It is two days before the new season and the Witch Queen preview stream and apparently the internet is awash with leaks. I don’t want to be spoiled and so I am staying away from social media and reddit until Tuesday. So no substantive post this week. See you next season!
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Review
This week I completed the Fatebreaker Seal by completing the gatekeeper challenge in Master Vault of Glass. In addition we had the last bit of the season’s story, the “Epilogue” cutscene in which the Vex have invaded the Last City and are repelled by St. XIV, Mithrax, Ikora, Amanda Holliday, and Zavala — with an assist from us, of course. It’s been a great season story-wise and I am excited for the next season and Witch Queen next year.
Thursday, I did a dungeon crawl with random weapon loadouts with Lostsight5 and NeoMadDog. The dungeons are some of Destiny’s best spaces and it’s always good to go through them again. And Destiny is indeed better played with friends, so I am grateful to have a regular time set up with them to game.
Other than that I spent my time in the Crucible, both in Control and Survival (Freelance) on my own and in Trials on Saturday morning. The Trials map was Endless Vale and the cards went quite smoothly — we took a couple of losses but no resets. I was generally satisfied with my play but am increasingly frustrated by the FoV/aiming difference going back to the old-gen Xbox makes. I am hoping that switching to old-gen won’t be necessary this upcoming season, and indeed am eager to find out what changes they have planned for Trials.
I continue to have fun playing trials though it is hard to determine if I am getting better or making any progress. I gave some feedback in my last post and it bears reemphasizing that some form of ranked mode would be a godsend.
Preview
This is the last week of the season and there is nothing left that I have to do. I’m not planning on playing Trials this week because I have family plans. If the uzume sniper is the nightfall loot I will likely try to farm a decent roll, and of course I will raid with Team Fabulous on Wednesday and play with Lostsight and Neo on Thursday. Beyond that I am just waiting for any information at all about the new season, including the weapons changes that are going to be announced in Thursday’s TWAB.
In my last feedback post, I discussed how a lot of Crucible-related posting online is marked by hostility towards and belittling of common gamers. Yet a lot of Crucible mains bemoan the fact that common gamers aren’t as interested in the Crucible as they used to be. These were on Twitter just this week (click the post to see the full thread on twitter):
In this post, I want to talk about my own on-again, off-again love affair with Crucible, and why I think that a lot of the suggestions made by good PvP players miss the mark.
Falling in Love With Crucible
The human element in Crucible changes all of that. Human players are unpredictable and have nearly infinite variety in skill and weapons. Crucible matches are not predictable in the same way PvE activities are and mastering PvP is much more difficult and involves learning a lot more than mastering PvE.
That variety — and that challenge — is what makes crucible great. When Destiny 2 launched I was a regular but poor crucible player. Three or four months in I sported a 0.67 k/d, and felt like I would always be bad at it — basically, I believed that crucible was just “not for me.” An extremely kind clanmate though, urged me to reconsider, and insisted that she was sure that I could get better. And with that encouragement, I started to try. Moreover, since Destiny 2’s year one content was the release/DLC model, where players could get through it all quickly (which I did), playing crucible became one of my go-to Destiny activities.
And I fell in love with it. I was usually matched with players around my level — there certainly were exceptions where I was much worse or much better than my opponents but for the most part it was pretty even. I loved the challenge of trying to get better. I watched YouTube videos, I watched Twitch, and more importantly I played — a lot. I created a simple spreadsheet to track my k/d progress, since my first goal was to get to a 1.0. And what that spreadsheet shows is that I played crucible almost every day from January to the start of Forsaken in September. And I absolutely did get better, not just as shown by my k/d improvement but also because I recognized and understood situations better the more I played.
Why I Play a Lot Less Crucible Now
I still play a lot of Crucible — far more than the average player — but certainly not every day. Here’s why:
Matchmaking
Bungie removed skill as a matchmaking consideration from all modes except Survival/Glory. That decision, and the communication around it, had a profound effect on how I think about PvP in Destiny. What it said to me is that Bungie is prioritizing the experiences of veteran, good PvP players over the experiences of common gamers like me.
