With Destiny 2 now having been out for 6 months, I thought it would be a good time to give a view on the game at this point from a PvE and PvP perspective from my 500+ hours of play so far. [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/243547410?sort=0&page=0]The PvE write-up can be found here.[/url] Destiny 2 has had a lot of road bumps and obstacles to overcome since launch, but those issues have been very different between PvP and PvE and where overall I feel D2 released with a much stronger PvE component from what we saw in D1, PvP seemed to become almost an afterthought. That is really weird to say considering the effect that a single game mode like Trials dictated not only on D1 over 2 1/2 years, but the impact D1 PvP had on shaping D2 as a whole. [url=https://soundcloud.com/oceans-of-canopy/special-edition-d2-reveal]From the moment it was announced[/url], we knew that the decision to go to all 4v4 was a mistake. I'm not going to go into all of that because Bungie did end coming to realize this as well and 6v6 and Rumble are returning later this month. However there was a second change that D2 brought which for a long time I didn't think quite as harmful, but now think was probably the biggest mistake overall in D2's PvP philosophy and that was the decision to go with playlists. I have no facts or figures to back it up, but I'd still be willing to bet that maybe the biggest reason people stopped wanting to play Crucible is being forced to play random game modes they don't want to play. I can say for a fact it has made me say the hell with it and stop many times and as recently as 2 days ago. When I played D1 at launch, I played Control exclusively. It allowed me to learn the nuances of play and get better at the game in a static familiar environment and I spent hours and hours logged in playing solo, not for any drops or rewards, but because it's why I bought the game, to play an awesome Bungie shooter. Eventually I started playing a lot of Clash as well (particularly when it got added to Iron Banner) and in year 2 when I met my friends and started playing in Fireteams, we would play almost everything, but even then we played what the group wanted and once we started it was a set game mode to go game to game in. The closest we had was the classic playlists that were a random chance between 2 modes and that for me was a huge reason to not log in and play them even when wanting to play classic maps. The classic playlists were created to gate content and to give those players who didn't own the latest expansions content to still play, but incentive to upgrade as well. The irony is that many of the issues that D2 sought to correct in adopting the playlist format were actually the result of the thinking that gave us playlists to begin with. D1 released with what? Clash, Control, Rumble and Salvage I believe and once a month Iron Banner would roll around and draw people to its playlist. Players had that very limited choice of were to queue, but they did en masse and the game was a huge success and particularly for streamers and YouTubers who put out Crucible content. D1 always had battles with lag, but the biggest issues with play in year 1 was unbalanced matches. By the last IBs of HoW there were better odds of dropping into a match in-progress and losing than getting a fresh match and when you did get a fresh match, odds were 4-5 people would quit out before it ended. Matches would start, one team would get a 1 or 2 thousand point lead and that was it, exodus. The solution to this was to increase the influence of SBMM in year 2 to make matches more even and stop the unmitigated pub-stomps. It worked. Destiny 1 over the course of year 2 saw the most competitive matches I saw over its 3 years, but it also saw other factors which were shaping play and playability as well. The first was the introduction of Trials in HoW and the crazy degree to which it was given carte blanche to dictate balance for not only PvP as a whole, but the entire game was bent to the whims of Trials players. The effects of this were not subtle as we saw meta after meta and the developers nerfing not just weapons, but abilities, ammo and ammo consumption and even artifacts across the board to cater to the whims of those who felt everything should be even and "skill'' should dictate every encounter and not the weapons or abilities. What that failed to take into account is that it's impossible for skill to not factor into every encounter and all it ended up doing was taking away the ability for players to master different sets of skills and made everyone play with the same tools. Not surprisingly it was hated when adopted into D2 by the same player base who thought for sure it would let their ''skill'' shine only to find that others were better at D2's play and so suddenly everything being equal somehow didn't allow for skill to matter. Classic doublespeak and once more showed the lack of self accountability that led to them wanting neutered play to begin with. There was something else happening over the course of D1 that also had a huge negative effect on play though and that goes back to the creation of the classic playlists. While D1 started out with relatively spartan choices for play, that did not last as we saw not only Trials and elimination added to the game, but also Supremacy, Rift, Zone Control, Mayhem and private matches. While it can't be argued that those were positive additions as far as more fun things to do and play, they came with a cost and that was how much they fractured and lowered the player pools for any particular activity amongst them. Instead of everyone playing in 4 (5 if IB was active) possible playlists, suddenly everyone were spread out and the immediate effect was seen with the almost crippling effect lag started having on matches in all modes as the matchmaking system struggled to put together clean matches with the drastically lowered player pools. This had a secondary effect as well as we saw in year 3 the completely bogus and unfounded attack on SBMM as the root of all Destiny's PvP woes and ultimately its demise and the way that shaped D2 as well. SBMM was always a factor in matchmaking going back to launch in Sept 2014, but it was one of many in a complex algorithm that dictated how we were grouped that included not only connections, but regions as well. The attack on SBMM was once again driven by the sweat community who didn't want to always play close matches against evenly skilled opponents, but wanted to pub-stomp for views and subs. So the rallying cry of "why should we always have to play sweaty matches?'' was set forth and adopted by viewers and listeners and then transformed into SBMM is the reason for all the lag and every other ailment. Bungie capitulated and it didn't cure lag, it only brought back the uneven quit'fest that existed in year one. So now we have D2 and as a direct result of the how the game progressed over the course of D1 (and the problems inherent from those changes themselves) we not only ended up with 4v4, but playlists as well. The effect was immediate as we saw a huge backlash against Supremacy always popping up as the game mode when obviously players were hoping for something else. This sadly led to Supremacy being changed because Bungie saw the issue as Supremacy not being fun enough and so ''let's make it more like Clash'' instead of ''hmmm, maybe we should let players just play Clash if they want'' From the start our group was affected by the 4v4 switch as our group of 6 that would go raid and then PvP together suddenly had to split up after raids and it affected not only the raid groups, but friendships as well. But on a solo level, suddenly where if others were grouped and running together, it took away any desire to log in as a solo player when there was no option to play what I wanted and to get stuck playing things I hate to maybe get a game of something I liked at some point. I'm not a streamer but I would guess that this had a huge impact on players who streamed Crucible as well as they were no longer able to just stream modes they preferred and excelled at and were forced into the random hopper. A huge part of any type of competition is getting into a groove and a flow. When you play clash or control or doubles or anything consistently, you can't help but improve and learn and find where you play best within the confines of each games rules and flow of play. That all goes out the window when those rules and games change match to match. There was another aspect of the changes that came home to roost in the playlists as well with the creation of ''competitive and quickplay'' which could now be labeled ''no one plays and let's pub stomp'' I get where Bungie was going with it and what they were trying to do with the SBMM and CBMM splits, but once again, the skilled players don't really have any desire to test those skills in competitive playlists. They want to go in and smear people and what have we seen in D2? Quitting out on a scale not seen since D1 year 1. This has resulted in a future update to give penalties for dropping out, which okay, but honestly I see that as one more deterrent to people playing and not a solution that examines why players are quitting to begin with and trying to change that. [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/243632487?sort=0&page=0&path=1]I hit the character limit talking history/infrastructure, here is the rest on actual gameplay[/url]