(Two-ish Years Later)

May 2018: Enough Time Has Passed.  Now, First Impressions.

About the Destiny 2 Beta, I half-joked: "Hmm. A less-polished, half-framerate Halo. But it's a start!"  We might say the same thing now, at the eight-month anniversary of launch, except we'd be wrong.  Nearly all in-game activities share only vestigial DNA with John-117's odyssey.  But!  Your favorite sub-optimal solo queuer isn't touching those various in-game activities in the first place.  No, our typical gaming session on Destiny 2 looks pretty much exactly like it did in the Beta, which is to say, quickplay after quickplay, often with map repetition sufficient to inspire Beta flashbacks, to boot.

I found the campaign to be a chore.  Taking me wholly out of the experience: I cannot get behind the silent player-character design choice, which turns the player into a robot assassin capable of story arc and agency only to the same extent as your everyday General Atomics MQ-1 Predator.

Pictured: Your Guardian, with Ghost

Beyond the story's having no chance to function properly (that is, grab me, move me, make me care about any plot point or other character or stir any interest in finding out what comes next) without a protagonist, there was the nonsense of it within the established game universe logic. One could tell, from the start, "okay, so we're pretending Rasputin doesn't exist.  And that the Fallen and Hive would be cool with a new enemy faction encroaching on their terrestrial footholds.  That the Vanguard's first move wouldn't be to queue all the light-strapped Guardians up to get zapped back to omnipotence by the Dead Zone shard.  And that the Traveler was just waiting all along for the right moment to rise from the dead and ex machina the ever-loving hell out of our difficulties."

I screen capped my friend's name in the credits (he is a lead tools engineer) and posted the picture on Facebook.  I wrote, honestly, "[C]ongratulations on this milestone. You are a lead among tools! Seriously though, all the player community folks I know are over the moon about it."

It was honest reportage.  Folks *were* over the moon.  At the time, there in that first week, most were glad to have cutscenes and a collection of plot points they could deem to be "story."  But everything since has been communal sighs or outcries tempered by the occasional giving of "propers" for things like quality raid encounters or promised improvements—some since realized, some deferred.

My worry, in the final weeks and months of Destiny 1, centered around the fact that I thought year 3 Destiny 1 was damn near perfect.  Re-tooling things for a sequel seemed likely to frustrate my enjoyment, at least enough to downgrade Destiny from "#1 hobby" to "game I play sometimes."  The *feel* of the first game, more than anything else about it, was a precious thing to me.  There was unmatched perfection in how it felt to shoot, to jump, to let fly my skip 'nade pretties.  In addition, there was the sense, always, of striving for more.  E.g., I was blessed with a pretty nice collection of Eyaslunas, but I was ever on the lookout for The One - the WishYouLuck special (sureshot, rangefinder, rifled barrel, luck in the chamber).  And the power fantasy of my guardian was borne out in the ability to solo almost every Nightfall strike.

But at the end of D1, after the glory of Age of Triumphs faded, the game population dwindled and it seemed like so much of the community was giving other games a try, all of us party to an unspoken agreement that we'd come back together, as one, come the launch of Destiny 2.

That coming together - that one-ness - proved incomplete, short-lived and ultimately illusory.  Not everyone came back, or did so fleetingly.  New clanmates popped in, migrated to PC and then off the game entirely.  Crucible gods climbed down from their peaks, judged the scene harshly, and sprinted to promised riches in some cartoonish third-person battle royale or another.