The result of this is that it is now a very common experience to be in a match against players much better than me, that I have little chance against. And I am about average. Bad players have it even worse. So match-for-match, Crucible is just less fun than it used to be.
Moreover, now every time I feel like I’m in an imbalanced match I am reminded of this decision and feel resentful about it. And if I am in a few imbalanced matches in a row, I wonder whether the population has gotten to the point that I just won’t have fun anymore.
PvE Seasonal Model
The Destiny model used to be that big releases or DLCs would drop and then there would be months in between new content. For players that play a lot and got through everything quickly, then, PvP could be the only fresh Destiny experience available for months. Indeed, PvP mains routinely argued then and some still argue now that Bungie should pay attention to PvP out of proportion to the number of player hours played in it because it is what gets the game through so-called “content droughts.”
We just don’t have the same content droughts anymore, and as a result there has never been more to do in PvE in Destiny. Under the seasonal model, the story evolves throughout the season and new content is revealed throughout the season. In season fourteen, for example, we started out with overrides, got Vault of Glass, then got expunge missions, the master Vault of Glass and Grandmaster Nightfalls. And this on top of seasonal events like Solstice of Heroes, weekly challenges that were revealed week-by-week, and new triumphs and a seal to chase. I don’t need PvP to keep Destiny fresh, there is PvE stuff for me to do all the time. And even if there isn’t, by the time I run out I have played so much Destiny that I may just try another game rather than play PvP if the PvP isn’t fun.
Survival Isn’t Fun Enough
Since Survival does consider skill in matchmaking, I find those matches more fun than most other forms of crucible. But Survival in its current form isn’t enough. First, it is a single game mode with no objective other than to kill the other team. A little variety would go a long way. Second, Glory is not a meaningful ranking system. Instead, it is just a progression system like Valor that measures longevity and playtime. If either of these issues were addressed I’d be more inclined to play Survival, but in its current form it’s not a playlist that is fun enough to play very often.
The PvP Community is Unwelcoming
PvP veterans seem to like nothing more than talking down to common gamers. They love to talk about how “trash” we are, how we’re “bots,” how we’re using “dad rifles” or “low skill” weapons, and to otherwise insult us. Moreover they don’t at all hide that as far as they are concerned, only the quality of their experiences matter, and the quality of our experiences is irrelevant except to the extent that they need opponents to stomp.
Just the day after posting about the poor reception videos about improvement in PvP get, Pattycakes tweeted out this:
As his video shows, when good players ask for instant respawns in regular PvP, what they are really asking for is more opportunities to spawnkill their opponents over and over so as to get montage-worthy clips for their videos. And it’s not as if they don’t know what that means for the experience of the other player — anyone who plays PvP a lot has had the experience of getting a bad spawn and getting spawn killed, and we all know how frustrating it is. It is pure selfishness.
I could write pages and pages of examples, but anyone who follows Destiny online has seen what I’m talking about. Common gamers are not stupid and it is not particularly appealing to play in a “community” where people value you only as cannon fodder.
What Would Get Me To Play More Crucible
There is one thing that would get me to play more crucible: fun. If the activity is fun, I will play. If it is not, I may play if I really want loot associated with the activity, but then as soon as I get that loot I will stop.
The suggestions most PvP mains make for crucible miss the mark because they don’t sufficiently take into account that “fun” is a bigger driver of playtime than “loot.” Some suggestions, like “instant respawns,” are just pure selfishness that would actually make the game less fun for common gamers and would lead to less of us playing. Also in this category are many PVP mains’ suggestions about weapon and ability tuning, which mostly amount to “buff what I like to use and nerf everything else.” Others that might have some potential benefit for common gamers, such as just “more loot” or purely random matchmaking in trials rather than card-based matchmaking, have a much greater benefit for the good PvP players than for common gamers. Those types of changes are not going to get players like me to play crucible more.
Until crucible is more fun — not more rewarding, more fun — common gamers like me will continue to stay away and even those of us that generally like and enjoy PvP will play less than we otherwise would because we just can’t get our friends to play with us anymore.
