I am not the greatest PvP player (and will probably never be), but I had the luck of getting two carries to the Lighthouse this weekend by two kind streamers ("KratosRising" [Twitch] / "Kratos Rising" [XB1] and "xxITSJOHNNYxx" [Twitch] / "xxxITSJOHNNYxxx" [XB1] - check them out on Twitch, they are quite new and can use some community support :)). Here are some thoughts about it. First of all, I am now a proud owner of four Reflection Sum pulse rifles and two Inward Lamp scout rifles. I had gotten one of each from a gold bounty last week as random drops. Ironically enough, the random drops have better perks than those I got from 7 wins and the Lighthouse this week. Better don't ask me how much that stinks. Btw, that extra perk on the Adept gun versions isn't really worth it, imvho. I'd rather go with the gun with the better overall perks. What I did not get was a Doctrine of Passing. I also never got a Vex Mythoclast from all the hard VoG raids I have done, while they got dropped on people left and right of me. One guy I played Trials with this weekend told me that he had gotten a Reflection Sum from each of the last four times he had been to the Lighthouse. The single biggest letdown and fail in this game is the loot system. I am convinced this is deliberately so. I don't really know about the "psychology" and numbers behind that, but hardly ever getting some *good* lot (if I get any at all) is extremely frustrating. I got for example three Red Spectres (which seems to be a very rare drop), and while the first one had acceptable (though not perfect) perks, the other two were a sad joke and only useful as infusion fodder. A problem here is that perks are selected mostly randomly. There is no perk subset per weapon class, so auto rifles can get perks that only really make sense for shotguns or fusion rifles (and vice versa). This is telling me something, and that is that nobody at Bungie cares to truly polish their game. There are a lot of vanilla mechanisms built into it that are a good foundation, but they have not been fleshed out and honed to the point where they would make this game truly shine. Back to Trials here. A good way to hand out loot (at least in the Lighthouse) would be to offer three version of the reward item with different perks (similar to what you get from the gun smith for weapon packages purchased there when you are higher rank). That would at least allow you to chose a gun with perks you really (or at least halfway) like. But no, Bungie didn't even go as far as to invest that little effort to make the Lighthouse rewarding. So why even bother sweating my way to the Lighthouse? I can as well play the gold bounty three times each weekend, struggling my way through endless matches where I get my ass handed to me and hope for that one DoP with perfect rolls. Once I have that, I will resort to regular Crucible matches and Iron Banner, which both provide way more fun to me, and never bother playing Trials again. Another interesting observation I made was about the pseudo match making Trials has (pair teams with equal amounts of wins). Previously I thought this would weed out the lesser teams, only leaving the super pros to compete for the lighthouse. Not so. It actually is quite a random thing who you end up against. Depending on what teams the MM puts against each other, you can have a significant skill difference between teams with 7 or 8 victories. One one occasion we had a team of sweaty try hards that were very very hard to beat (so much more as I got carried and was of little help). The next match was a piece of cake in comparison. We were going against a team of two so-so players carried by quite the PvP monster. Unfortunately for them, I got a double carry, so they lost, but the point is that we had to beat a significantly better team at 7 wins than at 8 wins. Obviously, the opponents we had at 8 wins had been far more lucky with who they got paired with. I find it hard to express how much that says about Bungie's failed approach to Trials "MM". On one side, they are basing everything on numbers and statistics (and fail to see how that is drying up their game and taking the fun out of it), and on the other side they are using an "intuitive" concept about how to produce good team matches for Trials that doesn't really work. This is just oozing incompetence and lackluster, amateurish thought processes. The only people at Bungie who seem to know their job are the map designers and the graphics programmers and artists. All the higher level game mechanics (I consider gun play basic level) is half assed, immature, and unpolished. Now I have read that Bungie considers their game to be very good. These guys must be living in their own universe. They are completely delusional. The sad thing is that so many people play their shitty game. No, not Destiny itself, but the meta game it contains: the loot lottery. To bad the guys at Bungie do not even have the balls to openly go into discussion in threads about their game like this one. But maybe the real reason behind all this is Activision, trying to turn Bungie into a faceless entity that cannot be addressed, and touched, and influenced and is entirely subject to the will of the deciders at Activision's cold, harsh business dictatorship. About myself: I am over 50, have been working as a professional SW developer for 25 years, and have been maintaining and upgrading an old 3D shooter game for over 10 years, making it playable on Windows 7/8/10, Linux and OS X. I have been playing my first video game at the age of 14 and got hooked to computer gaming ever since.