Happy Solstice everyone! The fire is lit, there’s grass in the Tower, and the Guardians don their new armor with the stats and sparkles to go with it. We hope you enjoy your time at EAZ this year. We’re listening to your feedback on what you like about the event, changes that aren’t good, and any improvements you’d like to see added. Thanks for sharing your comments and keep them coming. We have a busy TWAB planned for you today. As promised, we’ll take a look at the next raid launch date and then talk about some matchmaking changes coming in Season 18 and Season 19. Let’s get into it.
Raid the Date
Introducing Season 18 will be the second time we bring a raid from the Destiny Content Vault, and this time it will be… [REDACTED]. Sorry, we’re saving the reveal of which raid is coming to Destiny 2 for the Destiny 2 Showcase on August 23rd. But we wanted to make sure you had time to make the necessary arrangements to be ready on day one. So, take time off work, hire a babysitter, but don’t skip school, please, your education is important.
[REDACTED] The raid airs live at 10am. Pacific on August 26, 2022.
Since this will be a raid that many of you are already somewhat familiar with, we’re going to change the First World Race fight a bit similar to what we did with Vault of Glass. Here’s what to expect:
The raid will start with contest mode enabled for 24 hours. You will need to be at 1560 Power to be at the limit for all encounters. Clearing the raid in Contest Mode is the first step to access the new Challenge Mode in the Director and the special Triumph for completing all challenge Triumphs for each encounter. Completing the Secret Triumph, a curated list of challenges in this newly unlocked Challenge Mode, will be how a fireteam crosses the finish line of World One and claims their prize. To enforce the Triumph requirements in challenge mode, your team will wipe if you fail the success conditions during any encounter.
Challenge Mode and the secret Triumph will only be available for the first 24 hours, so hurry if completing it is on your bucket list. The first fireteam to do so will be declared the winner of the First World, pending evaluation by our team. If all goes well, the six final members of the event’s winning fire team will be awarded the coveted raid zones as a memento of their achievement. Good luck!
Doing races
Starting in Season 18, we will be introducing some changes to the way we play matchmaker in the Crucible. This will be the first iteration that is part of a larger plan going into Season 19. Our World Systems teams are leading this transition and are here with a great collection of information on what to expect.
Let’s talk about skill and connection
We know this has been discussed with a lot of passion and goodwill in many parts of the community (and within Bungie), so we’ll give you a clear rundown before we dive into the hows and whys:
We’re working towards a goal where all players—including New Lights!—can enter the Crucible and regularly get matches where they can feel competitive and have a reasonable chance of winning/competing. Making matches fair using Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) will be important to achieving this goal. We start with loose SBMM in the Control playlist at the beginning of Season 18. Loose SBMM has a wider starting skill-similarity than Survival and should result in matching a wider variety of players, while also eliminating some of the frustrations we see in our current system. Expect relaxed SBMM to expand to other playlists in future seasons as we fine-tune what we consider “high quality matchmaking” by collecting real data and feedback from you. We don’t plan to add this to every matchmaking Crucible playlist. We’ll keep tweaking until we’re in a good place. We will report tuning updates regularly. We will be implementing a preferred fireteam size matchup format in Season 19.
Much of what follows is pretty in-depth, feel free to skip to the Tuning section below if you don’t care about the details and just want a high-level view of what you’ll be experiencing!
High quality matchmaking goals
We have developed some goals to work towards in the coming seasons:
All players (including New Lights!) can enter the Crucible and get regular matches where they can feel competitive. All players, whether solo or with a fireteam, can find a place in the Crucible where they can play various matches and have a reasonable chance of winning/competing. We define reasonable as “expected win rate between 40 and 60% for most matches”. Players are rewarded based on their skills and proud of their skills. Reserve a slot for players who don’t want to get involved with the skill system.
Generally speaking, every fellowship in a competitive multiplayer game strives to put together high-quality matches. We consider three things when putting together a high-quality match:
Connection quality: There are two types of connections that are important: Connecting to the game server. Connect with all other players in the match. In general, poor connections to other players have a greater effect on Crucible than connection to game servers, so when we talk about connection quality in Crucible, we’re talking about this – player-to-player connection. Lower quality matches result in jerks from other players, missed shots, or unexpected damage or death. When fireteams spread across the world, we pick up single player latency to speed up matchmaking. Competition justice: Ideally, all players in a match have a reasonable chance of winning that match (ie, they are of similar skill). Matching speed: We always consider matchmaking speed to be key – no one wants to wait 10 minutes between matches, no matter how perfect they end up being.
When we match, we must balance these three elements. If we want to reduce the speed of matchmaking, we will either need matches that are less fair or matches with lower connection quality. We will continue to coordinate to find the best possible balance.
Dexterity
Throughout this TWAB we will use the term “skill”. In Destiny, this term refers to how we rate all players participating in PvP on a scale of 2000. Player skill is reflected in a graph that looks like this: Internally, skill is a combination of stats made up of your performance (kills, deaths, captures, round wins, revives, dunks, etc.) that ranks you against all other players in a match. Each player’s skill is compared to the skill of other players in a match and we make skill adjustments for all players at the end of a match where the two scores differ. There’s also a confidence rating—the more games the system has seen you play recently, the more confident the skill adjustment is. In addition to the stats listed above, skill includes all sorts of things: reaction times/agility, how you approach matches, how well you know the map/mode, how well you know your character, how you build your character, weapons , armors and mods you use, and how you stack it all up against other players. You’ll never really see a skill value in the game, and while we currently only use it to try to have fairer matches in Survival and Elimination, we’re still keeping an eye on it for all modes (including Gambit!). This gives us a logical starting position in new types of games like Rift or Zone Control. Now, how do these skill numbers actually play out in-game? Here’s a good shorthand we use internally:
If someone is 200 skills above you, you can definitely tell they are better than you and they will win ~75% of engagements against you. The opposite is true if someone is 200 or more below you. By the time you get to the 400 spread, the best players will win ~90% of the bets and the lower skill players have to be extremely lucky to win. Once you reach a 600 difference, there is virtually zero chance of the lower skill player ever winning a 1v1 clash.
Engagements should become fairer as you get closer to the same skill. This is our goal.
The space of problems
As we began looking at the competitive landscape in Destiny, we noted a few things:
Aside from Survival and Elimination, the ability to influence whether your team wins or loses is usually out of your personal control if you’re average skill or below (half the population!). This can be bad, as the outcome of the match is essentially random and you have no incentive to try to win. This contributed to de-emphasizing victory as a requirement to earn rewards in the Crucible.
Today’s landscape also allows for brand new players to be matched up against some of the more highly skilled veterans and expected to compete. On the other hand, if you’re very skilled, you’re often in a team where you feel like you’re carrying it and you have to consistently perform if you want to have a chance to win. This is not good for anyone.
In Control, skill differences within a team can be stark—over 50% of matches have a skill difference of 900 or more between the best and worst player, so significant that the outcome is already known before the run one shot. On the other hand, in Freelance Survival, 60% of matches have a skill difference of 250 or less. This makes a lot more sense.
These wide skill gaps also lead to more mercy games than you might expect. For example, Control:
Wide differences in skills also exacerbate other problematic elements:
With large differences in skill, trapping a single team in a spawn is much easier. With large differences in skill, it’s more likely that most of a team will be dead at once, releasing…
