Yesterday was the beginning of the first Iron Banner of Season 11, and with it I decided to start my grind once again on my least favorite character. It had been a few seasons since I last participated in Iron Banner, but when I last did it involved a quest line that required you to do a bunch of weapon based kill quests on each character. I figured I would devote last night to trying to get the Hunter through the quest and then work on the Warlock and Titan on following evenings. However it turns out that has all changed and there is now a single simple quest that involves killing 25 folks with sidearms and another 25 with auto rifles.
The reward for this is getting the new seasonal copy of an auto rifle and a sidearm. While the old quests were a bit of a slog, it was nice because you wound up with a full set of armor and a random roll for each individual weapon that would be dropping. This felt pretty good because if you got a shitty drop on one character you might get an amazing drop when you get over to the next character. Example right now I have gotten a single drop of The Forward Path and it is truly heinous. Essentially it is an auto rifle without any range or impact with all of the stability and handling you could ever want which seems extremely bad.
For the side arm I got what feels like a thoroughly mediocre roll. I am still not entirely certain I like playing with side arms, but I most definitely do not like playing with anything that looks this stupid. Suros designs are either awesome or horrific looking with little middle ground. This however shows the problem of having only one quest and one set of drops per account. There are two new weapons that will last for several seasons and both of the rolls that I got from them were duds. Granted I can keep grinding the Iron Banner forever and getting more drops.
The problem with that is Bungie disabled Skill Based Matchmaking, which is a hot button issue in the crucible community. Essentially it favors players with a better connection over players that are actually within your skill range. The end result is that folks like me who are not terribly good at pvp get matched with folks like Aztecross who is a pvp focused streamer and YouTuber. There is no way in hell that someone who regularly gets to the lighthouse in Trials of Osiris should ever be matched up with a scrub like me. However in the land of magical thinking and mystery it happens because apparently we have similar connections. He absolutely carried our team to victory, and I did next to nothing in the process.
Bungie has gone back and forth on this point over the years, and I feel like there has to be a happy middle ground because right now doing the crucible if you are not a crucible player feels miserable. However when skill based matchmaking is enabled all of the PVP Streamers and YouTubers scream their heads off about it because it is in their words “too sweaty”. As they move further and further up the bracket they get matched with progressively closer and closer groups of players until there is a point where there are no casual matches and only the most white knuckle gaming ever. This seems fair to me to be honest, given that as you improve you should be matched up higher and higher moving to a group of your peers.
The end result is that I wind up having to put myself in a mindset where I just do not give a shit about if I win or lose, and that I am tightly focused on completing whatever objectives I might have for quests. I also try really hard to break up the crushing defeat by venturing forth into other activities. I took a break last night to knock out some of my strike objectives for example, and when I returned to the Iron Banner I was once again ready to get my face beat in. I hope that Bungie looks at the data and decides disabling Skill Based matchmaking is a bad idea, because other than big events like Iron Banner it seems like it is only going to drive off the more casual gamers.
When I stopped caring about win or lose the crucible got a lot more fun. I can actually have fun getting trashed now, as long as I am making progress on one or two quests. The Gambit has become the place where I care about winning, it’s so much more enjoyable. Heck, I like enough that I actually sided with that asshole on my main character just in appreciation. I now have to stand getting heckled now and then for “falling so far” from my “heroic roots”… heh.