Joe Blackburn on Crucible: A Response About Communication

Today, Bungie’s Joe Blackburn put out a twitter thread about Bungie’s development plan for crucible, including plans for new maps, reprised maps, reprised game modes, and new game modes.  In response, I’d like to offer some feedback on how Bungie communicates crucible changes to the playerbase.

Anyone who pays attention to online posts about Destiny knows that PvP mains — including many prominent content creators — post a lot about the Crucible.  Unfortunately, a lot of PvP mains pepper their posts with comments belittling and bullying common gamers.  This primarily takes two forms:  First, there are comments suggesting that our experiences don’t matter — this is primarily seen in discussions about matchmaking in which PvP mains assert that their need to ‘relax’ should trump the common gamer’s desire to have a fighting chance in a match.  Second, there are comments suggesting that our opinions don’t matter — basically, arguments that Bungie should cater to the desires of good players and ignore the desires of the rest of us because the good players play more Crucible matches than the average Destiny player.  And all of this is delivered with an elitist sneer, with anything different than the good player’s preferred subclass and loadout derided as ‘low skill’.

The internet is the internet, and it’s easy to ignore (or block) obnoxious people.  That’s true of even prominent creators, because as we’ve all learned while some are great people, some are most decidedly not.  It is another thing entirely when people at Bungie, who have created and are creating this game that we have come to love and make a part of our lives, say things that suggest that Bungie itself agrees with the posters described above.  When Bungie does that, it really hurts.

Because I believe that Bungie does care about the common gamers’ crucible experiences, I think that when these issues have come up in the past it has been inadvertent.  So I’d like to highlight a couple of instances, explain how they made me feel, and respectfully suggest how it might have been done differently.

First, in the June 11, 2020 TWAB announcing the removal of skill-based matchmaking from most crucible modes, the first of the listed reasons for the change was to “Respond to Community Feedback.”  But “community feedback” on that issue was never one way.  Indeed, many, many players preferred skill based matchmaking and the community discourse overall — as opposed to just PvP mains — was much more evenly split on this issue than on many, many other issues.  A reference to “Community Feedback” without acknowledging the views of those of us that preferred SBMM strongly suggested that Bungie just didn’t care about the common gamer’s opinion.  It suggested to me that Bungie didn’t care about my opinion, despite my having played thousands of matches in the Crucible.  It hurt.  Some greater explanation as to why Bungie was choosing to increase the number of unfair matches in spite of the impact of that on the common gamer’s experience, or explanation of how the change wouldn’t hurt that experience, would have gone a long way.

Second, in the May 27, 2021 TWAB about the mid-season stasis changes, Kevin said “we agree with many in the PvP community who say that Stasis is too dominant in the Crucible for too little effort or skill required.”  In a subsequent twitter conversation, he clarified that what this meant was that many stasis abilities provided too much benefit for the effort involved — which is fair enough.  But in putting a point like this in terms of “skill,” Bungie is — consciously or not — adopting the same use of the word “skill” that the posters described above use to belittle common gamers and their choices about subclasses and loadouts.  That felt to me — and others I know — like Bungie was joining the chorus belittling us.  That also hurt.  All the more because it felt gratuitous.  Some stasis abilities were too strong, and therefore extremely frustrating.  That was all that needed to be said.  As anyone who has read Sirlin’s Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion knows, there’s an excellent argument that in those circumstances using stasis is evidence of skill, not of its absence.

To anyone at Bungie that has taken the time:  thanks for reading this, and thanks for all of your hard work and for creating these fantastic experiences.  I hope this provides some understanding about how the way things are communicated may hit in a way you don’t mean or intend. I can’t wait to see what you bring us in the future.