This week’s trials map is Wormhaven, and it’s a “Trials Lab” experiment with a control zone that unlocks 30 seconds into each round. In addition, with respect to matchmaking Bungie announced that the flawless matchmaking pool would not be in effect until Sunday’s reset.
The result has been a Friday and Saturday Trials experience that is reminiscent of pre-revamp trials. Solo queuing is a miserable experience of repeatedly facing three stacks with multiple flawless for the week. Even playing with regular-player clanmates we struggled to put together wins, though at least the matches were more competitive. The rewards if you don’t win matches are very meager, so ultimately it feels like a bad experience for poor rewards. And I am not a loot farmer, anyway. I am primarily motivated by the experience.
I went flawless as usual getting carried on Friday morning, although it was a bit more of a struggle than the last two weeks and we won “only” 18 out of 22 games. Since then, though, I solo queued 15 games and played 12 with a team of regular players, and won only 6 of those 27 games. Fully 63% of the Carried games and 60% of the Solo games were what Bungie calls “uncompetitive”. And about 27% of my solo matches were “blowouts”. (See the September 23 TWAB for what these terms mean).
Simply put, as much as this saddens me, I am not having enough fun to keep playing. Moreover, I am not sure that I would be having enough fun even at Bungie’s target metrics of under 33% Solo-Fireteam blowouts given that 75% of my Solo matches were against premade fireteams. One game out of four being a blowout — and even more being a 5-1 or 5-2 loss — does not sound like a good way to spend time, nor would it be rewarding enough given the current loot system.
When trials returns in a couple of weeks I will try to solo queue before I’ve gone flawless and after flawless matchmaking kicks in, unless they’ve changed the system. If that is a better experience, then maybe I will limit my trials playing in that way going forward. If not, though, I am going to back to my pre-revamp practice of just playing with a carry team. And I suspect that many other regular players — particularly solo players — will flee as well.
In this weeks’ TWAB Bungie announced the following change:
Community manager Cozmo later clarified:
Once you go flawless for the week, you start by trying to match with other flawless folks. It may eventually resort to matching against non-flawless. It resets each weekend. https://t.co/ICmbkRU8OM
A lot of feedback, overwhelmingly negative, ensued. Players that routinely go flawless or that were able to go flawless last week were very unhappy at the prospect of matching against only other flawless players after going flawless. That feedback caused a backlash against those players by players who had had worse experiences in trials last week and in earlier seasons.
In my view, there is actually a lot of common ground amongst players and even where there are differences they are differences that can be understood if not reconciled. But there have been very few people actually trying to engage and understand people on the other side of the debate. I think that if we actually listen to each other, we can get to a better understanding amongst each other and not be in a “Civil War,” as GernaderJake called it today:
Whoa.. the horrible, rude, and simply mean comments I’m seeing all over the place the last 24 hours. Say what you wanna say about these Trials changes, but I’ll tell you this:
Last week everyone was happy and positive. This week a fuckin civil war has broken out.
Here are some things that I think the vast majority of players can agree on, in order of least controversial to most controversial:
By the end of last season, Trials was not fun except for maybe the very top players (and maybe not even them).
Trials (or any PvP playlist) is better with increased population.
People will quit playing if they are having poor experiences.
I list the last as ‘most controversial’ because in earlier trials matchmaking discussions when I brought this up about average to lower-skill players, good players would respond that they players will continue to enter a playlist and get stomped if the loot system is good.
Say what you will about the feedback, but what it has made 100% clear is that experiences matter. The Trials loot system is fantastic, both in terms of generosity and ability to focus. It was a big driver of people reentering the playlist, or entering for the first time, last week. And it was a big driver of people staying in the playlist last week. That system was not changed from last week to this week.
What did change is the experience of players that go flawless, after they go flawless. And over and over again people have said that their experiences got worse enough that they will not play for the rest of the weekend after they go flawless. Even though they did last week, and the loot was the same. What changed is the experience.
All of the players that are themselves deciding, and loudly proclaiming, that the loot is not enough incentive for them to keep playing once they dislike their experience should recognize that the same dynamics apply to less-skilled players that don’t go flawless and have consistently bad experiences in the non-flawless lobby. If good players know that they would quit in flawless lobbies, they should see that less-skilled players are going to quit in non-flawless lobbies if they have the same experience. And everyone would recognize that less-skilled players quitting is a problem unless they are replaced.
By the same token, less-skilled players should recognize that average to good players playing great players and having bad experiences feels just as bad as their own bad experiences. There should be some empathy about that rather than accusations that anyone and everyone bringing up these concerns is an elitist that just wants to stomp on lesser-skilled players all the time.