August 2018: On the eve of Forsaken, a visit to Bungie

Family vacation took us through Seattle.  We naturally visited with our good friends who live there.  They are a couple, with the husband (let's call him "Randall") having undergone a career change from school teacher to game developer.  Our prior visit was ten years earlier, when Randall was still with Microsoft Studios and installed on site at Bungie's old location to help with Halo:ODST testing.  But by the time of this 2018 visit, Randall had officially moved over to Bungie and had been there long enough to be part of the "Old School" (he'd been "Middle School," with the t-shirt to prove it, when he'd visited us out east a few months after launch).  Now, knowing how much I enjoy the game, Randall offered to show me around the offices.  The fam and I waited outside the studios for closing time (which, surprisingly given the imminent launch of a major expansion, was 6:30 pm), posed for pictures with the Destiny logo and the Bungie releases timeline pasted on the wall outside the main entrance.  Luke Smith blithely strolled out just before 6:30 and I let him pass unmolested (as required by my Jedi New York training).

Inside, Randall showed me just about everything there is to see.  Almost none of it particularly noteworthy, save the following:

-- After hours, the place is properly empty, save a few scatter souls attending to their coding (or, in the case of one conference room, watching 70's kung fu movies, with at least a couple recognizable design leads in attendance). 
-- A couple dozen PS4s and XB1s are perpetually stress testing running the D2 software.  I didn't press regarding fail rates.  Damn.  Next time.
-- Near the second level rock wall, there is a large dual-screen display showing the current population by console/PC, among other tidbits.
-- Throughout the hundreds of unmanned work stations, I spotted far more XB controllers than PS controllers.  FTFW.
-- This was not a one-person community summit, mind you, but I put in a request: give us an emblem that tracks rumble 1st place (or even just podium) finishes.  Still waiting, *Randall*.

A couple of pictures:

July 2019: Amidst an apparent renaissance

Clan's pretty much gone.  It was built around a Destiny podcast that ended about 9 months ago.  But that's okay.  Clan was mostly just a thing to display a couple letters at a time in my emblem on someone else's death screen.  I miss the active discord, but I scratch that itch in another discord now.  Sub to a couple of Twitch channels at any given moment, remain not very active, and hit up the Bungie-created D2 app if and when I need to team up for something like the Outbreak Perfected mission or Thorn strike.  The rest is quietly soloing to pinnacle weapons and then not using them very much, if at all.  (Other than Recluse, which is a 100% of the time must for endgame PvE.)  Not sure whether I'll have much to say about the current or near-future states of things in D2, except to affirm, for now, that it is back to hobby status, if it ever left.  It's fine.

This is fine.

Rumble, Beta and Everything After, + a Note on Addiction

I've been cranky. Irritable. Unenthusiastic regarding the appurtenances of the everyday. Blame the interrupted flow of particular chemicals my body has come to account for in maintaining its normal performance.  The particular chemicals are these:

Chemical #1.  Alcohol.  As I begin to recover from my serious, mysterious malady, I find it easier to put on weight. Well, I needn't do that. Therefore I'm cutting out the (infrequent) nightcap. And (far more frequent) beer. Started over a week ago. But, you know, I like beer. It took me a couple years but I've found the stores down here in south Charlotte area that stock the good lagers, pilsners, stouts and Kölsch. So when I'm going without--abnegating, if you will--I am cutting out things I like: the ritual of it, the practiced pour and the light streaming through the amber, the taste and the chill, the soft bite of carbonation, and the rush of relaxation massaging the brain (even though I know this last bit is simply the pleasant, dulling effect of socially palatable poison).  Oh, and the kids love hearing the burps that follow.

Chemical #2.  Endorphins.  The science is not settled on this, but let us assume for the sake of blargument (erm, blogged argument? Sure, whatever) that when we are addicted to things that do not themselves have a chemical component, it is our internal chemistry that dictates the existence and consequences of the addiction. So, yeah, endorphins. Brought on by (you guessed it!) Destiny. I've entered a stretch without it. First there was the Prime Family Vacation, consisting of a five-hour in-airport delay spent keeping the four under-ten primelets alive and entertained, followed by three days of comically outsized Chicago traffic and tourist expenses, then a nice couple of days with distant cousins in Milwaukee (although those days were marred by near-constant work interruptions). So, yeah, no gaming during the vacation. Then back home to D2 beta week, in which heavy workload went hand-in-hand with Wifey Prime's newfound refusal to go to sleep at night to all but preclude playtime. So, two weeks now with nearly no Destiny for ol' Subtimus. And the chemicals are playing havoc with my insides, and my mind-parts (which, yes, are insides also).

