Nah, I'm just thanking him for arguing in favour of excluding people. Dont be precious.

Good lord, you're a prickly one.

Okay, fine. You're absolutely right, he shouldn't consider the big picture when discussing issues, he should worry about individuals. We all should. Because heaven knows Destiny isn't about making the majority of players as happy as possible.

How exactly does having fewer options please more people? If you don't want to play freelance trials, don't queue into it. Their adding it to the game would affect you none.

It's not about pleasing more people. It's about displeasing fewer.

I agree with him. I'd agree with him even if it affected me negatively (ie if I had no way to play with friends), because I think that Trials would be demonstrably less fun for EVERYONE (including freelancers) if freelancers were included. Yes, I believe that it would be less fun to play than not play.

How exactly would the inclusion of a freelance playlist be less fun for people not playing in it? And how exactly would it be less fun that not playing trials at all?

I'm sure you've stopped playing a game because you didn't find it fun. There's your answer.

And yes, this means I'm arguing in favor of excluding people. Or, in the world I live in, it's acknowledging that sometimes what's best for everyone isn't best for me, or someone I know. But hey, if you want to be as ungenerous as you can when ascribing motive... sure. It's all about excluding people.

Oh come on. I didn't say the motive was excluding people, did I? Obviously squid ian't over there cackling manically at the people who would lose out.

You buried the lede, though, which is that squid thinks a freelance mode wouldn't work well. You focused on a supposed secondary effect of what he was arguing for.

I've had this same argument with people who want Raid matchmaking. There are some high-stakes activities in Destiny that require teams made up of actual teammates with the same level of commitment toward achieving a goal. Matchmaking cannot account for the level of commitment necessary for success. The only way to account for that commitment is have players do the sorting themselves by making the effort to seek each other out. THAT effort is a demonstration of your commitment to the ultimate goal of the activity.

I understand the desire for matchmaking. But the mindset seems to be because I can go down to the park anytime and find a pickup game of basketball, I should be able to walk into an arena and instantly find 12 other teammates who know all the rules, who play well together, and are committed to playing a regulation game for 48 minutes or more (regardless of how well it goes) in order to get a trophy.

It's not going to work out in a satisfactory way most of the time. And when it doesn't, that means people have a negative experience with the game. That negative experience affects people's overall impression of the game. Those negative impressions can affect the overall popularity of the game. I'm sure that one of Bungie's goals is to avoid releasing modes that would provide a negative experience most of the time. Maybe you think it would be fun, but maybe, just maybe, they have a better idea of what the outcome would be.

The truth is Bungie is not being exclusionary. You've decided that the effort it would take to find a trials team is too much. It's your decision to exclude yourself. I'm with you, by the way. I don't want to be the reason we fail at trials, so I seldom play it, except for those few times when I've joined people who had no expectation of getting the reward. If Bungie were to provide a freelance mode with the same rewards, the expectation would be that those rewards were attainable, which would not be true most (I bet 95%) of the time. Why would Bungie want to set people up for failure?