Some Important, and Maybe Irreconcilable, Differences
Everyone has their own threshold for a minimum acceptable experience. And though I knew that before these past two weeks, it’s now become apparent that those thresholds vary widely. Datto, one of the best Destiny PvE players in the world, said this about playing Trials last week:
Chevy, another of the best PvE players in the world, solo-queued into trials this week for the first time. Here is what he had to say:
Worst experience I've ever had in this video game, or in any game really.
First and last time of playing Trials.
Good luck Guardians, I'll literally never step foot in there again no matter the rewards.
These are incredible PvE players who are decent-to-good PvP players. Datto can and has gone flawless. Chevy held his own very well (better than me!) in solo-queue trials. I would be content with their experiences. They are not. They don’t want to play anymore. Likewise, at least some other players feel like their experiences are bad even when I think that same experience for me and many other players would be good. This guy hates the flawless matchmaking pool EVEN THOUGH HE CAN GO FLAWLESS IN IT:
Understanding that these differences exist helps us understand the challenge Bungie has in front of it. Bungie needs to minimize the number of people that have experiences below their minimum acceptable level to remain in the playlist. Leaving the playlist for the weekend but then coming back the following week is less bad than leaving the playlist forever, but both are bad. But what does Bungie do with a player that is only happy if they go into every match as a 90% favorite, if there are no players that are ok with going into matches as a 90% underdog? It’s likely not possible to come up with a matchmaking scheme that will satisfy everyone — even last week’s did not satisfy Datto and likely did not satisfy a bunch of lesser-skilled players that had an excessive amount of 5-0 losses. Because in a system where round wins are how you get loot, then no matter how good that loot is and how good the focusing system is you are going to be frustrated when you make zero progress while losing match after match.
If we all start from the principle that everyone’s opinion and experience deserves the same consideration and respect — not agreement or action, but consideration and respect — then these online discussions will stop feeling like a “civil war.”
My clan’s leader asked us today whether we think using seasonal mods and rotating champion mods is a better way to ‘control and manipulate metas’ than sunsetting. I think it’s an interesting enough question that I thought I’d answer it here and give him a link.
First, we should recognize that the question assumes that metas will in fact be changed by Bungie. This by itself is not accepted by all players; some players like to find a particular loadout that works for them and then use it for everything and are resentful when changes are made. I like to use a variety of weapons so I enjoy meta changes. Neither of these preferences is objectively ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, they are just personal preferences — see my post What Kind of Destiny Player Are You for more thoughts on this.
Assuming that Bungie will change metas, the seasonal mod system is a far better method than sunsetting. Sunsetting was only meta changing when it removed the ability to use certain outlier weapons, like Mountaintop or Recluse, in high-level content. But it also removed a lot of other weapons that caused no issues, as witnessed by the fact that many were reintroduced with the same perks. And players resented having to reacquire a weapon with the exact same perks just because of sunsetting. Moreover, when non-outlier weapons were sunset other similar weapons remained available. Patron of Lost Causes was sunset, but we had Night Watch, for example. Thus, sunsetting served to only change part of the meta — the outliers — with high overhead that affected all weapons and armor.
The seasonal mods, in contrast, don’t permanently change any weapons or armor. Instead, they make some weapons or subclasses stronger, for one season. Their temporary nature means that Bungie can risk going too far, and so we have seen extremely powerful mods like Breach and Clear in Season 14 and now Particle Deconstruction in Season 15. Those can be a lot of fun, but would lead to power creep if they were permanent.
Every season we see complaints that the champion mods are too restrictive because they mandate the use of certain weapons to deal with champions. But in anything other than the highest difficulty level content champions can be dealt with without the mods. It is simply more efficient to use the mods than not. As for the most difficult content, that always requires the best loadout possible. And it is a better system to have some weapons buffed temporarily (and therefore become the best for that time) than to have permanent changes like sunsetting.
We are now two weeks in to Master Vault of Glass. I still have not cleared it with my regular raid team (or otherwise), though I believe I could find a team to get a clear if I really wanted to. But I’ve played enough to have an opinion based on my playing experience.
Master Vault of Glass differs from regular Vault of Glass in two ways. First, there are additional champions throughout the encounters. Second, the power level of the enemies is set to 1450. In Season of the Splicer, the power cap including pinnacles is 1420, which means that to be on par with the enemies you have to have 30 levels of artifact power, which is a little over season rank 463. Needless to say, only a small minority of the population will reach 1450 this season. This has led to predictable complaints.