But check it: I did get in a few early-morning sessions with the beta. Enough to form a hint of an impression (that being, "Hmm. A less-polished, half-framerate Halo. But it's a start!"). And then, oh glory of glories, today I got in about twenty minutes of unexpected Destiny 1 clash-ing.

And it was good. (Who needs the Main Ingredient when there's the max range/kneepads Panta Rhei?) The pleasure chemicals roared through me and my mood has been level set at "all good, man" since. Also good.

Update on the rumble grind. Even before my prior post, I had finished up the rumble grimoire grind. And almost immediately thereafter, the skirmish grimoire grind. Salvage and doubles remain, and I really don't see there being enough time left in D1 for those, unfortunately. Granted, I've gotten pretty okay at those. They were always my worst modes, and I still have some severely thumbless matches, but I've also started a mini-collection of zero death mercy games in those playlists. But even so, I will not finish those grimoire cards in time. Which means, appropriately enough, I have failed. It means I didn't beat Destiny - at least not according to the strictures I placed on myself. (And no, I've never, not once, picked up a Trials card, so I don't even know if there's a wins-tallying grimoire card for that.)

But let me close with this: returning to D1 after the beta was like coming home from a mixed-bag vacation (looking at you, Chicago). You're back to the everyday, the ordinary, the familiar. But hey, it's familiar. You know where things are supposed to go, and you know the rules. There's not all this pressure to be having fun. And so, sometimes, in spite of yourself, you look around at the everyday, the ordinary, the familiar, and you realize: this--my life, my everyday life--is fun. No alcohol required.

(J/k, give me a damn beer.)

The Last Days of Destiny

I'm not ready, guys.

Unpopular sentiment, perhaps, but there it is: I'm not ready for the end of Destiny.

In the past, finding a favorite game and playing it into the dirt left me starving for the sequel.  I played a fair bit of Final Fantasy on NES, then really rocked out on Final Fantasy II on the SNES.  I was beyond ready for Final Fantasy III.  And then that became my new favorite.  Play-through after play-through, with hours spent grinding Ultima casts in the T-Rex forest.  Anyway, Final Fantasy was just one manifestation of my hobby.  Even during any period of grinding out play-throughs, I'd still be playing other games.  Because the hobby was gaming.    

Once I started my current career as an attorney, though, I probably would have abandoned the gaming hobby altogether.  Kids, work, limited free time, the usual.  Not exactly an unheard-of result.  But then, my one buddy achieved his long-standing dream of working full-time on AAA games.  He was with Microsoft Studios, and he touched several IPs in his time there.  He'd work on a game, I'd pick it up.  Of those, my favorite was definitely the original Mass Effect.  I sank so much friggin' time into that game, and coming out of RPGs I loved the unwieldy item management system.  Mass Effect 2 was a big improvement in terms of controls and game play; a step back for item management and story structure.  Throughout, though, the hobby was gaming.  Again, Mass Effect was just a manifestation of the hobby.

Then, more life stuff.  More kids, moving, longer work hours.  The hobby was fading once more.  I hadn't played anything in almost a year.  This was June 2015.  My buddy was coming to visit, so I figured I'd better have his current game on hand.  Now, my buddy had spent a lot of time stationed by Microsoft Studios onsite with one particular developer.  So when Microsoft Studios became 343 and this one particular developer poached a bunch of folks, my buddy was among the poached.  That developer, of course, was Bungie.  The game, Destiny.

