By not resetting your passage though, you’re going to constantly be getting matched up with harder matches just compounding your issue. 

So way back in the day when I at the end of my teens, I played a lot of DOTA on Warcraft III where there was no matchmaking other than joining lobbies. I was pretty good at DOTA and I could play it to relax because generally speaking, I was going to carry the game in most lobbies I joined.

I believe making games rewarding independently of how they went is actually a big part of fun. Or more specifically, it is a big part of combatting anti-fun. A big reason why people hated Trials is that they *had* to win to get any tangible reward for their efforts, so they put an insane amount of stress on themselves…

Baseless conspiracy theories are pretty evil, too.

Elo ranking has been a thing since Halo 2 was able to play online and now people are giving it salt. 

That still sounds pretty bad. Like slot machine kind of bad. Sure you can be loosing here but you can win sometimes. 

The best time to start playing would have been last week, where the number of players newly trying Trials and players going Flawless for the first time break record numbers. Second best time would be this week.

‘the game is only fun for me if I can tell myself I’m making it not fun for someone else’

Eh. 99.99% of players aren’t so skilled that they need to worry about that, not to mention it doesn’t seem to pose much of an issue in literally every other competitive game lol.

Interesting changes. So you’re saying I may actually play Trials soon, then?

I’m sure I’m being uncharitable, but it’s hard for me to read ‘I’m a high skill player who hates the idea of skill-based matchmaking’ as anything other than ‘the game is only fun for me if I can tell myself I’m making it not fun for someone else’.

“If you’re at a certain skill level in the game then any reasonable amount of SBMM means you’re gonna face 360 noscope gods almost every match.”

Streamers used to make their money on recoveries, carries, and highlight reel clips of them solo-stomping entire teams.

Agreed! I thought Ethan hit well on something I see in the community that does bum me out: the idea that the present is somehow always in a state that is worse than what came before, and obviously not as cool as the next season/update/thing coming, so everyone has accepted that to play Destiny is to begrudgingly play…

I think thats a fine point, but often... SO OFTEN, Bungie’s intentions blossom into something else entirely.

Ah, well, thank you! I appreciate your takes on this game - I don’t comment much even though I’ve been around since daulerio ran deadspin, but destiny and its community really clicked with me at a time when I was very thankful for that. It doesn’t surprise me that discussing it would bring me out if the greys, and I…

Where the difference comes in here is that these folks aren’t playing Trials to win Trials, they’re playing Trials to get rolls for guns. Like everything else in Destiny, what you really want is just more loot more faster, so if you’re an asshole PVP god you can actually cash that in with the current system, whereas…

“makes it so that good people have to sweat every match.”

By and large, the Destiny groups I am involved with on social media are all over the moon for this. The sweaty shotgun apes can still be sweaty shotgun apes with other teams their (roughly) same skillset. 

I think what gets to me is the certainty with which certain top players and content creators will doomsay a change like this. While players like this undoubtedly spend the most time in PvP playlists, which lends them a reasonable degree of authority and insight, I don’t see why the reactions can’t come after the…