devtrackers.gg
Video for the people who like videos here: https://youtu.be/liCwNA2btTI
I don't want to make this post, as a PVP sweatlord. I want Trials to succeed. But we have to talk about last weekend. (warning: long read)
Anomaly returned to extremely negative fanfare. This week was much, much harder to go flawless for a lot of folks, myself included. I played 100 matches and only went flawless once, thanks largely in part to getting error coded several times but also thanks to my fair share of bad mistakes. But the problems this weekend weren't just connection-related.
Astral Horizon, the kinetic equivalent of Mindbender's Ambition, was up for grabs this week and to get it you just needed 3 wins. Some top teams cleverly decided to not go further than that, resetting their cards every 3 wins so that they would keep their loot pool down in order to farm the shotgun from packages from Saint-14. Effectively, they were token farming, meaning there was a disproportionate representation of top-level players at the early stages of the card.
This ruined the experience for nearly everyone else involved.
The Map and The Farm
Look, let's talk about Anomaly itself. The map is hard, and a lot of people were saying it's a trash map. I'd argue it's more technical than outright trash, but it's not a great map period.
The map is tailor-made for two things - Hardlight and aping. You could get kills with very little skill involved, just run up to them and shoot them with your shotgun or potshot from afar and let the ricochet rounds do the rest. Given the size of the map as well, it's extremely hard to recover a downed orb if it's not already near teammates. And even then, rushing the orb with numbers advantage usually works because said teammates can't react quick enough to cover off the rush.
The end result is that Anomaly becomes a map of fine margins, a very technical exercise that can only be navigated by the very best players. It requires above-average decision making, positioning and split-second timing of plays with perfect execution. It's unforgiving as hell and it's stressful to play with people who aren't up to the challenge. It definitely led to tensions between myself and members of my core group of friends at times.
And to make matters worse, all those requirements I just mentioned became prerequisites just for getting 3 wins.
I already mentioned Astral Horizon and the token farming involved and actively advocated by some of the game's biggest personalities. This to me is the ugly side of PvP shining through - not from the community itself but of the way the system is designed. To blame anyone for the reason things transpired the way they did is incredibly short sighted - after all, when was the last time anyone did the Last Wish raid, specifically the Riven encounter, wholly legitimately?
So, players found a way to farm the shotgun. The players who cared the most about this, i.e. Anyone with an active interest in a kinetic quickdraw shotgun, did the farm. And the overwhelming majority of players entering trials suffered as a result.
The PvP playerbase at large is not suited for technical maps. Anomaly is fine for 6v6 because it's an absolute sh*tshow and should be treated as such. But it doesn't work for trials, because the majority of players don't know how to play technically. They don't know what it means to thread the eye of the needle or to close down great distances in the blink of an eye.
Trials devolved into an absolute sweatfest from match number one because of the map, and because of the coveted loot that every clued-in PvP player was lusting after.
THE LOOT
In Destiny 1, we had this problem with a few maps - Drifter comes to mind. But casuals still played the game mode because the loot was genuinely compelling. You could get armour and weapons from weekly bounties and after games randomly. Flawless got you the chance to get adept weapons, which were primary weapons with elemental damage. These had INSANE utility in PvE as well, so there was incentive for PvE players to go flawless, thus boosting the Trials population. Now in Destiny 2, all we get are shiny pieces of armour. No adept weapons and an RNG token system.
The loot part of the looter-shooter aspect of Destiny 2 has been frustrating since Forsaken. Shadowkeep didn't fix anything aside from giving us energy weapons: the raid and the subsequent seasons have drip-fed us mediocre to average loot. Nothing new has been considered coveted or a must have until this season's Astral Horizon and, I suspect, the Eye of Sol sniper to come shortly.
Which brings me to the larger point - if there's no incentives for the larger Destiny population to play Trials of Osiris, it is dead in the water, and it will go down the same route as Trials of the Nine which led to its removal in the first place.
SKILL CREEP
I want to talk about something I'm calling "skill creep". Skill creep may sound like power creep, but it's quite a lot worse.
Skill creep concerns the skill spectrum and the shifting of the median towards the top end. If we have a spectrum bar of relative skill, where we put casuals on one end and highly adept players at the other, most of us would fall somewhere in between, with a heavy bias towards the casual end of the spectrum.
If the current iteration of Trials continues, the overwhelming population of players aka the "casuals" will feel helpless, overrun and frustrated to the point where they quit, never to return. Suddenly, you've done two things - you've lost a massive subsection of the population, and you've now shifted the skill median. Skill creep has now occurred.
The people in the middle, the "good" players, are now at the low end of the skill spectrum. They're now under pressure, and all they play are players better than them. They're the new casuals. They quit. Skill creep occurs again.
Now the great players are the ones on the tail end. In this bracket you're going to find players who are amongst the most visible of the PvP community and considered the eminent voices of the community. These are content creators, streamers or your mate Jack who used to skip school on Friday to play Trials on launch. But now even Jack is frustrated, because he can't compete with the only level of players in the competition pool - the sweaty elites.
Jack's had enough. He calls it quits. Skill creep has reached its endgame.
Now all you're left with is a fraction of the initial population, whose sole mission is to play PvP to the best of their abilities. The players who know every angle, every strategy and are good with every single weapon in the game and don't miss, the players who will take a mile when you give them an inch. PvP is now not fun for even them. It's a job. And that's probably why they keep playing - for the overwhelming abundance of recoveries and paid services that, due to the low nature of the population, they have to collaborate on and throw matches in order for everyone to get a payday.
Congratulations, you've now killed Trials of Osiris and the integrity of pinnacle PvP.
THE FUTURE
Look, I'm sorry for being dramatic and I'm not a game developer, i don't know how to fix this and I'm not going to provide solutions. This is not my forte. Analysis is what I'm most capable of.
And I think in many ways, Anomaly was a blessing in disguise. Without such a perfect storm of a terrible map, the shotgun and the Destiny community jumping on the loot farming technique, the issues with Trials of Osiris would have laid dormant for weeks or even months. This week exposed the bad with the game mode in one overwhelming fell swoop.
To dmg, Cozmo and Deej, if you stumble across this post/video I hope you send this along to the people who need to see this. I said this week could be a blessing in disguise, but only if these issues are addressed and acknowledged in a timely fashion. I may be just one voice, but please look around and take it all in - there's hundreds if not thousands of comments on reddit, twitter and your own forums saying exactly the same things as I did.
I hope something can be done for the April 2020 patch, but I understand the nature of game development is tricky, especially in the precarious time we're living in.
One solution I have seen floated around, in particular by TrueVanguard and LogPowerslave of the Destiny Down Under Podcast, is that the token system should be changed so you receive more tokens per win. That would be a good start in my eyes, but it might not be enough.
Please address this, we love trials and we want it to stay this time. It's up to you.
Thank you for reading.
tl;dr:
- problems with loot + token system will have top teams farming for tokens after going flawless
- this creates a hostile experience for casual players who are running into a disproportionate amount of high-level players at early stages of their card
- this will create the problem of skill creep, whereby players at the tail end of the skill spectrum will quit progressively until only the sweats are left
- the end result is that ToO will become the wasteland of recovs and paid services that led to T9's removal in the first place.