I was slow to pick up what was going on with this game.  To that point, my social gaming had been limited to split screen Goldeneye in high school and dorm LAN Quake in college.  So I was wholly unprepared for just about every aspect of Destiny.  First forays into crucible were a shit show as I ran headfirst into the Thornpocalypse buzzsaw.  Over time, though, something happened with the mix of gear grind, PvP improvement and community.  I mean, you can interact with the best players, run into them in pubs.  Imagine randomly having John Daly on your card at the golf links.  Anyway, all this went into turning Destiny into more than a new favorite manifestation of the gaming hobby.  

Destiny became the hobby. 

That's why I'm not ready for the sequel.  Destiny 2 is not my hobby.  Sure, it may become my new favorite game.  It may even become my new hobby, but that is far from certain.  And this has never happened to me before.  I've never had a hobby just kind of . . . expire.  

And it's already happening.  Content drought, player population drop-off.  Clan's a hundred strong, and only ever two or three members on Destiny at a time.  But even so, every time I log on is my favorite time ever.  I'm scared of losing that feeling.

So no, I'm not ready.  But we'll get there, guardians.  

I hope.

Pretty much the above but spoken aloud by me, at times flubbingly because 2yo kid was talking to me at the same time:

The Last Days of Destiny on Subtimus Prime's Slapdash YouTube Stinkpot

In (muddled) Defense of Solo Queue Destiny

Diff'rent Strokes.  Clan Discord's been feeling the Destiny 1 Age of Triumph Raid Re-fresh Nostalgia feels.  "Oh, I'd have quit long ago but for playing with the folks on here" and such.  And that's good.  Great, even.  Or, it's great for many.  Most, perhaps.  But you and I? We're meeting Destiny the sub-optimal way, remember?

Soloists, we are.

And then, suddenly, a flurry of NOT being a soloist.

Conflicted Grouping-up(s).  Owing partly to "Spring" break for the kiddos (c'mon, I mean, it's Easter break, right? No judgments, but call it what it is), I had some time alone in March and April and spent some portion of it doing the Destiny things.  *I did a lot of shooting, if I'm being totally honest.*  My most consistent inviter on Destiny, this past year+, has always been Cat, and that continued during this Destiny-intensive time of mine, so we played together here and there.  He mentioned having proposed to his clan leader that we three run a Trials card together at some point.  In response, I was non-committal in word and ambivalent in emotion.  The running inside/not-really-inside joke between me and said clan leader basically amounts to: "Sassi is good at Destiny.  Subtimus, not so much.  Ha!"  Were I to attempt true end-game content like Trials, I'd be forced to confront the "not so much" part of that duality.  

Later in my Destiny-intensive time alone, I wound up doing a quick nightfall run with Cat and Sassi (feeling pretty slick about 0 deaths, 6 revives) and then roped them into doing some salvage in order to pump up my lagging salvage grimoire.  But the salvage portion was pretty painful, actually, since my usual inconsistency (some games I'll play alright, some not) showed up for the party.  But even where I was doing alright (never well/good, mind you, and let alone where I was outright sucking), it was well below what Sassi is accustomed to.  Vis-a-vis Cat, I felt like "Donnie Brasco" leaving Lefty to hold the bag with his gang.  Cat didn't say "But I vouched for you!"  He didn't need to.  I hope his clan didn't wack him.  

I left the fireteam after that salvage disaster and continued crucible bounties (which are working brilliantly since the patch, by the way, both for the weapon diversity in crucible and for the breadth of the bounty loot table) until I got a Crota invite from Jim.  It was to be my first raid, and it was terrifying.  I'd watched raid playthroughs, including Crota, and I'd even attempted a solo Crota run during Taken King.  But this was like transferring mid-year to a new school in a different country and trying to muddle through with the language after glancing over a "My First Hundred Words in [x]" book.  (I have done exactly that, though, and it wasn't sooooo bad.)  I got the Crota challenge emblems and a void and a solar primary out of it, but I in no way earned those things.  It was, however, good for at least one laugh:

Also, after over a year of chatting online with him here and there, I finally got to run some games with (as far as I know) this blog's sole reader.  That was a lot of fun, with some nice conversation and general catching up, and I look forward to doing it again, though time zone differences tend to indicate, in magic 8-ball speak, "outlook not so good."

