When death is of little consequence (Destiny)

by stabbim , Des Moines, IA, USA, Wednesday, August 13, 2014, 13:25 (3564 days ago) @ Avateur

I get the feeling you all are right about a matchmaking component being in play to try and match up based on skill, but I'm having a very hard time believing it will be in there or that it will work well considering that half of this doesn't take skill. It's all based on gear, how many friends you went in with to coordinate with, and who saw whom first. More luck and timing than anything, really. Or is the skill in being better at seeing someone before they see you, and potentially having better gear? lol

All of this assumes that matchmaking is evaluating skill in the first place. It isn't. It's really evaluating your success rate. True, in Halo that basically equated to skill, but matchmaking was never observing how you played and making a value judgement of whether you were a "good" player or not. Only a human could do that, and only a human would bother. It was just keeping track of your wins and losses, and matching you against people who tended to get similar results.

The point being that even if some (or all) of your success rate in Destiny PvP comes from gear, matchmaking could still match you against other people with similar success rates. People who play a ton and acquire great gear, and set up their skills in an advantageous way, would still get matched against others in the same category. People who maybe don't play as much and spend less time acquiring gear would tend to get matched with the same. You might even find that some players who have a lot of good gear but aren't that good at PvP get matched against people who are better at PvP but aren't as geared up, because they both end up being similarly effective. And all of those matches are valid as long as they tend to produce close games.