Don't even get me started on that! 😂 The root cause of all matchmaking, and most problems with PVP, is a lack of PVP players. The percentage of people who enjoy PVP is abysmally small. (There are plenty on this forum, and they all claim to be rock stars, but this forum is not representative of the massive, silent, casual majority who only play PVE.) Because the PVP player pool is so tiny compared to PVE, Bungie keeps desperately throwing ideas at the proverbial wall and tweaking everything (especially matchmaking). If there were always tens of thousands of PVP players at any given time, Bungie could use both SBMM and CBMM, they could abandon fire team matching that results in balanced teams but still includes players with wide skill gaps which is miserable for lower-skilled players that didn't enjoy getting personally steamrolled even if their team wins, and people would always find a balanced match with no wait. But presently, Bungie can't attract casual players and many PVE mains to PVP because when those players do their toes in the PVP water, they get slaughtered, repeatedly team shot and instakilled, poached across the map by chickens camping their favorite hiding spots, blasted by apes who can sprint and slide and fire a shotty and simultaneously throw a melee. It's miserable for them and if they turn here for help, they're just met with some smug "Git gud, hit your crits" BS, so they never play any more PVP unless it's required for a catalyst or triumph of something,

PvP has more players than pve does right now or did for most of last year. That's pretty good for what it is. And it's helping the game efficiently because it takes less resources overall (although it's still a ton of work for someone) than pve. I just really don't get the rockstar comment. Most pvp players are simply people that truly like it enough to care more about whether it's good than what they're handed. It's literally supposed to be about not being handed anything, but the problem is that it's 95 percent about the game deciding everything and handing things out. Comp k/ds. . It's unfortunate that "casual" players with sky high triumph scores and a truckload of grief to dispense seem at odds with the kind of pvp that destiny really would be if it didn't have to stay anchored to what it is while trying to make them not feel inferior. To me it's actually childish for people to be fine with breaking someone else's game because they can't deal with not being good at something. And too many people have grown too soft over time. You can see all over this forum that some of the toughest talkers are actually the softest and most sheltered and constantly asking for handouts while pretending they're against that sort of thing. This is not how games used to be in terms of the guilt trips and gaslighting to get what you want. There's so many casuals with " whooooo me?" slimeball con artist attitude running around on this site that it's honestly one of the things that attracts me to this place. There's just something about conniving people playing stupid and being the victim, and oh yeah I work a work job and I'm tough and don't believe in handouts that I find endlessly fascinating, unfortunately. The game obviously is what it is, until it's not, and when it's not is a broken sloppy mess. That's not like that for anyone that truly likes what pvp is supposed to be about. The casuals of this game have simply gotten the whole death before dishonor thing in reverse because a lot of them are simple sheltered people that don't know very much. If they did they wouldn't say the things they do. It's also not always only casuals. That's a broad broad term in this game.

When I play any PVE content, I'm never matched with the same players. When I play PVP, I'm constantly matched with or against the same players. Obviously the PVP pool for players of similar skill is much, much smaller than it is for PVE players of similar skill levels. But what I'm taking about is whether Bungie's attempts to attract PVE players to PVP have been successful. When someone dips their toes in the PVP pool for the first time, do they find it enjoyable and want to play more PVP, or do they find it miserable and rarely play again? As someone who sucks at PVP, I can tell you I dreaded playing it previously. Now, with SBMM, I can play competitively and find it enjoyable playing against equally lousy players. I know a lot of PVP snobs hate SBMM, but I'm certain it's attracted more new players to PVP than there are vets who've stopped playing PVP because of it. But the PVP pool is still too small. Bungie needs to find new ways to attract new players. Once everyone finds the experience enjoyable rather than toxic, there will cease to be any matching issues.

