To breakdown some stats for you - 10% of the entire D2 population play PvP with any frequency. I read somewhere that of the 10, about a 1/4 actually play Trials with the ability to go Flawless, and that's with a team. Lobby balancing, unfortunately, has been an impossible task. No multiplayer PvP game has had any success in the 30+ years the game type has been around. That's why things like SBMM and CBMM have failed miserably - and there's been calls to move to EOMM - experienced based. With that said, there are players who can pretty much solo Trials matches; taking out teams within the first few minutes, and usually it's players who can also do so in the original Comp. They're just that good. That's why you see people them carrying 0.3 k/d individuals to the Lighthouse, so it's not unheard of. But when you say "old model", do you mean from D1, Trials of the Nine, or when they first brought back Trials in D2?

Bungie want PvP to fail now and it shows/- to make way for there new PvP baby( which by the way I won’t be buying ) no new maps; keep messing with matchmaking; messing with game modes ( trials / comp ) but not adding anything of value. Bungie you really are doing well at destroying this game that I bet the current devs did not work on this game from the start. It shows; the original devs if they played this game now would be embarrassed.

Slot machine is luck with very low chance for return and there is nothing anyone can do to increase the odds. Solo trials the better you are the better your odds are. Trials should be difficult to solo. They never should have had the flawless pool it made flawless too easy. What they need to do is add random drops of trials gear at the end of matches that way win or lose you walk away with something and your time feels worth it.

Bungie have really messed up with matchmaking

Well the player pool probably is small after the changes they did removing the flawless pool and removing card base matchmaking and getting rid of freelance makes no one went to play now so, all the hard-core players stay in there

It’s the result of CBMM. Lobby balance, don’t make me LMFAO, will never happen it’s all RNG based on connections. If you’re playing the same group over and over it’s because you have a good connection with them. Lastly the player pool has shrunk due to CBMM randomness and players being tired of being stomped due to random matchmaking. Want to solve the problem and have balance, demand SBMM with strict parameters. However be warned that will of course never happen because it’s not what the cheaters, hackers, streamers, and high skilled players want. Bungie only listens to them.

I mean when a roughly average skilled PvP player (me) keeps getting teammates who make me look like I am the best PvP player in the game facing the other team who are like clones of me ... yea the MM sucks.

Population issue. Playing soon after reset can have that effect because: 2 platform pools (pc/console), 2 matchmaking pools (practice/challenger) and ftmm. As of 3-4 hours ago the trials player count was ~30k but that’s the total before all the crossplay/pool/matchmaking factors I mentioned along with your region. When the playerbase is this bad I simply don’t play that much if at all on friday or monday, I mostly stick to saturday/sunday.

Welcome to flawless based mm