Review
This past week in Destiny was another Iron Banner week. Once again, I played each character until all four of the weekly bounties were done, and tracked the games in a Google Docs spreadsheet. The four bounties this week were Defeat Opponents, Defeats with Zone Advantage, Capture Zones, and Assisted Defeats. All of my matches were solo queue and on the Xbox Series X. The assisted defeat bounties took the longest.
It took 45 matches to complete all of the bounties, as compared to 78 matches last IB. I played 17 on Hunter, 12 on Warlock, and 16 on Titan. One third of the matches ended in mercies, similar to last IB. My team won 23 and lost 22 games overall, and won 9 and lost 6 of the mercies.
I actively dodged stacks, either abandoning the queue before it filled if I saw one or leaving the game immediately if I didn’t until I flew in. Even with three stacks if they were on the other team I would check destinytracker.com and leave if it was basically three good players.
Once again I enjoyed my IB experience this week. I tried to learn Duality and felt like I improved over the course of the week. Certainly I had some tough games, but I also had some good ones. Avoiding stacks helped make it a better experience.
Raid Team Fabulous did the Templar challenge without cheesing it and without major trouble. It was excellent. We then did a regular run and were flawless until we messed up at Gorgons. I think if we tried we could get a flawless run done.
I also joined pStabs’ Thursday raid team for their first try at master VoG. Their team did great for their first try–we got all the way to Gatekeeper, completing the Templar challenge with no cheese. We went back in on Sunday and completed Gatekeeper too. It was really fun and I’m glad I was invited to join.
I’ve stopped doing the seasonal event because I think I have enough of the currency to focus the engrams I want to in the remaining two weeks.
Preview
This week the season’s story wraps up (or at least begins to wrap up) with Epilogue. I am looking forward to it and to seeing what the next season has in store. It is also the return of the Gatekeeper challenge in master VoG, and completing that will complete the Fatebreaker challenge for me. Beyond those two things I am just hoping to continue having fun and trying to improve in the crucible and reading This Week at Bungie which is going to tell us about armor and mod changes for season 15.
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.
Review
Other than the Grandmaster Nightfall, the Disgraced, and the Oracles Master VoG challenge, there was nothing pressing in Destiny PvE this week. I ran the Disgraced twice, with relatively easy clears both times. It was double loot, and the first time I got two adept weapons. The second time, however, I didn’t get any. Not getting any when you expect that “double loot” means you have a good chance to get two feels bad.
Oracles was a relatively easy challenge on Master difficulty. Our team used this strategy from reddit and with multiple well warlocks, always three people to teamshoot, and relatively few threatening enemies we got it done quickly. We then hopped into normal mode and did the Eyes on Atheon challenge (kill Atheon without anyone killing a supplicant) which means that I now have all of the challenges done except the remaining Master challenges: Templar and Gatekeeper.
I spent the rest of my Destiny time playing crucible, with 93 control matches and 39 Trials matches. Let’s start with Trials. The map was Wormhaven, which I think is a reasonably good map for trials. We had three resets on my first character — hunter — although one was only on game 2. We then ran off 21 wins in a row. I continue to struggle in Trials, with only 12 out of the 39 games being at a 1.0 k/d or higher. I do feel like I have improved in the past year but it is difficult to know how much and how to take it to the next level.
One issue I have is the transition from my Xbox Series X, with 105 Field of view, back to my Xbox One X, with its unchangeable field of view of 72. When I first switch back my aim is off because I am sliding way past the target when moving my reticle quickly. I feel like it comes back after an hour or so but the first few games are always unpleasant. I am considering not playing next season if I can’t play on the Series X.
I had a wide variety of matches in control. In many I struggled and went negative, where in others I had very good games. I am switching between handcannon/ shotgun and pulse/SMG as my main loadouts. I felt like as the week went on I got better at being conscious of and using cover. I am going to continue working on that this week.