The thing about trying to attract (which this game can easily do with rewards) and retain pve players is that the game has been out for 7 years. And they've tried just about everything. They've succeeded with making sbmm good for who it's meant to be for, but therein lies the problem. It's simply not what people think it is and part of the evidence is you playing the same people repeatedly. There's a reason for that but it's hard to explain seeing as how I'm not a dev and don't have the proper words to explain it. The unfortunate thing about sbmm is that it doesn't really attract people, rewards do. And tbh once you become a serviceable pvp player it basically ejects you out of the playlist due to lower quality matchmaking becoming the norm for you. That's what happened last year. The one thing that is a "positive" for Bungie is that last year's pve did nothing to keep people invested beyond their pvp experiences whereas this year has a way better chance of that happening. Also matchmaking has changed but when the game starts doing certain things in the absence of rewards, it's only a matter of time. That has been proven time and again in this game. Sbmm, if left by itself, drains the player population. That's what the evidence says at this point. It's pvp for people that don't really like pvp. And the people that like sbmm and pvp are a tiny minority of the player base. The game will never have a self sustaining player population based solely off of people that like both sbmm and pvp. The last part about "everyone finding the experience enjoyable rather than toxic" is nonsense, no offense. When people try to act like what they want is completely aligned with the greater good in something that's supposed to be a competition, those are the people you should be the most suspicious of. Unless maybe they actually don't play it very much. Like a retired referee or something. People like that, and there's a lot of them on this forum, are just controlling and manipulative people most of the time. They make it about things it's not even supposed to be about and expect to not get called out on what they're really doing. It's also just ridiculous to suggest that people that do or have done something the least have the best or even an equal idea of what constitutes the greater good for that thing they rarely do and don't really like unless it works "their" way. When you do that you get what we had for three years with people talking about themselves as if them needing to be heard is a reason for pvp to run a given way when the majority of the time what they're saying won't have anything to do with anything. And all they're doing is playing a setup for them to eventually look offended and so be given what they want. Craven behavior like that doesn't belong in competition, even in a videogame. It's part of how the population got where it got before the pvp snobs fixed it.

I'm old, professional, a former dev, former product manager, statistics geek, and respected business consultant. My software and biz creds are better than my PVP creds. Your arguments are all flawed. For example, saying there are more people playing PVP than PVE at a given time does not mean there are more PVP players. Most casuals aren't playing either PVP or PVE at any given time... they finish the story, a few triumphs, grind a weapon or two, then play something else until the next season drops. At any given time, considerably less than 1% of D2 players are actually online playing. Obviously they could be sleeping, working, doing life, etc., but that's true regardless whether they're PVP mains or PVE. If 51% of that 1% are playing PVP and 49% are playing PVE, that doesn't mean there are more PVP players than PVE; it means 0.51% of the community is playing PVP and 99.51% are either not playing or playing PVE... of which, most are casuals who occasionally play PVE but rarely play PVP. To grow the PVP player base, Bungie needs to make PVP more enjoyable for that 99.49% of the TOTAL player base.

[quote]Your arguments are all flawed. For example, saying there are more people playing PVP than PVE at a given time does not mean there are more PVP players.[/quote] I did not say this. If it looked like it then it was because I was just typing from my phone. What I said was the current PvP player population has hit a higher number than what pve is or really ever was for most of the last 1 or 2 years. Of course that would usually taper off like seasons do and if it doesn't then final shape would have to be considered as a contributing factor as well. Basically I was just trying to make the point that PvP is doing pretty damn well for what it and the game has been through. The people involved with it should be proud of those numbers going up as high as they did after all the various previous negativities. [quote]At any given time, considerably less than 1% of D2 players are actually online playing.[/quote] I would have to know what percentage of the player population should be online at any given time to really understand what you mean by this. I don't know about these things, but to me point in time calculations tend to obscure things quite a bit. [quote]To grow the PVP player base, Bungie needs to make PVP more enjoyable for that 99.49% of the TOTAL player base.[/quote] Yes. But there's evidence of what happens when they do that or think they're doing that. And unfortunately that's when the stats start to break down. The stuff it takes to make the game more "enjoyable" for the majority (man I'm getting flashbacks) has been shown to not work and depopulate the playlist. Other than that its more about the play loop and rewards. If people do not like PvP there is no matchmaking that is going to retain them in the absence of a meaningful play loop. PvP players have been saying this for years now. And you may think they're biased but I can tell you they think about what would make pvp better all day. And most of the time that includes being truthful about what it takes to make people that have serious problems with being confronted by not being good at something happy. The problem is it would basically take PvP not being a PvP anymore but everyone pretending like it was. No one really wants that do they?

To make the game more enjoyable for the majority of players who play a little PVE each season, then stop playing altogether until the next season, Bungie could ask those players why they don't play more PVP or end game stuff to fill time before the next season. But Bungie doesn't do this. They solicit feedback from this forum and Reddit and maybe Twitter, and obviously from well-known players. People who frequent forums and top-tier players are a tiny fraction of the total player base; and they tend to be more-skilled die-hards who play more frequently and whose opinions likely differ from the casual majority. If somebody isn't using a product or feature, the best course of action is not to ask what current users like and want; the best course of action is to ask people who aren't actively using the product or feature why they're not and what would make them start and stay.