A competitive crucible/Luna`s Howl Quest anecdote

I decided that this past week would be a good time to focus on making some progress with both the Redrix Broadsword and the Luna's Howl quests. This morning, I surpassed Glory Rank 2000, meaning I've just about hit the rank requirement for Luna's Howl. I noticed something surprising over the course of the week with regards to matchmaking. This is obviously just my anecdotal experience, but I'm curious if it lines up with anyone else's experience.

Last week, I played one night of competitive with a full fireteam. We won 9 or 10 games in a row. My next session, I went solo, and after loosing my first 2 matches, I then went on another 9 game winning streak (or thereabout). I was hovering somewhere between 1100-1200 glory points by the end of that streak. I was surprised, as I'd expected solo-queuing into Competitive to be a far rougher experience. I then jumped back in with a full team, and proceeded to get crushed 6-7 games in a row. I played a couple more games solo, and won them without much trouble. Then grouped back up with a fireteam, and BAM... another loosing streak. Last night and this morning, I sunk a bunch of time into playing solo, and I was routinely going on 3-6 game winning streaks, punctuated by the occasional lose. I never lost more than 2 in a row.

The key thing that seemed so strange to me was my impression of the average skill of my opponents. It appears to me that when I went into competitive with a full fireteam, we would get thrown against highly skilled teams almost every match. I'd often finish games with my kill score in the single digits. Then I'd jump in solo and be averaging 20-30 kills per game, and winning most of those matches. The effect has been that I've found it far easier to make progress up the rank ladder while playing solo than I have while playing with a team, which is counter-intuitive to say the least.

Has anyone else run into this trend? Or is it just a bit of strange luck?

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If you’d have gotten that many glory points last season you wouldn’t have to grind now for Redrix’s Broadsword :-p

Also yeah. Last time I solo queued I went 10-1.

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If you’d have gotten that many glory points last season you wouldn’t have to grind now for Redrix’s Broadsword :-p

Sort of :)

If I understand correctly, the win/lose point distribution is a bit more forgiving this time around. I know that to reach the required rank for Redrix Claymore in season 3, you needed to have a better than 50/50 win/lose record to make any progress at all up the final rank. But at this level in season 4, wins provide more points than losses cost, so a 50/50 record will still move you up the ladder, slowly. Reaching the next weapon, Not Forgotten, appears to be closer to the sort of climb that was required to get the Claymore last season :)

Also yeah. Last time I solo queued I went 10-1.

Interesting.

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Nah. The real reason it’s easier now is there are no loss streaks and win streaks never reset. The point delta between win and loss is similar to last season. You also move up faster since everything is worth more points than last season. Twelve points for a win at rank 4 last season! And losing took off ten. So yeah. If you won half your games it’s be slow.

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I did pick up a little tip this week which proved to be invaluable for me in terms of building my Valor rank quickly, which is a big part of the Redrix Broadsword quest (the final quest step requires resetting your valor rank 5 times before the end of the season).

The trick involves this:

* Play quickplay/Iron Banner and win games until you build up a 5-game win streak (any streak is better than none, but obviously aim for 5 if you can).

* Then, switch over to the Competitive playlist. As of this season, Competitive matches earn both Valor and Glory points.

* Here's the real trick: wins in the Competitive playlist will maintain your Valor win streak bonus, but losses in the competitive playlist will not end your Valor streak.

* This means you can play Competitive all week long, and reap the benefits of a 5-win streak Valor bonus at the end of every single match, win or lose.

Thanks to this trick combined with the double and triple valor points last week, I'm already close to my 6th Valor reset in season 4, despite the fact that I've been playing mostly competitive all week and losing plenty of games (I was at 2 resets this time last week). More directly, it has allowed me to make great progress towards both the Redrix and Luna quests at the same time, which is nice.

Hope that helps!

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I'm not complaining, because I need a ton of competitive games for the Redrix quest, and because I also need a ton of Valor points, and because this makes things oh so much easier... but it's definitely a bug. ;)

They probably can't fix it before triple valor turns off tomorrow morning, though, so I'm gonna exploit the hell out of it. :)

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https://goo.gl/images/ivak6G

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If you have a 5-stack going (from Quickplay, or IB), and you go into Competitive, losses net you 30 valor points per game, wins net you 120.