Preview
This week the master challenge is Templar. I have gilded the Conqueror title so I will not be doing any grandmaster unless it is to farm for an adept weapon and upgrade materials. I may attempt to solo flawless the Warrior master empire hunt as I never got the flawless master empire hunt triumph. Beyond that, I will be spending my time completing the Iron Banner bounties on all of my characters in preparation for next season. I may not be able to play trials as I have a lot of plans this weekend.
A lot of players give feedback about Destiny 2 online. Much of that feedback is awful and not constructive. Constructive feedback has to start with a recognition of some basic truths:
- Bungie knows a lot more about what is going on in the game than any individual player, no matter how much that player plays.
- Bungie also knows how the game is constructed and how its various parts fit together, and the technological and practical limitations on changes far better than any player.
- Bungie’s incentives are to make as much money as possible consistent with its ethical vision (e.g., even if it would be more lucrative — which it wouldn’t — Bungie isn’t going to promote racism or sexism in Destiny).
- What an individual player can offer that is new is their experience and feelings about features in the game.
When I am giving feedback, I try to focus on communicating information that Bungie could not get by simply analyzing my game play. The folks at Bungie know how much time I’ve spent in any activity, for all time. They know how many times I’ve abandoned an activity. They know what weapons I use and how often I change them. And much more. They know these things about all of us.
What Bungie does not know is *why* I make the choices I do — in other words, how I feel when playing and how those feelings drive the actions they know I’ve taken.
When I’m giving feedback, I try to keep that in mind and be focused on what Bungie doesn’t know rather than my own (relatively uninformed) opinions about things they do know.
How does this affect what I say? One example is my views on PvP matchmaking. I believe that matchmaking affects the PvP population, and in general I prefer skill-based matchmaking. But you will not see me tell Bungie: “Put in SBMM because SBMM will increase population,” even though I personally believe that all things being equal SBMM is better for a playerbase than random matchmaking. Why? Because it is quite obvious to me that all things are not equal. Bungie has chosen to have connection-based matchmaking in its casual playlists and so Bungie has obviously concluded that for Destiny 2, at this point in time, CBMM is better for population (see truth 3, above). And Bungie has far, far more information than I do about that.
A related but separate issue is how to get feedback heard by Bungie. Bungie very publicly listens to and takes feedback from content creators, and gives very little indication that they take feedback from ordinary players. But people who know the company better than I do assure me that they do, through various mechanisms. Part of the reason I started this blog is to scratch my itch to give feedback and have it heard, and while I can’t control the latter at least now I have an outlet for the former. Expect a feedback post on Crucible soon.
Review
With all of the Solstice and seasonal activities done I am down to the Master VoG challenges and Grandmaster Nightfalls as far as “must do” PvE activities each week. I still do a set of gunsmith and vanguard bounties on each character, as well as a set of splicer bounties as I do the three overrides and three expunges that grant a powerful engram each week. Aside from that I am spending my time in the crucible.
I did the Master conflux challenge early in the week with Wafflez’ clan with not too much trouble, though I came in as a sub so I don’t know how long they had been at it. But after I joined we got it on the third try. Raid Team Fabulous had a bit more trouble — we had to abandon the effort on Wednesday night as it was getting late and someone was headed out to Vegas in the morning. When he got back we went in again on Monday night and finished it off. A very satisfying clear. Once again I was very impressed with how chill everyone was even when things weren’t going well. This is a team I’d be comfortable going into a raid day 1 with, because even if we couldn’t clear it we would have a good time.
The Grandmaster was the Warden of Nothing, which I did one time. Some people do it for clears, and some people like to farm. I don’t like farming and don’t want to do more than 1-3 at a time so unless I catch a group just interested in that I’ll only do my one clear a week.
The trials map this week was Convergence, which is — by far — the map I play the worst on. The first two cards (on hunter and warlock) went smoothly, but the titan cards were more of a struggle with 2 or 3 resets on the way to that flawless. I mostly had fun but don’t enjoy the “lost” feeling I get when I don’t really know how to play the map.
I spent a lot of time in the crucible and generally had a good time. I tried out a couple of handcannons including having a few good games with a 180 (Survivor’s Epitaph) of all things. I play well at times but also play mindlessly far too often; I need to find consistency.
