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)_/¯

I got better

The set-up. Mid-summer this year, the Prime Family sold our house in order to move into a new one being built a few miles away.  Vagaries of life event timing being what they are, the move-out took place a month and a half prior to the moving in, and on fairly short notice.  To start the liminal period, we divided.  Wifey Prime and Primelets to Prime-in-laws in Florida for sun and such.  Subtimus to Optimus' place in New York for working in the firm's NYC office.

The lonely drive up 77 was all #feelsbadman, missing the fam as the car radio offering a steady diet of depressing presidential campaign antics and equally depressing twang-pop passing as "country." Time ticked away on the first night of Iron Banner.

The practice and the Halo.  Let's get to it, guardian, I thought.  The time away from family, though sad, was time I might spend improving my game.  And I did.  To start, I reached Iron Banner level 15 for the first time.  And on Friday, no less.  And I worked at NLB/sidearm.  No surer way to improve aim, perhaps.

Another thing that helped: being gently dragged over to Halo 5 by catstacheinc.  Something about the pace, reticle placement and maybe even the framerate of that game, although wildly different from Destiny, helped when going back to Destiny.  Plus there's the focus Halo provides.  I mean, I'll get matched now and then in Halo against some players who are really good at movement/flanking/coming from strange angles/team movement/etc., but mostly the matches are about shooting well and using spatial awareness to create one-on-one engagements.  All very good practice for leaving behind all those loadout, super, ability and kit concerns and instead getting to core gun skill in Destiny.

But what about those loadout, super, ability and kit concerns?  Destiny is more than just a core shooting mechanic, of course.  And that's what makes it something to think about damn near 24/7.  Always something to try, something to strive for, to grind for.  Because sometimes, you get one of these:

So after working up some NLB/sidearm/shadestep skill, I went the other direction and worked on closing out my clash and control grimoire wins on my titan.  Because if I learned one thing getting matched against Texas Prod in Free-for-all one time (with my utter failure apparently broadcast live on his twitch stream), it's the answer to that age-old question: can juggo/matador/eyasluna Titan can work quite well?

Yes, yes it can.

Since that time alone with the game, I've slipped in direct proportion to my reduced playtime.  And what time I do have is low-quality, coming late at night when I ought to rest my medical merry-go-round ridin' ass.  And I feel my slippage turning algorithmic as the Rise of Iron end-game content passes me by, light-level-wise.

But there was a moment, there.  I had it.  Consistency.  We shan't see its like again.