I don't get the math, but I'm not arguing. :)

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When I started, I had a 5-streak in non-Competitive (combo of Quickplay and IB). I was a little ways into Heroic. (I'm not sure exactly how far, but it wasn't far. For the sake of easy math, I'm going to assume I was right at the beginning.) I played 15 games in Competitive, here's the Win-Loss progression:

L W W W L L W W W L L L L L W

If this had been a normal week, and I was playing Quickplay, here are the point values for those games:

10 15 20 25 10 10 15 20 25 10 10 10 10 10 15

That's 215 points. Would have gotten me about 2/3 of the way to Fabled.

Because it's a Triple Valor weekend, if I'd been playing straight Quickplay, this is what the point values would have looked like:

30 45 60 75 30 30 45 60 81 30 30 30 30 30 51

657 points (a little more than 3x the original value, because I crossed the barrier into Fabled) - not too shabby.

Because I was getting points for a 5-streak, even though I was losing a lot of games, my ACTUAL values should have been like this:

30 105 105 105 30 30 111 111 111 30 30 30 30 30 120

1008 points (a 53% increase over the Quickplay-only value)

HOWEVER:

I wasn't keeping close track of the value after each game - I just know that after those 15 games, I reset my Valor, meaning I'd increased

1650 points

during this time. That's more than double the regular triple-play progression, and a 64% increase over the BUGGED predicted score.

That's insane.

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When I started, I had a 5-streak in non-Competitive (combo of Quickplay and IB). I was a little ways into Heroic. (I'm not sure exactly how far, but it wasn't far. For the sake of easy math, I'm going to assume I was right at the beginning.) I played 15 games in Competitive, here's the Win-Loss progression:

L W W W L L W W W L L L L L W

If this had been a normal week, and I was playing Quickplay, here are the point values for those games:

10 15 20 25 10 10 15 20 25 10 10 10 10 10 15

That's 215 points. Would have gotten me about 2/3 of the way to Fabled.

Because it's a Triple Valor weekend, if I'd been playing straight Quickplay, this is what the point values would have looked like:

30 45 60 75 30 30 45 60 81 30 30 30 30 30 51

657 points (a little more than 3x the original value, because I crossed the barrier into Fabled) - not too shabby.

Because I was getting points for a 5-streak, even though I was losing a lot of games, my ACTUAL values should have been like this:

30 105 105 105 30 30 111 111 111 30 30 30 30 30 120

1008 points (a 53% increase over the Quickplay-only value)

HOWEVER:

I wasn't keeping close track of the value after each game - I just know that after those 15 games, I reset my Valor, meaning I'd increased

1650 points

during this time. That's more than double the regular triple-play progression, and a 64% increase over the BUGGED predicted score.

That's insane.

Yep. I wasn’t keeping good track of my numbers, but I did notice some strange things happening with my Valor rank as I played. I’d win a game, and my Valor score would barely move, then I’d win another and my score would shoot up. I was ranking up so fast that I decided to just not worry about it and enjoy the ride, but I do wish I’d kept better track of my Valor score as I was playing, just so I could try and figure out exactly what was happening.

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I haven’t played more than ten games solo, but I definitely haven’t had as good an experiencing doing so as you have. I’m not nearly as strong a player you, but I always seemed to get steamrolled solo. It feels like I always get teammates that are actually clueless. Their stick skills always seem fine, they just don’t ever seem like they’re doing anything other than running straight to the enemy in a single file line and dying one at a time.

After losing three games in a row last night, I switched to my low level Titan and played a bunch of Quickplay. I dropped from the kid 1100s to the low 600s in Glory the past few days. I’m trying not to just focus on the gun grind, because I genuinely had fun this weekend, even during the bad losing streaks. I’m enjoying Crucible more than ever before, and I do like the competitive nature in Comp quite a bit. I’m actually really excited to see Trials return. I just perform better when I have a strong player to take the lead. Even though I enjoyed it all, it’s still demoralizing to see my Glory rank cut basically in half.

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I’m convinced that there are times when matchmaking goes deliberately out of its way to screw me.

I played a few games before work ttgis morning, after grinding the living hell outta the Competitive playlist all weekend. I’m on a win streak and 1 win away from hitting 2100.

I have time for 1 last game before work. So naturally, matchmaking decides to put me together with 2 other randos, and throw us shorthanded against a party of 4, several of whom were already using Luna’s Howl.

/headdesk

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Back in Warmind Bungie rolled out some changes to make matchmaking more fair to singles. Instead of seperate matchmaking pools they set it so individuals will be treated as a lower skill than pre-made groups. It was in a TWAB somewhere, but my google fu is not serving me well here :). It's been on and off a bit as they've tweaked it, but I believe it is currently active

https://twitter.com/_mantis_/status/997268311623651329?lang=en

EDIT:
Found it!

https://destiny.bungie.org/bwu/220

Derek: From reading your feedback and looking at data, it's clear that solo players are facing an uphill battle in the Crucible when they encounter well-coordinated opponents. Players in Fireteams have a substantial advantage, particularly as average skill increases. In the current Crucible, solo players at virtually all skill levels win fewer than half of their games.