Again with the Solo Stuff(s).  But now, back to a purer form of running solo, as the family vacation/travel stuff is pretty much over with and we're back to normalcy - meaning, about 45 minutes of Destiny every couple days.  

This morning I spent my minutes soloing the nightfall, and I recommend this as a great week for doing so.  Most weeks I'll check the modifiers on reset day and watch Esoterickk's solo run.  But I've only managed the solo once before. This week's daybreak / solar combo, though, equals:

You'll notice I use my unearned solar primary from the Crota raid.  But soloists without a solar primary shouldn't worry.  Any solid PvE primary will do, since the M.O. here is basically "chuck infinite solar nades" (as you shall see if you click through for the clip linked in the picture).

  

Finishing the Rumble Grimoire. Also, Fuck Sepsis

When I assigned myself the task of completing the grimoire wins for each crucible playlist, I was between houses - sans prime family - and staying at my parents' place.  Just me and my dad for a couple weeks, aside from the few days I stayed overnight in NYC for work.

As an aside, it's coming up on a month since my dad passed away after an unexpected and extraordinarily brief fight against sepsis (blood toxicity from a bacterial infection).  I am filled with regret, anger, disbelief and sometimes despair, but I am also glad for the times we spent together lately.  Particularly those aforementioned couple weeks when it was just the two of us.  I indulge this personal aside as background for the following entreaty: learn the signs of sepsis and be prepared to advocate for yourself or your loved one when facing medical providers and/or ER intake personnel.  This thing destroys bodies with a frightful quickness.  My dad went from "I think maybe my lunch meat was bad" to comatose in about 12 hours, and from that point, aggressive medical intervention could only get him another 44 hours of life.  As I wrote in clan discord server just before heading off to the airport to try to reach my dad before the inevitable: "Hold your peeps close, peeps.  Life can be a real MF sometimes." From sepsis.org:

I had already completed the Elimination wins without even realizing it.  So I started, in grimoire card order, with Clash and Control.  The 30 or so wins I needed in each of those playlists took just a couple days each, running juggernaut Titan with Feedback Fence, LitC/rangefinder/reinforced Eyasluna and LitC/aggr/reinforced Matador.

Since then (it was August 2016; now it's January 2017) I've been working on the Rumble grimoire.  I was at just under 30 wins when I started the process.  Now bumping up against 70.  So, yeah.  A few days for 60 Control/Clash wins.  Five months for 40 Rumble wins.  Holy hell.

Part of the drip drip drip of wins is from reduced playtime.  Part is the nature of the playlist.  By design, you should be winning about half your team-based playlist games.  Rumble, though?  Technically, you should be winning about 16-17%, or a sixth.  I'm a bit above 10%.  And that lines up with the matchmaking, I think.  I have:

·         a pretty good shot at about 80% of my games, where opponent ELOs are all within a couple hundred of mine;

·         an excellent shot at about 10%, where the ELOs are pretty tight to mine; and

·         no fucking chance at the other 10%.  

In those "no chance" games?  I'm against players on an entirely difference plane of existence.  A sampling of such opponents from my Rumble grind:

Guardian dot gg Rumble Rank	XBONE GT
24...................	Snipelogic
66...................	Conjector
95...................	Dzizy
115.................	Grip Funky
121.................	Cam
159.................	Mikke
174.................	Artyk
217.................	Vonify
256.................	Xayah
280.................	Ripsta
332.................	More Velocity
338.................	Edd1biP1nP1n
339.................	Flucz
371.................	Texas Prod
380.................	Narzuh
546.................	McNug
and.................
.......................
.......................
.......................
.......................
790.................	I Am CoolGuy

