Greetings fellow Guardians, As we sit here a month and a half into Season 8 and 21 days until Season 9, I wanted to share my Crucible experience since Shadowkeep dropped. I've been a Crucible fan since launch and there have been times during the life of the game where I've basically lived in the Crucible, most notably House of Wolves which has always been the gold standard of Destiny PvP for me. I was very disappointed with the decision to move everything to 4v4 with D2 and, once we finally got 6v6 back, it ending up being added with the removal of all skill considerations. In the 5 years of Destiny, last year was by far the most frustrating for me as a player. In both PvE with the ultra-punishing grinds that never relented and in the Crucible as well where QP was nothing but an endless stream of pubstomps with 1-2 players obliterating everyone else game after game (with the other team getting crushed and their own teammates picking up a few scraps here and there). There has been a lot made about the state of the game and matchmaking over the past few years and a lot of that dialogue has been driven by the top .01% of the Destiny Community. We saw the depths of that influence throughout year 2 in systems like Enhancement Cores which were requested by players that make a living playing the game as well as the removal of skill based matchmaking which was a direct result of Destiny influencers bombarding Bungie with feedback to keep it off after it was accidentally disables with the patch that returned 6v6. A lot has also been said about the how bad year one of D2 was and anyone who was on these forums back then remembers the ever present replies of "D2 sucks" and "dead game" in every single thread. For all of that though, the population numbers dropped lower in year 2 and from 6 months on were among the all time lowest the Franchise has seen for PvP. Which Brings us to Season 8 and the changes Bungie made to try to rebuild the Crucible into not only an experience that the majority of the player base could enjoy, but also one that welcomed in new players and created an experience that let players grow into PvP and ultimately create a feeder system into higher skill game modes. Outside of Iron Banner I basically stopped playing Crucible in the second half of last year, now at this point in Season 8, I have played over 500 games and reset my Valor 11 times. It is easily the best Crucible I've played since HoW and win or lose, I always have incredibly fun games. In D1 I mained a Titan in PvP. In the fist 2 years of D2 I mained a top tree Nightstalker. So going into this year, I wanted to main my Warlock for really the first time in Destiny. What I never expected was to not only love the new Crucible even more than I had dared to dream possible going in and play as much as I have (I've only done 2 PvE missions and have leveled to 962 basically just playing Crucible, which is another incredible change from last year), but I looked at DTR the other day and, on what has been my weakest class historically, I was in the top .07% for Control on Xbox. This is where I want to talk about the experience getting there and how this season has been such a drastic improvement for myself as a player (who plays 99% solo) as well as the realities of what skill based matchmaking does and does not do. To begin, one of the absolute biggest improvements Bungie made with Y3 PvP was the addition of a straight Control playlist. D1 Control was what made me love the Crucible to begin with and I spent a couple months learning the ins and outs there; learning maps, learning to read radar and anticipate enemy behavior, learning my class and abilities and what weapons worked best for me to combine everything to the point where I was confident in any and all situations I encountered. That all came to a peak in HoW when I ran Scout + Fusion and played at over a 2.0 kd for the expansion in the hay day of the mighty Thorn. When D2 released without the set game modes to play and instead went with random mode playlists, it immediately made it much more difficult for me to get into any kind of rhythm and ever truly feel comfortable in any playlist because we always moved to something else and they all played differently. So when the new Control mode came back, suddenly I was able to really get into grooves and learn where on maps I could play to my advantage and make my opponents play to me, and something else the set mode (plus matchmaking that removed the every other game dumpster fire with one person clowning on everyone else) let me do was really dive into a loadout I wanted to play vs having to run what I knew I could get kills with last year vs all the Luna's(NF)/DRB/Wardcliff builds we saw every game from the top players just trying to "relax". In Y2 I ran bow+fusion in QP and some IB, but once I got Le Monarque, I mostly ran double bows in Iron Banner. When Y3 began, I played the first 4-5 games bow+fusion, but