I’m not trying to weight the concepts as equal - I’m not saying ‘fairness in Destiny is equal to fairness in human rights’. I’m saying that the basic argument at the core is the same: ‘if people can’t help themselves, they don’t deserve help’.

Of course it’s subjective - you’re conflating the population pools of the overall mode, which are going to be affected by plenty of outside factors, with the specific impact of SBMM. Is the current population of Trials affected purely by the new SBMM? Of course not; it’s still being affected by the new…

Now re-read all of your post, especially the parts about how it’s bad player’s own fault that they’re bad and they don’t deserve any kind of help from the matchmaking, and tell me I’m way off base hearing the same arguments behind ‘it’s poor people’s fault that they’re poor and they don’t deserve any kind of help from…

I’m actually really curious to see how the playerbase contracts - and amongst which players - in the weeks ahead. Like, I feel like you’re absolutely right... but I also think there’s a chance that ‘new to Trials’ players who didn’t dip their toes in last week will give it a shot this week after being encouraged by the…

I strongly disagree with the notion that ‘SBMM in Destiny has always failed’. A) it’s entirely subjective - it’s not as though the mode was literally failing, connection-wise or otherwise. I had a significantly better time in Destiny PvP when SBMM was engaged, to the point where I stopped playing regularly after it…

The difference being that, with a slot machine, most pulls are ‘losses’. Here, so long as you win a round in each match (and then, once you’ve built up a stock of won rounds, so long as you can manage a single kill), you get the same rewards as if you’d won the entire match. So I wind up with the same rewards for…

I’m sure all of that’s true, in that there’s no single group of people - especially not people linked purely by something as socially arbitrary as ‘is really good at a specific video game’ - that’s composed only of assholes. But at the end of the day, ‘the problems of streamers with recognizable names’ trumping ‘the…

I tend to agree, and I think that last part is what a lot of people are overlooking: this is only the second week of this revamped Trials, and the first week with the new matchmaking. All of this is likely to be tweaked - how the reputation works, how the rewards drop, how the matchmaking is handled, the basic…

And that’s still... kinda my favorite thing about all of this? In that Trials - the sweaty tryhard end-game PVP mode - is now, as far as I know, the only PvP mode with any kind of skill-based matchmaking. The more casual PvP, including Iron Banner, is just as stompy, and it got that way because the hardcore PvP…

I feel like (like a lot of things these days) once you scrape away the weird sense of entitlement and the outrage, there’s a core argument in there, from the folks against SBMM, that’s actually pretty solid: once you get high enough, you’re only ever coming up against the same players who use the same tactics and the…

I’ve thought the same thing about Forsaken, too - and especially about Taken King, which gets held up as the ‘pinnacle’ of Destiny really, really often. And it was great! But I think people also forget that it was before Bungie had any plan for content other than ‘annual expansions’.

That’s sort of my point, though: I know I’m not going to go flawless, so I’m just... never going to reset my passage, ever. Which seems a little counter to the spirit of the mode, you know? I should at least be trying for those Adept weapons, even if I’m highly unlikely to get them - but doing so would actually hurt…

I think it’s absolutely true that there’s been an utter dearth of PvP content in Destiny in general - even as someone who only occasionally glances at PvP, I can recognize that. (Forget new modes or new rewards, even: when was the last actually new map the PvP side got, even?)

Cheers, thank you!

I get what you’re saying - but I don’t see how that makes it ‘unfair’, really. This sounds more like it’s not going to be incredibly easy for your ‘asshole PvP gods’ to earn top-tier loot, because they can’t just stomp all over lesser players to get it... instead, it’ll only be slightly less difficult than it was when…

‘This will be totally horrible!’ lacks a certain weight, just rhetorically, than ‘this was totally horrible’, for sure. Like, you’re not Cassandra, random YouTuber person upset about this. Maybe actually play the mode with the new changes once they go live, then work your audience into a froth, you know?

I would absolutely love it, honestly, if Trials became the ‘ease into Crucible!’ mode for Destiny (or just PvP) newcomers. For one thing, I feel like the structure of Elimination actually helps the frustration level, just because, worst-case scenario, you’re going to die five, six, maybe seven times in a match.…

I’ve been in that same position before - skewing SBMM for a partner - but here’s my question: do you honestly think she’d be having more fun without SBMM at all? I feel like saying ‘SBMM doesn’t entirely protect her so SBMM as a whole isn’t useful’ is a little throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you know? Especia…

You’re probably right, and I didn’t mean to minimize the ‘hardcore but PvE only crowd’ - but I still tend to think that just means there’s still some cannon fodder, which isn’t nearly the same as ‘more cannon fodder players than hardcore PvP combatants’. Essentially, the more players in the pool, the more likely it is…

Honestly, as a Trials newbie (who actually quite enjoyed it last weekend!), one (minor) issue I’d raise with the current reward system is how little it incentivizes trying to go Flawless, if you’re not a ‘hardcore badass PvP player’ already. As far as I could tell, there was little-to-no reason for me to give up my…