These players have short, simple GTs devoid of numbers subbed for letters and the injudicious application of the letter x (mostly). They don't sport scarab emblems (which emblem, paradoxically, more often signifies an opponent I can readily beat). They are not streaming (again, mostly). They don't emote or teabag (and yep, you guessed it: mostly *ahem, looking at you, McNug*). And they play differently from the rest of us. The play in a fashion that evinces (i) crazy good movement skill, (ii) crazy consistent mid-range eyasluna 3-tap ability (usually; some of these folks are artists with complete shit weapons, like Conjector with the Zarinaea-D) and (iii) *throwin' salt here* the ability to consistently survive shotty-melee-melee in the rare instance I'm able to get the jump on them.

Slightly exaggerating that last bit, which really is a function of the aforementioned crazy good movement skill, in the sense that there's no hitting these guys dead-on.

Anyway . . .

The recently-reduced skill-based matchmaking priority has made my grind a little more difficult, but I figure to wrap it up by the end of March if I can keep up my pace of an hour, maybe two, of gameplay four nights a week, minus Iron Banner weeks.

My loadouts for the grind are, lately:

-- bladedancer with quickdraw and invis super, extra-mag silvered dread machine gun, shinobu's vow double skips and either (i) vendor palindrome + trespasser or (ii) last word and but not forgotten or 1000 yard stare, memory of jolder;

-- striker with shoulder charge, transfusion and shockwave super and max agility, same machine gun as above, MIDA (or sometimes a max range shadow price), matador (yr1 matador, recently re-rolled with cascade and replenish for ammo purposes), mk.44 standasides, memory of jolder (this is a shoulder charge-focused build - MIDA gives more agility, jolder eliminates sprint cooldown, and standasides prolong the time during which your sprint can activate a shoulder charge; transfusion then triggers life support with each successful shoulder charge); and

-- voidwalker with life steal, embrace the void and scatter 'nades, same machine gun and matador as above, LitC/rangefinder/reinforced Eyasluna, Ophidians, memory of jolder.

This may be of interest to no one, but I close with a microtage of a few Rumble win clips from the first month of Rise of Iron:

"Recent ROI Rumblings" mid-November 2016

Making TLW / Sniper "happen" (again) + IT'S ALL MEANINGLESS

Back in time a bit:  I recall Xur sold The Last Word a couple weeks before Rise of Iron was released.  Lobbies were rife with the weapon that day.  At the time, I happened to be in the middle of a few days of trying to make things happen with a Last Word / sniper loudout.  It was working out alright.  The Last Word, no surprise, is a fairly dominant 1v1 engagement primary, assuming the engagement range is sufficiently low.

Back in time a bit more:  I'd run with the thing here and there earlier in year 2, when the method for using the gun was to hold down the fire button, auto-fire one or two shots to the body while ADSing to snag improved hit detection, then release the ADS button to complete the engagement with auto-hip fire while enjoying the remnants of that initial, improved ADS hit detection. It worked very well that way:

Forward in time a smidgen:  That wasn't working any longer, though, towards the end of year 2.  Hip fire was all but removed from the game.  Trying it became this (credit to Sassi).

Instead, one needed to remain ADS once engaged, and tap out shot-by-shot as quickly as the stability will allow.  Example:

Exception to that rule would be in extremely close quarters, when auto-firing center body mass (while ADS) would also be acceptable.  Heck, the instability may even kick you up into a finishing crit shot.

What I found running this loadout, however, was that I'd achieve some level of success in my usual mid-tier lobbies, then get matched with someone who actually knows what they're doing and wind up schooled, repeatedly, in the ways of The Last Word.

Present day:  The schooling has continued now that everyone seems to be coming down from that initial Rise of Fast Pulse-ador high.  Indeed, a bunch of folks in my lobbies, myself included, seem to have independently but simultaneously arrived at the thought: 'nuff of this.  I'm going Last Word / sniper.  The wisdom of crowds, indeed.  Even tippy-top players seem headed in this direction (excuse the gay panic tinge to the gentleman's tweet (or don't)):

From my renewed schooling, I share some thoughts on effectively using TLW / sniper combo versus the currently strong loadouts.  Or, at least, what I'm working on in hopes of becoming effective again.