We're making some under-the-hood adjustments to try to ensure that even when solo players do end up fighting against Fireteams, they'll be doing it on a more-even battlefield.

Instead of using your normal skill value when in a Fireteam, we will use a modified value that takes your Fireteam size into account. The larger your Fireteam, the larger the potential modification. We don't want to try to completely nullify the benefit of team-play, so our initial values are conservative and can (and will) be tuned as we see the system working in the wild. All of these settings can be configured on our servers without waiting for a new update, so we'll be able to make additional tweaks based on what we see.

We always encourage you to bring your friends with you into the Crucible, but we think this change will improve your experience during those times you have to fly solo. As always, we'll be keeping an eye on how well these changes are working once they're live, and look forward to hearing your thoughts!

#FTMM

(Editors note: For those like me who didn't understand this hashtag immediately, this means Fireteam Matchmaking.)

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Why can I remember some random detail from a 4 month old twab, and I can't remember to put my kids water bottle in her backpack in the morning?

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Oft repeated activities or circumstances do that to you. It’s why you should mix up your commute periodically to avoid tunnel vision and dangerous lost time.

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Oft repeated activities or circumstances do that to you. It’s why you should mix up your commute periodically to avoid tunnel vision and dangerous lost time.

My ADHD doesn't help much either! :p

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Why can I remember some random detail from a 4 month old twab, and I can't remember to put my kids water bottle in her backpack in the morning?

I'm just now realizing that I forgot to do the same thing today, lol

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Back in Warmind Bungie rolled out some changes to make matchmaking more fair to singles. Instead of seperate matchmaking pools they set it so individuals will be treated as a lower skill than pre-made groups. It was in a TWAB somewhere, but my google fu is not serving me well here :). It's been on and off a bit as they've tweaked it, but I believe it is currently active

https://twitter.com/_mantis_/status/997268311623651329?lang=en

EDIT:
Found it!

https://destiny.bungie.org/bwu/220

Derek: From reading your feedback and looking at data, it's clear that solo players are facing an uphill battle in the Crucible when they encounter well-coordinated opponents. Players in Fireteams have a substantial advantage, particularly as average skill increases. In the current Crucible, solo players at virtually all skill levels win fewer than half of their games.

We're making some under-the-hood adjustments to try to ensure that even when solo players do end up fighting against Fireteams, they'll be doing it on a more-even battlefield.

Instead of using your normal skill value when in a Fireteam, we will use a modified value that takes your Fireteam size into account. The larger your Fireteam, the larger the potential modification. We don't want to try to completely nullify the benefit of team-play, so our initial values are conservative and can (and will) be tuned as we see the system working in the wild. All of these settings can be configured on our servers without waiting for a new update, so we'll be able to make additional tweaks based on what we see.

We always encourage you to bring your friends with you into the Crucible, but we think this change will improve your experience during those times you have to fly solo. As always, we'll be keeping an eye on how well these changes are working once they're live, and look forward to hearing your thoughts!

#FTMM

(Editors note: For those like me who didn't understand this hashtag immediately, this means Fireteam Matchmaking.)

This explains a lot.

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What Cruel describes is a big departure from the end of last season, where playing solo virtually guaranteed you would play against a 4-stack, and almost always lose. Fireteam Matchmaking was ostensibly enabled then, but didn't seem to be doing much. However, that was in the last week's of the Redrix Claymore grind, so the majority of the people playing were in parties of 4, which must have been throwing things off. I think what we are seeing now is a larger population in Competitive, which may have changed things. Or, Bungie twisted some knobs without saying anything - also very possible.

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After about 10-12 games, I am.....at the exact same number, 650. I feel like I am wasting my fucking time. Blueberrys are really stupid, hey that guy has a rocket, let's bunch up.....I can't even.

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After about 10-12 games, I am.....at the exact same number, 650. I feel like I am wasting my fucking time. Blueberrys are really stupid, hey that guy has a rocket, let's bunch up.....I can't even.

Are you talking about Glory rank, or Valor rank? (My Glory rank is pretty close to where it was when I started - in the 400s. That one actually goes up and down accurately based on wins and losses.)

Blueberries are definitely dumb, though. I can say that definitively, because I AM one, sometimes. :)

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A competitive crucible/Luna`s Howl Quest anecdote (Destiny)