Destiny 2's pinnacle PvP activity, Trials of Osiris, is undergoing yet another metamorphosis this weekend. Bungie's latest blog update revealed that Freelance Trials was well-received and that matchmaking times and game quality were still as high as ever, but Freelance won't be coming back so soon after its debut.
Instead, Bungie plans to continue tinkering with the main Trials of Osiris playlist by removing the Flawless pool. This was the separate matchmaking pool that matched Flawless players (those who win seven games in a row with zero losses) against other Flawless players to keep them from being matched against low-skilled teams.
Bungie explained in yesterday's TWAB that while the Flawless pool improved match quality and let more people go Flawless themselves, it had some negative qualities as well. It made players who were slightly better than average stop playing altogether after going Flawless because they knew every game going forward would be against much better players. This incentivized those players to reset their cards to keep their opponents skill levels more reasonable. There was also the issue of the Flawless pool opening on Sunday afternoons, which really only worked for North American players.
For this weekend, Bungie is removing the Flawless pool in favor of win-based matchmaking. The matchmaker will first try to match based on the number of card wins, and then it will match based on your total number of wins overall for that weekend. This will hopefully ensure Flawless players with hundreds of wins in a single weekend will only match with other Flawless players.
The other hope is that this change will do away with the Flawless pool while still maintaining relatively low matchmaking times. As usual, we’ll have to wait and see what players think after the weekend’s games have concluded. It does feel a bit like Bungie is reinventing the wheel and taking a circuitous route to reinstating skill-based matchmaking, though.
Next week is a return to Iron Banner, which means Trials will be put on the backburner until November 9. On the plus side, you’ll be able to use Telesto in both Trials and Iron Banner once again after a few tweaks removed most of the gun’s game-breaking glitches, but apparently not all of them.