This has been covered in recent TWABs, but I thought it would be worth mentioning here now that we've had some time to see how the new competitive playlists and ranking system are playing out.

If you've always wanted Luna's Howl, Recluse, Mountaintop, Revoker, and the new Randy's Throwing Knife, but never thought you'd be able to pull of the competitive playlist rank requirements, then you just might want to jump back in and give it a try this season.

The TL;DR is this: Ranking up in comp (now called "Survival") is far easier than ever before, with a few small caveats.

I've been working towards reaching Legend over the past 10 days or so (Legend rank being 5500 points). I got as high as 5000 a few days ago, before tumbling back down to 3800. But that's a post for another day. The only reason I bring up my progress is that the highest I've ever reached in previous seasons was ~2600. So the fact that I hit 5000 within a week or so should give you an indication of how drastic the changes are this season.

So what's changed?

In a nutshell, there are 2 major factors that are making it far easier to rank up:

1) The "Freelance" playlist

2) Reworked point-gain calculations

Comp is now divided into 2 "survival" playlists. One of them is straightforward. It's a 3v3 game mode, and you can go in by yourself, as a duo, or a full fireteam of 3. Just like previous seasons, if you do go into this playlist yourself, you can expect to get matched up with randoms and then pitted against full fireteams on a regular basis, which is a tough disadvantage to overcome.

However, the 2nd competitive playlist is called "Survival: Freelance". It's the exact same 3v3 game mode, but it will only let you join if you're a solo player. So you'll never get matched with or against players who are in a party together. In theory, this makes the playlist a bit less brutal for solo players (although I have a lot to say about how its working out in practice, but I'll cover that in another thread later). What it has certainly done is made the standard "Survival" playlist even tougher, because it no longer has any solo players in it. So you're probably only going to find 3-stacks in that playlist. All that said, the fact that the Freelance playlist gives solo players a place to play without worrying about getting matched up against 3-stacks is a big stress relief, and a very welcome addition.

The even bigger point is the way the rank calculations have changed.

When I first jumped into the Survival Freelance playlist, I got off to a brutal start. I lost my first 8 games in a row. "But wait, I thought you said its easier to rank up this season!" Don't worry, I'm getting there. Despite the fact that Matchmaking seemed to be doing everything it could to prevent me from ever winning a match, when I eventually did, I gained somewhere close to 600 points. Then I lost another 3 or 4 games (which in previous seasons would have wrecked my score), but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was only losing a very small amount of points per loss. Then another win, and BAM another ~500 point increase.

I don't know how the ranking system is working exactly, but there does appear to be some connection to a hidden Trueskill rating, or something along those lines. Bungie said that they want players to land at their appropriate ranks more quickly than previous seasons. Whatever they're doing behind the scenes, the experience I've had is that I've never ranked up so quickly, despite the fact that I'm actually losing more matches than I've ever lost in comp before.

I reached 2100 points (Fabled rank) after about 15 games, and only 4 or 5 of those were wins. So while my game-to-game experience was one of the most punishing runs I've had in Destiny PvP, my rank results painted a very different picture. Now that I'm up in the Mythic 2 & 3 levels, things have normalized to more predictable gains and losses.

I've got a lot to say about the way the Freelance Playlist handles matchmaking, which I'll go into in-depth at some point (here's a preview: it's utter shit), but I wanted to stress this in case anyone tries a couple games of Freelance and gets discouraged: stick with it. If my experience is any indication, you might be able to hit Fabled way faster than you'd ever expect, even with a losing record.

Is anyone else playing much comp? How's it going?