● Engage at optimal range.  Meaning, the closer side of mid.  Don't give in to the temptation to treat grenades as a range extender (i.e., "If I weaken with a nade, it won't matter that I'm out of Last Word range.  Surely one or two of my eight shots will connect, despite the sub-optimal range!"  Wrong.)

● Break engagements.  Miss that first sniper shot (or hit body and you are out of primary range)?  Disengage.  Enemy makes it to cover and you don't have a full clip and/or health bar?  Disengage.  

● Related note:  Regarding cover (and this is not TLW-specific), be smart about how you choose to lay in wait for enemies.  If you are set up to exploit a high traffic lane, you should be in or next to cover, and your intended kill zone (where you want the enemy to be when you commence firing) should not be near cover.  

● Use The Last Word like a hand cannon.  I am astounded now and then by the time-to-kill of The Last Word in the hands of someone using it like a hand cannon.  What I mean is this: 1.  Keep your reticle trained at head level.  2.  Snap to your opponent's crit spot and fire three well-paced shots. 3. $$$Profit$$$.  I am working on this - going into patrol and shooting walls, trying to group a clip of shots as tightly as I can while pushing the fire rate up as high as I can.  I can't do it properly yet.  But going up against someone who can?  Insta-killed.  Believe it.

● Avail yourself of Bungo's magnanimity.  After a year of upper-mid impact sniper rifles everywhere and the only high impact one being stuck behind a PvE chore, year 3 is awash with high impact legendaries.  Use one.  Especially if you are like me and the body shots are real.  Vendor Event Horizon.  Seriously.  

● Be extra careful with corner bait cat/mouse stuff.  Those eight shots in the mag go by rather quickly.  Take a second or even third look at your radar before engaging in a game of corner bait with your opponent.  Check for extra pings that indicate two or more enemies are around the bend.  Disengage or wait for backup.

● Always Icarus.  HCs are pretty good in-air.  So be in air, especially if your 1v1 enemy is going that route and you feel like remaining on the ground leaves you at a disadvantage. 

● Count out your shots.   Out loud, to start with.  You really need a feel for the mag size, or else you'll find yourself lashing out with a panic melee when you should be finishing with the primary.  And bear in mind that aside from Warlock, the melee ranges are always a little shorter than you think in the heat of the moment.  Especially bladedancer, with which I still find myself counting on year one blink strike range, sometimes.  (Hint: the range now is bigly shorter than year one range.)  Needless to say, an out-of-range melee is even worse than doing an emote in the middle of a fight, since it's a full second of helplessness you cannot interrupt.

● It's okay to feel bad.  Existence is a horrific exercise in self-delusion, in which every moment of growth or joy is an illusion.  But so, too, is despair an illusion.  You will try TLW/sniper, and you will fail.  You will despair.  That's okay.  It does not matter.  You will improve.  That, also, does not matter.  But you'll have fun doing it.  (Or not.)  😊

  

My Rumble Plateau and a New Direction

The Rumble Mismatch Problem

Last post, I touched on a few things that helped me improve in Destiny crucible this past summer, but as we race through the fall season I am suffering a bit of a regression.  Maybe.

Or? Maybe . . . maybe the skill-based match-making settings are going a little haywire.

