I felt the opposite of you about the gameplay. As a general pvp shotgunner, I felt completely weak on my hunter the whole time. The entire game felt about waiting for a pick with a sniper and then collapsing down to hold that orb and finish off the last guy. The PvP elimination class imbalances were HUGE. When I swapped to my 35 warlock with Thorn and Praedith's Revenge, I was absolutely crushing enemy teams. My buddy who is not very good and I were roflstomping lighthousers simply because Thorn is OP and I could eat a crapload of damage as a max armor/max recovery sunsinger. Easily twice as effective as my main hunter in this gametype. I leveled up to 40 in no time at all.

I think 3s provides for a lot more variance in gameplay and strategy, as splitting up isn't a horrid idea that way. Contrariwise, if you split up in doubles, you're probably screwed.

I wish that you weren't reliant on RNG for the loot drops of the shaders and special ghosts. As such, I got zero special ghosts, but did manage to get both shaders. My buddy got a ghost, but got no shaders. Laaaaame.

It was fun? I guess. I don't like crucible so I went out of my way to not try and my runs with Blue didn't go terribly bad. I think we were 4W7L or something like that.

If they brought it back, I would play as a not Hunter and get guns that were actually good for PvP. Maybe drink less, but I doubt it.

Did get a 319 poop ghost shell, so that's cool.

It existed. I played it. I got enjoyment out of it as a video game.

Some dudes were going in with low grimoire, so we figured we'd take it easy on them and just go exclusively for headshots and auto rifle kills, no special or anything. They won a round and teabagged us. After reporting them for being unfriendly, we started trying and won the rest of the rounds handily. I hope their tires blow out on the way to an important job interview and they are stuck in a dead end position for an extra year while barely scraping by paying off their student loans, they have to cancel their netflix subscriptions because they just don't have any money, and their friends slowly ostracize them from social groups because they can't pay for anything, and so are left out of gatherings. "Why invite xxlastspartan34 anyway?" they say to each other, "He can't afford it, he's still working on those loans."

I do not like competition, and even though this was more casual than Trials, I found myself disliking people just as much, and on a more personal level. I'm not going to do it again.

As someone who finds Trials interesting but just too high stress this was a fun mode. Clearly it wasn't the "Event" it was hyped up to be (either by Bungie or ourselves) but I enjoyed it well enough. I didn't really hop in until after knowing I was guaranteed a ghost so I didn't go through the frustration of thinking I would come away empty handed. I wouldn't mind more things like this from the Live team as long as expectations are in the appropriate place!

Aside from my lackluster performances with you, unoudid, I felt like I played doubles pretty well, if not better than i play Trials normally. There are a few reasons why this was so in my opinion.

1) I didn't feel as screwed when I the last guardian standing.

Obviously 1 v 3 is worse than 1 v 2, but the buff was so significant that I could still capitalize if they made a tactical mistake. I won a number of rounds this way where my partner would die in a relatively un-res-able position, and I would instead retreat to a position where I had some chance of picking one of them off. Once it was 1v1 again, it was a new ball game.

2) I think flanking AND dealing with being flanked were both easier in 2v2, than 3v3

I know it Trials it can be effective to divide your group, but it is a great disadvantage if your 1 person runs into 2 people and suddenly your down a person in an un-res-able position. This could potentially happen in doubles, but I found it to be much rarer.

Perhaps I just did well at it, but I didn't have a time this weekend where a flank went so south on me that I couldn't retreat to my partner. And frequently I wasn't flanking until it was 2v1 or for sure we knew both opponents were in the same vicinity. When this is the case, it's almost impossible to survive people flanking you.

That being said, in 2v2, when you see your radar with split reds, indicating you are being flanked, I always immediately called out one of them to push on. When you recognize your opponent is flanking, you need to rush one of them and take him/her out and tip the scales. Time and time again, we did a good job of identifying the flank, choosing one, and taking them out. If only our opponents made this mistake more often.

Lastly, a random factoid. Don't go invisible when you have the enrage buff. Your an invisible body with red flames. You're gonna have a bad time.

True to my word, I played Queen of the Masquerade a total of 19 times over the past week. In some instances, I switched characters and returned to the Tower while the song was still playing, so there probably should've been more. A total of 105 minutes of the same song--almost two hours. You'd think I got tired of it, but I didn't! Fun fact: My vocal cords ripped to shreds after the second time.

Playing Crimson Doubles immediately reminded me why I'll never touch Trials of Osiris ever in my life ever ever: Camping Icebreakers, High-Intellect Crests, network defying cheaters, and piece of shit teabaggers. No wonder everyone else just killed themselves. I know one thing for sure--I'm not setting foot inside Crucible again unless I'm in a 3-man boosting team in Rumble to finish quests.

But the Tower did look absolutely awesome...I can't help but wonder how long it'll take to leaf-blow all those rose petals off the balcony...

As a gametype, I think 2v2 Elimenation is great. Not too similar to Trials, but still taps in to some of the same elements that make Trials work so well.

As an event, I think Crimson Doubles was tarnished a little by several of Destiny's ongoing issues: I don't think the new special ammo tweaks are having a net positive effect on gameplay at the moment. I like the spirit of the changes, I'm just not sure it is working out. Matchmaking was also problematic for some... I didn't have any trouble with it myself, but I've heard many people say that games were more tense and hyper competitive than they'd hoped. And of course, the loot drops didn't seem to go as intended.

