Remember back before Shadowkeep dropped, and Bungie said that there would be "a renewed focus on PvP in Season 8"? And then they removed four maps in exchange for one new map, we got solo queue in comp, and... that's it.

But people were like "give them time, it's a huge content drop".
Well, season 9 is here, and we get... One new Crucible map, one Lab mode is made permanent, and... that's it. They couldn't be bothered to turn Elimination into Trials during a Mercury-focused season. Future evolutions of the Crucible indeed.

But hey, at least they're retconning the death of one of the few interesting characters in the lore.
Also, Sparrows on Mercury after two years!

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[Link] Hey all,

At Shadowkeep launch, we refreshed the Crucible nodes, added a Solo playlist for Comp, refactored Glory gains, and started curating Crucible maps to pull ones that weren't performing well out of rotation for some love. This was the beginning of our work on Crucible over the next year, and we are far from done.

In Season of Dawn, we'll be reintroducing Rusted Lands, bringing Elimination to a static playlist node available at all times, and doing a bit of Sandbox work to refresh how Crucible gameplay feels. A few weeks back, we previewed the changes for OEM and Recluse, which may shift the sandbox around a bit. On top of that, we have a slew of new legendary weapons, exotic armor pieces, and subclass changes which we hope will push players to new builds. We'll also have a few maps returning to rotation with fixes to spawns and other issues, with a selection of maps being removed. We'll have some details on that in the TWAB later this afternoon.

As for Masterwork materials, we're passing this feedback along to the team. The current source of mats, as stated in the [reddit] OP, is after a full Valor refresh. This isn't comparable to other parts of the game. Gambit shares this issue to an extent, but there are fully masterworked weapons that drop from time to time that end up granting more mats than Crucible.

We have been introducing new pursuit weapons for players to earn via Glory, but we hear you on the Legend rewards, and have been passing this feedback along as well.

I understand the feedback right now, in that things feel slow. We have three month seasonal rotations with a few additional updates within each season, which players find to be too long for upkeep and refreshes. While we're passing this feedback along to the team, we also have to be sure to balance our resource allocation internally, and not rush fixes or changes which may break the experience. This isn't meant to downplay your feedback in any sense, just wanted to say that game development takes time, and that we don't want to rush things that could end up creating more issues in the wild.

As we have more information on future changes for the Crucible, we'll let you know. Until then, we have people working on the crucible internally, whether it be tweaks to modes, matchmaking, sandbox, or other.

Please keep the feedback coming, as we continue to collect it to help prioritize what players want to see most.

Cheers,

-dmg

[Link] Re: Trials

We've had a few blog posts talking about Trials of the Nine being on indefinite hiatus, and Luke speaking to what worked and what didn't in one of the Director's Cut blog articles.

This season, Elimination is returning as a static mode that you can play at any time. We collected a lot of feedback from Crucible Labs over the last season, and we'll continue to look at how the mode plays this season with upcoming Sandbox changes and other things. You bet your ass I'll be in there.

Please continue to sound off with what works and what doesn't. Maps, mode settings, weapons, armor, etc.

Edit: As in this post I've made here. Why? Because it's all lies anyway, right?! ;D

- Is there not a new raid?

Nope

- Any mention of trials?

Nope

Is that all?

There was also some discussion of a new mechanic whereby you charge up with light in some way and this allows you to do something powerful which is either affected by or controlled by armor mods.

To be honest I had a visitor and had to turn the sound off during most of it. It was probably one of the shortest reveal streams they’ve had. I caught parts of it like them jumping on a sparrow and the new activity having a new landing zone just for it. Didn’t see much of it but it seems to be leaning more to a menagerie like activity. About a minute after I got rid of my visitor and started really paying attention and catching up it was over.

I didn’t watch the stream, but after Vex Offensive, expecting the Sundial to be anywhere close to as fun or mechanically challenging as the Menagerie seems like just setting yourself up for disappointment.

I hope I’m wrong.

They said not long after Curse of Osiris that sparrows on Mercury caused some sort of performance issues they couldn’t fix, so they just got rid of them.

I guess it’s possible that those problems occurred early enough that the design of Mercury was changed somehow to compensate, but that wasn’t the impression I got.

I always thought on some level that Mercury was designed the way it is (small and few paths) BECAUSE there are no sparrows on Mercury

People from Bungie have been quoted in the past that their were sparrows on mercury until they discovered some big bug and disabled them. Don’t recall any indication of what the bug was or why it has taken them two years to fix it.

Where does more of this live? I couldn't see an easily-accessible hub (on mobile).

And also, what was the lore for Season of Undying? I have no idea outside of the season intro video and the fact yhere are Vex on the Moon?

Vanguard Commander