Bug fixes, weapon tweaks, new UI options, expanded voice chat... Destiny has received a lot of updates over its short life. One thing I do think deserves some scrutiny though, and hasn't yet gotten any, is Destiny's join in progress feature. A lot of the time join in progress is great. It keeps your Crucible team filled and makes sure you don't end up doing Strikes alone. Unfortunately there are two areas where join in progress currently does a terrible job: [b]1. Spreading Misery in the Crucible[/b] When it works well join in progress keeps crucible games flowing and keeps team numbers balanced. Sometimes, however, all join in progress does is spread misery. When I press Launch on a Crucible playlist I have a decade of expectation, from Bungie's Halos, that the matchmaking system will try to find me a good, fair game. Far to often, however, matchmaking either drops me into a game where my team's losing score disparity is so great that it will be hard if not impossible to overcome, or it drops me into a game where there is not very much time left either because the score(s) are too close to the goal or because the match clock is too close to running out. [i]This is not fun.[/i] I don't want to join a match where I start out losing horribly. Presumably the people I'm joining are already frustrated because they lost team members. You would think join in progress would help, but really all it is doing is spreading that misery to new people who were expecting a fair, balanced game. Join in very late into a game might be even worse. It means instead of getting to play a good dose of Destiny I get to watch a match end, wait thirty seconds while I'm shown a score I barely had time to contribute to, go back to matchmaking in orbit, fly back down to a planet, and hope maybe I get a full game next time... What the Crucible needs is some sort of matchmaking filters that turn off join in progress if the scores get too far apart or if the game gets too close to ending. Will it suck for those one or two stuck outnumbered with no help coming? Yes. But it was already sucking for them... how does it make sense to spread that misery to me and other new players by joining us into a bad match? Matchmaking in the Crucible should seek to give players the best game possible and at some point automatically restarting the matchmaking search instead of using join in progress is the far better option... [b]2. Handing out unfair rewards in Strikes. [/b] Every once in a while I'll lose one or both my randomly paired fireteam members during a strike. Usually, Destiny is able to pull new Guardians in to help me within a minute or two. But sometimes I keep playing... and keep playing... and keep playing... and whittle down the boss to just a sliver of health left only to groan as I see that [i]now[/i] Destiny has decided to bring me some help. This just happened to me a few minutes ago. I played through the entirety of the ROC version of the Devil's Lair by myself and some six shots before I killed Sepiks Prime I see that two new Guardians have join my game in progress. I finish off the boss and sit down and wait. A few seconds later the two players who did not fire one single shot come and sit with me until the rewards screen appears. I scored 273 kills and 0 deaths over the course of thirty minutes and yet these two Guardians get similar rewards to me for fighting all of absolutely zero seconds?! Worse I've seen it where the late comers get drastically better rewards! That's just not right... Like the proposed changes to the Crucible's join in progress above, matchmade Strikes should shut off join in progress both after a set amount of time has passed and should certainly disable it when a single player gets to the boss room. Once again, the job of the matchmaking system should be to give all player the best experience possible. When I start a Strike I mostly want to play a whole Strike start to finish. I almost never want to pop in at the very end. And it is even more frustrating to have to run through a whole Strike myself only to have Destiny give players who didn't help the same or better rewards as I get. Anyway, that's how I see it at least. Thanks for the great game! :)