A Sodium Imbalance

20 Jun 2018

Totally Fair Matchmaking.

Anyone that pays attention to my twitter would be well aware when I’m trying to play Competitive crucible in Destiny 2, mostly because of my complaining about being constantly matched against full sweaty four-stacks when I’m running solo. A question about this came up on the Crucible Radio podcast:

Q: What kind of things were you concerned about or are you concerned about now about getting people into the idea of going into comp rather than hesitant if they don’t have their full stacked maximum tryhard team, is there anything that is coming up right now?

A: We’ve gotten a tonne of that feedback, but I’m going to give you the honest perspective, and this is as someone whose played a lot of FPS’s and definately played a lot of Halos, and we’ve seen the feedback online about fireteam versus solo matching and I’ve even seen people disparage people who go in stacked and it like, it’s ranked play, like this is the “win matters”…

it does not matter to me if you decide to not run stacked I’m running stacked I’m running with my full team because I want to win. Because that’s the point of this. The point of this is to win, and I will do what it takes.

And yeah, we’re trying to take efforts to make solo play fair and better that was part of the TMM stuff that went online a couple of weeks back. If you want to ensure your best chance of doing awesome and winning, which is the goal of that mode you have to come in with a full fireteam. If you’re not interested in doing that, if you’re not a player that wants that, that’s why we offer the Valor rank, that’s why we offer the rewards in the Valor rank, there is something for you to chase on a seasonal cadence.

But at no point, from the get-go, we’re like ‘this is for this type of people, and this is for this type of people’, we were specially trying hard to not comprimise either those experiences because we felt like ranks were super sensitive to that, people wanted those to be as pure as possible.

Link to recording: Crucible Radio 154 - Bungie Talks Pt. 1 (49:22)

I have some issues with this attitude. Not the “it’s competitive so people should use the best tools available”, no, that’s reasonable. It’s the attitude that ‘solo players should just suck it up’. There’s already a sweaty-try-hard-bring-your-fireteam mode in the Crucible, it’s called Trials of the Nine. And now you’re telling me there’s a not-so-secret second one? So why can I still queue into the play list solo? Why shouldn’t I expect that when I come to competitive that both teams are on an even level playing ground?

Why should I be okay with expecting to lose, not because of my admittedly mediocre but getting better skill, but because the matchmaker says “yeah, no”. Why are you okay with gifting free wins to fireteam players? This wouldn’t be so bad if it was the occasional four-stack landing in the matchmaker, but it’s constant. Even in Quick Play, it’s constant four-stacks versus random solo players. I even got matched with the same four-stack twice in a row for some reason, even though they just stomped us. Destiny 1 matchmaking actively avoided that kind of matchmaking, so what happened? Bungie, I think you need to review your ‘TMM Stuff’ because it’s not working.

It doesn’t feel fair, it doesn’t feel competitive, it feels like I’m actively being punished for playing the way I want to play, the way I can play. I’m not the type of person to use third-party fireteam sites, and the people I play Destiny with aren’t as interested in Crucible as I am. I’m basically losing Glory points for daring to select the “Launch Matchmaking” button. At least put a Competitive Mercenary playlist in and let solos derp with solos competitively. Heck, make it a separate ranking if it’s that important to you.

Come on, let me play the way I want to. You seem to want to let everyone else play they way they want to.

I’m going to summarise this in a community feedback / bug report sort of way:

I have an issue with:

When I play competitive as a solo player and a team of random players that include me get matched up against a fireteam of four organised players.

How it makes me feel:

Frustrated, as if the game itself doesn’t want to provide a fair or winnable match.

How frequently does it happen:

It feels like pretty much every game in the Competitive playlist. It is rare for it not to happen.

My suggested fix:

It’s competitive, so I don’t see a problem with if you run a full fireteam, the matchmaker should only match you against other full fireteams. That, or a Competitive Solo playlist.

PS: Let Valor get earned in any playlist, including Iron Banner. At least that way I can progress towards something while geting my butt handed to me.