Destiny: Crucible Matchmaking

This topic has been huge over the last month and as of a week or so ago Bungie has given us CBMM. Now lets do some review, for pretty much all of year 1 the crucible was connection based, we still had lag yes, in fact there are videos from year 1 showing how bad the lag was. So definitely not a perfect system, then Christmas of year two, about a year ago they changed it to skill based, and the lag was worse. Now since then matchmaking has been revised many times, to the point where bungie had said that it was basically connection again (a few weeks ago).

Of course, we didn't really feel like it was connection based because the connections were still fairly bad and the lobbies were still very sweaty. Now that things have been made primarily connection based we are still experiencing and evaluating what the crucible is like. My theory is that bungie first of all, heard the cries, and second of all, realized that the population had dropped so much that SBMM was more of a hinderance than a help. 

Iron Banner year 2: w/ NLB+Sidearm

Now lets talk about what the crucible is like now, of course everyone will be experiencing different things, some positive some negative. Most of my experiences of the new matchmaking was from Iron banner last week. I solo queued the entire week, and was pleasantly surprised. There were very few red bars and the lobbies did feel a bit easier, nothing ground breaking, but still.

I think that this benefits the crowd that is generally above average. If average is somewhere around .8-.9k/d then the 1.3/1.4k/d will probably benefit the most. I sit somewhere around 1.1 k/d and for a week and a half I have been consistently sitting around 1.4-2.0. But this is probably hardest on the bottom 50-60% as the lobbies will be much more difficult. Most of the matches I played in there was 3-4 players who rocked +2k/d  while everyone else was below .8. many sitting around .3 - .4. So like SBMM, there are problems with CBMM, but we all new this when we asked for it. The main thing, that we have to keep reiterating is the fact that laggy crucible is unplayable. That is the fact. I can't kill a guy who is teleporting this way and that.

And as for the top 1%, I was matched up against a top %1 player who was solo queuing and his team lost pretty badly because the matchmaking overcompensated for his skill. It took the best player and the 5 worst players and made a team in order to try and keep the teams fair. But of course the team that has all of its players from the top %10/20 wins, there isn't anything that one guy can do.

So all in all, it benefits some players more than others, but it does benefit EVERY player because there is less lag, you can't get rid of ALL lag, but at least its an improvement. I think this is a step in the right direction. The next thing to improve in this area is ranked and unranked playlists, which I have been lobbying for since the whole problem of SBMM began.

Sidenote: my personal favourite thing about this change is the fact that when you have a really good game, the matchmaking doesn't try and compensate for that anymore. I would always be scared after having a good game because I knew the next 3-4 games were going to be awful.

Thanks for giving this a read.

~Ducky