In Bungie’s latest blog post, Destiny 2 announced they are changing how matchmaking for Crucible PvP will work in Season of the Wish.
Destiny 2 PvP Crucible Matchmaking Changes
In Season of the Wish, Destiny 2 is making a couple of adjustments to its Crucible Matchmaking systems. PvP Matchmaking in Destiny 2 has always been a huge area of contention for the community. when Bungie introduced Skill Based Matchmaking, or SBMM, into the Quickplay PvP playlist, many PvP players cried foul. While less PvP-minded players thought this was because the ‘PvP elite” wanted easier games, it was more because higher-skill players no longer had the option of having a less competitive space. In short, because every playlist was using Skill Based Matchmaking, higher-skill players were always playing higher-skill players. This made every match require just as much energy as the match before, making the experience less enjoyable.
Bungie has been tweaking the Matchmaking parameters for several years now, but in Season of the Wish, it seems like they are changing how matchmaking works for lobby balancing. Per the This Week in Destiny blog post:
In Season 23, the lobby balancer should operate more like a snake draft, where Team A gets the first pick, Team B gets the next two picks, then Team A gets two more picks, and so on until there are no players left. Fireteams can sometimes throw off the balance of the lobby, and while this system attempts to resolve that as best as possible, there are edge cases where the balance will not be perfect.
THIS WEEK IN DESTINY – 11/09/2023
This should make the lobbies seem more fair with the players of higher skill levels being more evenly distributed. But it’s not just how the lobby balancing has changed to help with matchmaking. How skill is being determined is also getting some tweaks, as the Crucible Team is also changing how their “Confidence” rating works. Destiny 2 uses a Glicko-based Confidence system to determine player skill.
The more matches a player plays, the more confident the system will be in determining the player’s rating. Sometimes, the system is so confident, it won’t budge, or it takes a lot for it to budge. It just knows how good you are, relative to your peers, based on how you played. But that’s not always true, is it? Sometimes players have off days. Sometimes they want to play off-meta. Sometimes they want to play an alternate class that isn’t their go-to. As such, our plan is to tune this confidence rating, so that skill rating has more variance from match to match.
THIS WEEK IN DESTINY – 11/09/2023
This will only currently apply to the Control or the 6v6 Unranked Playlist. The Crucible team plans to monitor these changes and continue to iterate on them. Their goal is for players to feel less like they have to play the most effective builds and use the best weapons in order to play more casually while still keeping a level playing field. This excites me as a healthier Crucible playlist is better for everyone.
New Features Coming to Destiny 2 PvP in Season of the Wish
The Destiny 2 Development Team announced several other sweeping changes coming to PvP. This includes several new game modes, playlists, and reward structures. These changes range from the mundane to the game-changing. And there are so many new features being added this list is just a small selection of everything that is coming to Destiny 2 PvP in Season of the Wish:
- New PvP Playlist Nodes
- New PvP Game Modes
- Map Spawning Changes
- Reward Changes
As stated, these are just some of the announced changes coming in Season of Wish. And while it is not coming next season (at least as far as we know), a new Crucible map pack is also in the works. New maps are something the Destiny 2 community has been asking about for a long while. All of these changes along with Bungie adding this new game mode (one that started as a bug not less) shows that the Destiny 2 Crucible Strike Team is putting in work.
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