LET ME PREFACE THIS BY SAYING IM NOT ENTIRELY AGAINS SKILL BASED MATCHMAKING AS LONG AS THERE IS A DEDICATED SERVER NETWORK WITH REGION LOCKING Despite all their promises of lessening the skill rating’s on the matchmaker, we can all still feel the heavy skill search restrictions. These heavy skill rating’s are very apparent as leaving games see’s you thrown into the same lobby against the same sweaty 6 man team repeatedly, it see’s you play the same group of players constantly, and it just generally leads to lagier sweatier unfun games. Now as I said above, skill based matchmaking isn’t an entirely bad thing. Games like Overwatch, which I currently find myself playing instead of destiny, has incredibly heavy skill ratings influencing their matchmaker but what it has is a dedicated server network with a fantastic netcode to back it up allowing for them to have such heavy skill ratings not negatively affect the game for the best players while still insulating the lower skilled players from the Pro’s. I would have no problem with the skill based matchmaking in games like Call of Duty and destiny as long as they have good netcode’s and dedicated servers to back them up. SBMM continues to be one the most complained about topics on the forums and I understand where the Dev’s are coming from with this, I really do, but I haven’t really seen much of an improvement in quality of games by adding this and I have seen an increase in pub stomping and blowouts at the higher end of the Skill spectrum. I think that the breaking up the matches and mercy rule would have been enough to deal with the blowouts that happened in year one Destiny. If for Destiny 2, they rework the netcode and have a dedicated server network, then sure by all means bring back heavy skill ratings to increase the competitiveness of the game, but right now Bungie needs to accept that they just don’t have the network to support the current Matchmaker settings and that it is negatively effecting the game for a lot of people Lack of real content: this content trickle has to stop. Its not enough as most of us know and that is all I will say about that.