One complaint is that the rewards are not worth the struggle (the rewards are a single timelost weapon available each week from the challenge and the possibility of higher-stat armor). In general players that are more loot-driven than experience- or completionist-driven have this complaint. As I am not loot-driven and I haven’t completed the seal yet the loot is not yet an issue for me.
Another complaint category is the 1450 power level. Generally people object to artifact power to making Master mode easier either because (1) they think it should be easier generally; or (2) they think it should be at a set difficulty for all players. Often this category of complaints is dressed up in the label of “Artificial Difficulty.”
A good example is this Youtube video from Fallout, in which he gives this “loose definition” of “Artificial Difficulty”: “Making things more challenging not by improving the enemy AI or by adding more complex in-game mechanics but by stacking the deck in other areas.” He appears to be firmly in camp (2), because his complaint about artifact power being useful is that it rewards “the wrong thing” in that he “[doesn’t] want to beat a challenging end-game activity through bounty farming” because “that doesn’t make [him] feel accomplished.”
Curiously, he also says this is an “accessibility” issue in that players who have reached 1420 and also gone well above rank 100 in the season pass are still finding master mode too difficult. Fallout contrasts this with “contest mode” which he says is an example of power-level difficulty “done right”.
Contest Mode caps a player’s power level at 20 levels below each encounter, regardless of their actual power level. That’s 1430, or 10 power levels above the pinnacle cap. Fallout praising contest mode as having better “accessibility” doesn’t make sense to me, because the people he described as finding master VoG too hard despite having played a lot had to be all over 1430. So it’s not a day one accessibility issue.
And having contest mode apply for all time to Master VoG is worse for accessibility. In general, all Destiny content except for Grandmaster nightfalls can eventually be overleveled, making it easier. This season 1450 is a reach for all but the most dedicated players. Next season 1450 will be only 20 artifact power levels which is not at all uncommon. And the season after that it will be only 10 power levels (or less, if the power cap increases by more than 10 for the Witch Queen release). Thus, over the long term, setting a power level rather than using contest mode makes Master mode more accessible, not less.
I don’t think it’s useful to use pejorative terms like “Artificial Difficulty” to describe some methods of making content more challenging than others. Champions add mechanics. Power level makes enemies tougher and therefore requires different tactics. At least some of that would be necessary even if more complex mechanics were added. At the end of the day master mode is hard, and it is intended to be hard, and people will just have to play more carefully than they are used to in order to clear it. I think that is good and what I want from a “Master” mode.
Earlier this week, dmg04, one of the Destiny Community Managers at Bungie, tweeted out a thread that started with this tweet:
I’m pretty pleased to see this expressed by someone at Bungie, because it is not something that is obvious from online discussions about Destiny 2. I love Destiny and I love to talk about Destiny, so I’ve participated in a lot of public and private discussions about the game. And I’ve come to realize that the game is vast enough and deep enough that many people play differently than I do.
Here are some differences in the way people play, both well-known and obscure:
PvE main vs PvP main: The granddaddy of them all, because many players who primarily play PvE dislike PvP and many PvP mains look down on PvE players.
Loadout perfecter vs Dabbler: Some players like to find the best weapon in each slot for them and then use those weapons almost exclusively. Some players like to use different weapons as the mood strikes.
Social vs. Solo: Some players play primarily alone; some players play with others as much as possible.
Armor is fashion vs Armor is stats: Some players care primarily about the look of their character’s armor. Some care primarily about the stats the armor provides.
One class vs. Three classes: Some players play exclusively or primarily on one of the classes. Some players play each of the three classes more or less equally.
Enjoys difficult content vs. Doesn’t enjoy difficult content: Some players really like to be challenged by the game. For others the learning curve on some content is so steep that it is not enjoyable for them.
Loot driven vs. Experience driven: For some players a major part of the enjoyment is acquiring a sought-after piece of loot. For others the loot is secondary to whether the gameplay itself is enjoyable.
I’m sure there are many more I could list, and of course these are not binary (all players love loot, for example, and all players change weapons sometimes). But it bears keeping in mind if you discuss the game with others or even just pay attention to the Destiny Discourse that other players will likely have different desires and opinions that you do if they don’t play like you play.
I’m a PvE main that loves PvP, and a loadout dabbler. For me, armor is more stats than fashion. I play and love all three classes. I enjoy difficult content. I prefer playing with friends though the majority of my time is solo play. I am more experience driven than loot driven: I can only “farm” for so long because I don’t enjoy doing the same thing over and over even in pursuit of tasty loot. On the other hand I can enjoy playing PvP for hours with basically minimal rewards.
Recent Comments