D2 Crucible reached for the Stars and tried incredibly hard to give the players what the studio thought the community wanted from 3 years if D1 feedback. - weapons that all had around 1.2 second kill times for 1:1 weapon balance. - Neutered grenades, melee and abilities (that were all hyper-balanced between classes) to cut down on ability spam. - Roaming supers for each class to make them all play similarly. - playlists to condense player populations and create larger player pools to combat lag. - Comp was added in response to requests for ranked play. Everything that year 2 Crucible changed was a direct result of the studio trying to build what they thought we wanted from PvP, but there was one change that ultimately broke everything and that was the move to 4v4. We sat at the reveal and knew 4v4 was going to be the Achilles heel of D2 PvP. D1 Crucible made sense with its 3 person fireteams for regular PvE and Trials, and 6 person fireteams for regular Crucible and raids. It was fluid and 3's could flow into and out of 6's, and raid teams could transition to Crucible together. D2's 3/4/6 made no sense. On paper it was the move to 4v4 for all of PvP was streamlining things and helping eliminate lag more, but it was also making a 3 player fireteam go find a 4th to play PvP and it was making 6 player raid groups dump 2 players to go PvP together. We immediately knew it was going to splinter raid groups and friendships as a result and it did, but that wasn't all it affected. It forced Trials to also be 4v4 and with both Trials and Comp sharing game modes, they became redundant and just took players from each other. This in my opinion ultimately led to the demise of Trials as it lost its identity and the studio was committed more to trying to make ranked play work. 4v4 also led to the creation of smaller maps which along with the smaller teams and 1:1 balance led to the age of team-shooting. Ultimately 6v6 was returned and the sandbox completely revamped: faster kill times, buffed supers, melee, abilities, cooldowns, and the return of a real neutral game... But it was trying to squeeze what made D1 fun into D2's framework. 6v6 was a definite improvement and the Y2 sandbox was incredibly fun at launch, but the maps weren't designed for 6's and that led to issues with spawning and gave shotguns a lot more dominance than they'd probably have had if D2 been built for 6v6 from the start. Modes have suffered too as we've never seen Supremacy reach anything near the level of fun it was in D1, Rift never returned and (in my opinion) Control is a shell of what it was in D1 since it's still bound by rules and scoring that were changed and built for 4v4. Even Clash had a much better scoring system in D1. [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/251632231/0/0/1]Part Two[/url]