really lost all interest in running a fusion because of all the complaints about them, so I switched to scout+bow and have run that since. My loadout now for 99.9% of my games this season has been Telemachus-C/Le Monarque/Sins of the Past and I run a Chaos Warlock. Initially I ran Geomag Stabilizers as my armor piece, but switched to Getaway Artist once it dropped for me. I have also throughout the season made a disc/strength build hitting tier 8 on Discipline and tier 7 on Strength. Last year I fell in love with bows and over the course of the year I notched 1765 bow kills. To this point in Season 8, I have 3091 bow kills. I'm going to double what I did in all of year 2 in Season 8, and here's where that gets really significant; I'm using a bow for 99.9% of my engagements be they ranged, mid or CQC. Recluse. Revoker. Erentil. Luna's. NF. Byegones. Jade Rabbit. MIDA. TLW. Randy's. Trust. DRB. Chaperone. Vigilance Wing. OEM. Fist of Havoc. Dawnblade. Spectral Blades. Nova Warp. Arc Staff. And on, and on. My counter is my bow+my abilities and I have made a build that allows me to play the game in a way that suits me and plays to my strengths and allows me to feel confident in any scenario I find myself in vs any loadout and regardless of the number of opponents I'm facing. I have no issues playing aggressively and I've shut down more FoH than I've died to this season. Certainly I am at a disadvantage in straight weapon vs weapon kill-times in many scenarios, but the game doesn't revolve around (and has never) 1:1 weapon play. D2 Y1 was the closest it got, but Destiny PvP at its best is a chess game where we use everything at our disposal to counter and attack and my build with my bow + melee and either grenades or Arc Buddies allows me to do that. I also have a build that neutralizes OEM for me as even with an overshield, Titans are still the same 2 hit kill for me with my bow if I land my shots well. So over the course of the season, I have been able to learn and perfect a class perfectly suited to my play in an environment where I could build a groove in the mode and where I could be properly challenged by matchmaking in games while still having fun playing in losses and that is key because that wasn't the case last year when in so many games there was just no chance and I wanted to quit Destiny after 1-2 QP games, but I've also found out something else very interesting over the process as I've improved in skill over the season... Matchmaking is actually even less strict than I had originally thought and I already knew it wasn't the ultra-strict sbmm that the top players like to have everyone believe. As I've improved and my numbers have gotten better and better and I started topping leader boards with consistency, I have definitely seen more quality opponents on opposing teams and with that, more Luna's, NF, Mountaintop, etc. But the difference is that I have been able to play my way into facing them at an even skill level where I am equipped as a player in both skill and ability to face them and give as good as I get, but as was the case in the numbers I would post last year from Iron Banner's matchmaking, the lobbies are still diverse with some players even or higher skill and most are average players, and you can look up any top Destiny PvP player and look at their lobbies and they may be playing 1-2 players who are near them in games, but the majority of their opponents are still average players because the game has to match them like that. In my 500+ games I've had no issues with load times, uneven lobbies, lag, or any of the other complaints that are associated with skill based matchmaking. I have however seen a couple posts by huge PvP names slamming having to sit longer in queues and to that I would say, sure it sucks, but when you're in the top 300 players IN THE WORLD, I'm not sure why Bungie should have to blow up the Crucible for the other 1.1 million players. Which brings me to the daily attacks the top PvP players are waging against this crucible. They are actively petitioning Bungie to make drastic changes to a game that has pretty much even PvP population numbers to last year at this point and to the Monday DTR numbers exactly one year ago, are 300k higher this season. The PvP population struggled to maintain 200k across all platforms for months last year, but somehow 1.1 million players daily now is the Crucible dying... and that's the other shoe about to drop. We've seen the "dead game" attacks used to drive the game to suit them and with the growing daily attacks attempting to poison the community perception of PvP, I'm afraid we may be headed back there which is a shame. I 100% believe that everyone should have the ability to have a great Crucible experience including the top .01% of players in the world, but I don't see them wanting to find any middle ground as they wage war daily to try to get Bungie to remove skill from matchmaking again.