Preview
This week the master challenge is oracles, which I think will be one of the easier challenges. The Grandmaster is the Disgraced. Aside from those I have no real plans to do a lot of PvE activities beyond the usual. Instead, I will concentrate on the crucible.
I have rediscovered my motivation to get better, so I’m looking forward to more crucible the rest of the season. I want to do some deliberate practice to work on weaknesses in my game and improve. And also find a loadout that I will work with in Iron Banner next week.
One thing I want to do on this blog is highlight creators that I not only enjoy, but that I also think make content well-suited toward the ordinary Destiny player. Today I want to recommend Critbuff, an up-and-coming Youtuber and Twitch streamer.
Critbuff makes weapon review and build videos, and these days plays crucible on stream. His tagline is “I try weapons in Destiny so you don’t have to,” and he lives up to that by trying off-meta and new weapons to see what they have to offer. This season some of his best work as been weapons reviews where he uses the weapon for 1000 kills in the crucible:
And here is a fantastic review of Retrofuturist Critbuff did a few months back that shows how he can effectively communicate a lot of useful information in a short amount of time:
In my opinion Critbuff is a great creator for ordinary players to watch because while he is a good player, his strengths are strategic thinking and managing engagements rather than pure skill on the sticks. In other words, I don’t think any of Crit’s plays are beyond what any ordinary player could do with learning, thinking and practice, and watching his videos and stream are great ways to learn ways to improve.
Critbuff currently streams Monday-Friday from 1030am – noon US Eastern time. Unfortunately for me that is 730am to 9am so on days when I have to go to the office or drive kids to school I can’t watch, but I try to catch him whenever I can. Check him out, he’s well worth your time:
Review
This was an “odds and ends” week rather than a week dominated by any one activity. Raid Team Fabulous (my regular Wednesday night team) went in to Master VoG on Wednesday night and got farther than we had before, stopping at oracles more out of running out of time than a feeling that we couldn’t complete it. So we are getting there. I think Master VoG strikes a good balance between difficulty and accessibility.
I also did the Grandmaster Inverted Spire a few times, as it is not a hugely difficult grandmaster. I enjoy the challenge of those but am not someone that likes to farm the same activity over and over so 1-3 runs at a time is the sweet spot for me.
The Trials map this week was Javelin-4. After last week I was not optimistic that it would be a fun time, but it was. The cards were challenging, of course, and I still personally struggle in trials, but it was a fun time with only one reset over the three characters. I don’t play golf but I know a lot of people that do and they have described struggling through most of a round but having one or two shots on the day that feel so great that it makes up for it. That is what Trials is like for me and I had a few good plays and one really good match that made my day.
On Sunday I decided it would be crucible day and played 12 matches of control, all on my hunter, trying Messenger (High-Impact Pulse) and either Compass Rose (Shotgun) or Shayura’s Wrath (Submachinegun) as a loadout. I had a lot of fun with it, trying to learn and pay attention to things like engagement distances and cover rather than just playing mindlessly. I think that I will be playing more Crucible in the coming weeks as we wait for the new season.
I also joined a team from Wafflez’s clan doing an Atheon checkpoint for Master VoG. We got the clear so I got the triumph and the ship, but I won’t consider myself to have cleared it until I do a full run through.
This was the last week of seasonal challenges and I finished them all, including a few last gambit matches that gave me enough wins for gilding Dredgen for the second time. I also completed the “kill 100 bosses on Prism day” triumph to complete the Solstice triumphs. That is enough EAZ for me for this year.
Preview
The end-of-season doldrums have begun to set in a bit. There are not a lot of groups active in the clan for impromptu raids or other things. And, personally, there are not many PvE activities that hold my interest more than an hour or so, other than raiding. So the rest of the season may be more crucible-focused for me.
Raid team Fabulous will go in to Master VoG again Wednesday and I’m very confident we can get the conflux triumph done. Beyond that and doing the Grandmaster I have no plans other than continuing to experiment in crucible.
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