Overall, I left Crimson Doubles feeling like it offered a great gametype, but as an event it was a bit of a dud for me.

I just started playing Trials and as a mediocre PvP player, I had an absolute blast. (I'm not sure how many games I played, but I didn't get any ghosts, and that's ok.)

As other have pointed, going 1v2 when your teammate dies (or, more often, me) is a little more forgiving, and more importantly, this was a great opportunity to get a feel for how smaller teams work with (and against) one another.

There were a lot of "wow we just did that" moments.

I didn't keep track of W/L etc, but I did have a ton of fun playing, and learning.

My main complaint would be that this event was just reskinned 2s. There were some great ideas, such as the shared bounties, where I would equip an Auto Rifle to help my teammate complete his -- I just felt like those ideas weren't developed quite to the degree of sophistication that they could have been and with commensurate rewards, e.g., "Kill an enemy player damaged with your teammate's melee with your melee." This may be tedious to implement from a coding standpoint, however.

As for the Special ammo thing -- I suspect it's a tricky system to implement correctly and that the current measure is a stopgap.

Perhaps there could still be special ammo on spawn on Round 1 but with a debuff which deeply penalizes special weapon damage by a certain % for the first 20s, sort of an "anti-Specialist" type of thing.

I generally lucked out that I only got one super tryhard team that came in with Thorn and sunsingers with flame grenades. No Icebreaker or side arm switchers as near as I could tell. I tend to rely on my primary heavily and I enjoyed using a Scout/Sidearm for most of the matches.

The fact that you could advance even on a loss made things easier. I still had a few minor issues with hits not registering or not getting the grenade off on my screen, but since the cost wasn't so high it didn't feel as bad as trials where one loss kills your chances at the lighthouse.

At the 2v2 and 3v3 levels i felt that it is very tough to balance classes. Warlocks just have too many good things at this level, armor, tracking grenades, life steal/shield on hit melees, that the other classes don't. With more players, these advantages count for less, but in the smaller game types they seem to dominate.

Also, snipers are just really good at holding teams at range. The sniper/TLW or Sniper/high ROF auto rifle are too effective at covering all the range bands. A mid range build with fusion rifles can't compete, so you are left trying to shotgun around a tight corner. In fact I think I was the only team that used fusion rifles in all the games I played (I varied my load out game to game for fun, even ran QBB and an auto combo).

I think there is a video of someone sniping my partner at range and then following up with a headshot on me as I'm killing their buddy not 20 feet in front of him. Of course in that clip I don't get my fusion grenade off, but on my screen I did :(

The point though is that I'm very close, and snipers shouldn't be effective at that close of a range. That they are is one of the main issues right now.

I'm curious about everyone's thoughts are on CD now that the event is officially over.

I loved the playlist, and the shared bounties were a nice surprise (and led to a popping-out of my comfort zone, which was fun). The Heartbroken buff was definitely interesting, and something I'd love to see return. Going 1v1 against another buffed enemy led to some great encounters that led to some tough choices (Go For The Rez!).

Sammy and I ran it the first evening, and we had a great time (and got loot!). Some funny moments, saving throws, heartbreaking losses, and plenty of hate mail. :P
It was a great Valentines present.

I was somewhat disappointed in the scope of the event, but then again, Valentines ain't that big of a Holiday. At the same time, the smaller scope meant that I could run it multiple times across both consoles without feeling pressured to start.

I think the great thing about it was that you get a better understanding of how you work with another player without the stress caused by the regular doubles playlist (where enemies can space out your revives and control the match), and it was an excellent way to see how pairing certain weapons can help out the team; I remember running Doctrine while Sammy ran Jade Rabbit, and enemies had a very tough time pushing through to us when I played conservatively (which is not really my strong suit, heh).
I also loved playing around with weapons that I never use (Sidearms! Green Sniper Rifles! Scout Rifles! Hawksaw!); that weapon Bounty was great.

On the flipside, laggy enemies were more frustrating because of the fact that you only had one other teammate that could focus on them (and who also experienced their bad lag) so stacking shots was tougher. Fortunately they were few and far between.

I think that there was plenty to improve, and Bungie's already acknowledged some of the issues (320 candy Ghosts for all!), but if I could ask for anything, it'd be:

• Shorter countdown between matches (should take 20 seconds between matches, 4 seconds to go to Orbit)
  
  
• More diverse bounties (Trials has done a good job of varied-but-manageable bounties),
  
  
• The Special ammo situation fixed (bad timing for the whole fix thing against the ammo-generating weapons),
  
  
• More reward variety (I'd like to see the return of a Queen's Wrath style event with specially-skinned weapons/gear. The fact that some of us still have our Year 1 Queen's Wrath gear should tell Bungie something about the value that aesthetics can have over fancy "new' gear. I did get a great Red Spectre out of the event, so it was kind of like what I would like to see :P).
  

Overall, really fun event, I hope to have some clips up soon. In the meantime, here's a clip from a game where I got a flattering hate message:

And our quickest match (that landed Sammy some hate mail), with the aforementioned Red Spectre: