Not really... (Destiny)

by red robber , Crawfish Country, Monday, August 29, 2016, 23:15 (2789 days ago) @ unoudid

This is a minor complaint wrapped in an honest question about the current state of the crucible.

This question comes from the fact that I remember playing crucible lone wolf in year one and actually having a great time. Games felt fair overall even though the advantage was always to a coordinated team.

I played quite a bit of matchmaking this weekend both on teams and running solo. What really stuck out to me was the fact that when I ran with a team I tended to have very fair matches overall. Of course there were a few times when we got completely smashed. One time we got matched against a team of 3 in salvage/skirmish where the best person was a top 100 player on guardian.gg and no matter what I did I could not kill them.

Things changed though when I ran solo. It seemed that I would get dropped into matches where the players on the other teams were all vastly better than me. This happened enough the point where I was so frustrated that I was about to launch a controller through my monitor. At that point I turned the xbox off for awhile and took a break.

Now the real question comes into how does Bungie balance between playing in groups and playing solo?

For example, If I have an ELO of 1100 but typically run in groups where people are ELO 1300+, when I go play solo, does that run of playing with great players affect my matchmaking when running alone? Basically, if you are getting carried, does that screw you over?

It seems that once year 2 SBMM came along that nearly all matches have turned into a complete sweatfest. I actually miss the days of ranked and unranked matches in Halo. At least I knew what I was getting into when playing in the ranked lobbies.

Also, join in progress still sucks when playing solo. There's nothing like getting dropped into 6 straight losing matches when trying to play 3v3 playlists to work on grimoire.

But it's not because of matchmaking or win% or k/d. Mostly I just prefer the camaraderie of the Xbone crew. The majority of us who play together are even keeled, decent at callouts, and can hold our ground. My win % greatly improves when I play with the DBOers. Strangely, I feel that while the competitors get easier when I play solo (meaning my k/d seems to improve), my likelihood of winning seems less. I don't feel that getting carried skews your matchmaking. I think that playing with good teammates tends to set your expectations, and having crappy teammates puts more stress on your own skills because you are having to carry more of the workload.

I'm not really sure what calculates ELO, nor do I even know what it stands for. For example, I have the same ELO as Squid in Salvage and he is clearly the better player if not the best player on the DBO Xbone team.