I play Destiny in a big active group, there's about 40 of us, we loved the raiding content and the weekly challenges but rarely dabbled into multi-player, that was until recently when the house of wolves (or house of Shotguns as I've been calling it) expansion dropped.
Now, I'm not new to FPS games, I'm 37 years old and I've been playing FPS's on PC and console in one way or another for around 23 years, I was a competitive Battlefield 2 player who moved onto COD 1/2 & 4, I'm familiar with technical details around tick rate and latency being different from ping, input lag, etc.
I've been playing (and loving) ToO, it's been great but it's the only PVP experience in the game that's actually worth taking part, not just because of the rewards, but because it seems that you've tailored the game around a best connection preference as opposed to your current 'skill' matching option. On the whole the experience in ToO is entirely enjoyable and I've been fortunate enough to hit up the Lighthouse with all of my characters so far on a good few occasions.
Iron Banner and Crucible in general are a complete opposite experience, they are frustrating, laggy, non-consistent and causing me to want to put down the controller for longer and longer periods after playing and that's all down to how you deem to be a reasonable 'skill' fit for the players, if I'm playing someone on the West coast of the US then skill is out the window, watching them warp around (like Titans, if they had blink) isn't a great experience and given that there's no raiding content (PoE is a poor second to an actual raid which requires teamwork and not just Gjalla's) it's causing out group to start to atrophy members.
Not once in all of the time I was playing Destiny did I think that it would actually be the game content (specifically matchmaking style) that would start to pull players out of having a good experience and turn them off the game, I assumed the next big thing would come along and do that, but it seems that in forcing people to take part in PVP, you're essentially doing that yourselves.
Part of the main frustration in these matched games are kill trades, which happen all of the time, as a Battlefield 4 player I can remember EA/Dice explaining that kill trades were caused when the tick rate on the server would roll up actions and process them at a slower rate than the action on the client's screen, resulting in kill trading, making it a moot point on who fired first, 10hz (100Ms) is far to slow to process actions in a manageable fashion, it's as if you're injecting a forced input latency onto the players and given that the game is hosted on XBL and PSN networks with games who host servers which tick at up to 60Hz, I don't see the justification in this decision, this is the description from how Battlefield dealt with it:
"The Dec. 16 game update improves Battlefield 4's netcode in a way that should cut down on "kill trading," whereby two players who fire at each other seem to die at the same time. In particular, the update shrinks the time frame in which players with high latency who should already be dead could still get a kill."
Now I appreciate that 'netcode' isn't a simple fix, but tick rate can be increased and it would absolutely lead to a much more enjoyable experience, I suppose I'm really asking for you to experiment with this and hopefully add more game modes which have a connection preference over skill in future expansions.
I love what you guys do and I love the game but experiences like the ones shown in the video are really starting to put event the most dedicated players like me off the PVP experience.
I can appreciate that you can't get through every single forum post but I've done my utmost in attempting to start a conversation about it, so you can't say I didn't try to get my point around the poor experiences players are experiencing across.
If you watch the video you'll get an excellent idea on what it's like, I've also made it clear that this is on all connections I use and isn't specific to me, I've just spent the time capturing these clips to highlight it, all of these IB clips were also captured in just one day.
Thanks for reading
Affro
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Agreed! Matchmaking is not skill based if people are not on a (close to) level playing field due to lag advantages.