The case for my own personal regression in skill level is compelling.  Yes, skill-slip is almost certainly the culprit behind my decreasing K/D.  Looky here.  Components of a successful play session include: warm-up, mental clarity, focus and energy.  Not complaining, but my life set-up precludes such indulgences.  There's the whole working-a-lot thing, and then I cannot play until kids (and spouse) are asleep in bed, and then I have to stop a couple times during a given session to tend to the youngest kid when she starts wailing from her crib, and then I'm staying coiled and ready to shut off the game system and TV if/when the spouse wakes up, so that I can plausibly deny staying up to play later than would be prudent.  I've covered all this before, but I'm looking again at these factors now that I have a test case from the summer, when I was relatively free from responsibility for a couple weeks and just piled hours upon hours into practicing my aim and my overall game skill.  As measured by rumble wins, those summer sessions were more fruitful than any other I've had with Destiny.  

Funny thing about that, though.  Towards the tail end of the intense couple weeks-long session of practice and improvement, I hit a wall.  A wall of grossly outsized competition:

Listen to me.  I'm not bragging about being matched up against top-tier rumble players.  Because here's the theory about SBMM settings just being a little haywire, summed up:  based on skill, as evidenced by performance in Destiny crucible, I have no business being matched up against Texas Prod or Grip Funky (or Cam or Nicely or Endarro, etc. for that matter).  It might not be archived on Twitch any longer but I checked and Texas Prod was streaming when we matched up for a couple games.  Very interesting to see my own total destruction from another vantage point.  I was half expecting to hear him rage when I got him a couple times at the end (wasn't targeting him or anything - I just always try to hold A on Widow's Court and that's where he was), the effect of which was to prevent him from catching Grip Funky.  But nope, just orbit out of the lobby and away from Grip Funky, thanksmuch.

Anyway, it's continued like that, or gotten worse, maybe.  Especially just recently.  

I have no business being matched up against I Am CoolGuy.

I have no business being matched up against more velocity.

It's lunacy, really.  Rumble ELO rankings-wise, I'm somewhere in the eleven thousand range on xbox.  And here I am loading into lobbies with top 200, top 100 players.  In those lobbies, I am nothing but a helpless kill feeder.  Look, I understand the bell curve means that the player population at the upper echelons is quite thin, and we don't want to keep those folks waiting and waiting and waiting for matches.  But with around 600 to 700 hundred thousand crucible players every day, do we really need to dip into the five digit rankings pool in order to construct lobbies for players with double digit rankings?  

You know what?  I guess we do.

And?  And . . . I love it.  I mean, I don't get to play this game I love all that much, and if 8 or so minutes of the hour I get with this game is spent getting creamed by players I look up to, then all the better.  

DTS Discord Points the Way: A New Direction AKA Ask me your kit questions

So what?  So I should git gud skrub.  Thing is, that's been the goal for quite a while, and I think I'm at a plateau.  See, I'm old as shit.  My reaction time is shit.  I'll watch back my own clips and see that an entire missed Last Word clip was not ghost bullets, but simply bad aim I was either not cognizant of or unable to adjust for in the moment.  Even against stationary targets.  

I've tried to be a student of this game, of the equipment, the abilities, the maps and their angles.  All of it.  And that study has paid all it's going to pay, I think.  In-game, at least.  What I've noticed, though, is that I have something to contribute to the discussion on clan Discord chat, at least when it comes to weapon rolls, scope attributes, ability node choices, that sort of thing.  Kit questions, basically.  

Or shoot, I think I have something to contribute.  Because kit advice from someone like True Vanguard or MTashed is well and good, but don't be surprised if those players can "make it work" with equipment that will leave you, dear reader, in the cold.  But if I, an average-or-below player, can point to something that has worked for me, there's a fair chance it can work for you.  Anyway, maybe that's a new direction I can take this rather haphazard, sporadically updated blog.  So yeah, ask some kit questions.  Stuff like: "What am I looking for on a Clever Dragon when next Iron Banner comes around?"  "I got two Hero Formula drops - which should I keep?"  "Vortex or voidwall?"  "Is the answer always 'matador 64'?"  "Will using juggernaut lower my IQ?  By how many points?"

To close, here's a micro-fail-tage, as well as a seasonally updated logo for some holiday cheer 

/  \_(ツ)_/¯