I’d love to see you elaborate on the unsustainability of Trials v1. I’d like to know more.

Trials where the majority of the loot depends on winning, necessarily depends on someone being there to lose as well. As good players get better at the mode, the losing becomes increasingly concentrated on the same group of players. Those players quit because who wants to lose all the time. This cycle continues with the next lower "tier" of players and so-on, until all you have left is 100X flawless players.

At that point it's basically impossible to encourage new players to try out the mode. Adding rewards for losing can sort of help, except then you become incentivized for losing as quickly as possible, which makes a mockery of the mode.

Didn’t the true random matchmaking solve this problem? You weren’t likely to go up against the very best… because there aren’t as many. The bell curve would mean most of your matches are likely to be against people in the middle. Even if everyone below the bell on the left dropped out, you’d still be more likely to face someone in the middle rather than on the far right.

In recent weeks, there might be 1000 people in the playlist, total, at any given time. Sometimes less.

Your bell curve is more of a spike, full of experts. There's nothing BUT people on the far right.

I’d love to see you elaborate on the unsustainability of Trials v1. I’d like to know more.

Trials where the majority of the loot depends on winning, necessarily depends on someone being there to lose as well. As good players get better at the mode, the losing becomes increasingly concentrated on the same group of players. Those players quit because who wants to lose all the time. This cycle continues with the next lower "tier" of players and so-on, until all you have left is 100X flawless players.

At that point it's basically impossible to encourage new players to try out the mode. Adding rewards for losing can sort of help, except then you become incentivized for losing as quickly as possible, which makes a mockery of the mode.

Didn’t the true random matchmaking solve this problem? You weren’t likely to go up against the very best… because there aren’t as many. The bell curve would mean most of your matches are likely to be against people in the middle. Even if everyone below the bell on the left dropped out, you’d still be more likely to face someone in the middle rather than on the far right.

Yes. The true random matchmaking that Trials had at the beginning (House of Wolves era) was when it was the best. I firmly believe that if they had stuck with that system, Trials would never have begun its downward spiral toward the latter part of D1's lifecycle. The reason that it went downhill is because they changed to a card-based matchmaking preference. That is when the scenario Squid described above began to play out and Trials became a try-hard-only mode. I still can't figure out for the life of me why Bungie is so hell-bent on sticking with the card-based system as it is completely logical and foreseeable that it will continue to make Trials completely undesirable for an average player. You 100% need a large pool of players for a mode like this to be worthwhile, and you will never get that critical mass if it *always" gets harder with each win you get because of the way the mode is designed. You *need* that randomness of who you get matched against for an average or even above-average fireteam to have any hope of going flawless (and thus being incentivized to spend their Friday night playing the mode and keeping the playerbase at that critical mass.

I could ramble on for hours about this, but I'd basically just be saying the same thing over and over again. Get rid of the card-based matchmaking, damnit!!