Is the Trials competition really so weak on Xbone... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Wednesday, November 30, 2016, 21:56 (2703 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

His theory was that on Monday nights, at least, a majority of the teams are regular joes being carried to the LH. He said this didn't happen to him at all on PlayStation, that he made it to the LH regularly there.

Purely anecdotal, but I played Trials every monday night with the same team (slycrel and Peaksutah) for the better part of a year on PS4, and I didn't find the competition noticeably different than on any other nights that I played. The only trend I could pick up on is that Trials seems to have gotten progressively more difficult as time goes on. In early 2016, Slycrel, Peaks and I would routinely get to 6-7 wins before hitting "the wall" of truly stiff competition that we couldn't overcome. By September, we would often fail to reach 5 wins.

More often than not, I would play a few tickets with other players earlier in the weekend as well. These teams would quite often include lighthouse regulars; Thee Chaos, Ottermack, Korny, Speedracer, Cody, Cyber... back in the House of Wolves days, any combination of those players would almost certainly make it to the lighthouse within a couple hours of trying. But over the months, the competition got tougher and tougher, regardless of the night we played on. I went 6 months without going to the lighthouse, which is saying something considering I used to make it there 2-3 times per weekend.

I'm sure there are trends at work with regards to certain days being more competitive than others, but I haven't noticed it to a strong degree. There is, however, a different issue that I feel is effecting the skill-barrier involved in going flawless; it has to do with the way matchmaking tries to match your team against opponents with a similar number of wins in their card. Obviously, this means you are facing stiffer competition the closer you get to the Lighthouse. But I suspect there is something happening above and beyond that. While playing with people like Thee Chaos and Ottermack, I've noticed we will often sail to 8 wins with relatively little difficulty, then suddenly get knocked out by teams that are head and shoulders above anything else we've faced, multiple times in a row. I've wondered if the best-of-the-best teams will go straight to 9 wins, and the keep playing, either for fun or more loot drops, etc. I wonder if these teams just keep getting matched against other teams who are in the 7-9 win range. If this is the case, the matchmaking pool might contain a group of ultra good teams that spend hours at a time knocking out other teams who were themselves on the verge of reaching the lighthouse.

Total speculation on my part, and based purely on my own experiences, but it happens so often that I can't help but wonder if there is a concrete reason for it. The teams I face once I hit the 8 win mark are almost always leagues better than any other team I come across at an earlier point in the ticket.

Concrete reason is Scarab Heart and the new emblem. I've always kept and played on 9-0 cards to try to get that emblem, which I'm sure is a pretty common grind for Lighthouse vets, though my last few 9-0 runs, I just stop playing.

I get the reasoning behind Bungie setting it up that way (bigger pool of players throughout the weekend, and folks trying to obtain prestige items), but it taints the fun of the challenge for me if I know that there is a deliberate wall awaiting me after a certain point. I won't complain about a challenge, but it's more that I don't like game devs manipulating me to keep me playing, so yeh, I've not bothered with Trials unless I've specifically been invited.