An alpha guardian's opinion on the current state of the community.

I didn't say I have info showing 5-10%, just that we are all assuming the problem exists to a greater extent. At the company I work for, we routinely have bugs and problems with our site (just like any other code-based app/site/whatever), and our engineering team has to prioritize development based on severity, etc. If 1% of our traffic is experiencing an issue, it'll get a much different response than if 90% of our traffic is experiencing it.

I suspect SBMM falls into that same category... yes, there are folks who are having a shit experience, but it's also only affecting [small #]% of users, whereas this other issue is affecting [larger #]% of users, plus we have to balance against developing [new DLC plan] and [upcoming sandbox update] and [next major title update/Destiny 2/whatever it is]. They may be fully aware of and working on the problem, but it's 1 engineer vs. a team of 20 engineers who are working on the next major expansion.

Like I said, your experience may not be that great, but I don't think it's necessarily representative of the whole. Consider this: the last time we heard anything about Destiny's playerbase, it was something like 25 million players.

25 million / 2 platforms = 12.5 million per platform (assuming even distribution), or something like a 10/15 split (assuming PS exclusives or other things have drawn players to one platform at a higher rate than the other).

12.5 million / [30+ PvE activities + ~10 Crucible playlists] = 312,500 players in each possible in-game activity (give or take, assuming it's evenly distributed across all activities).

312,500 players / 24 hours = 13,021 players online at any given hour of the day (assuming each hour is equally busy, and that 100% of the 25 million total players are actually playing each day)

13,021 players / 1000 matches = 130 players available to matchmake into a given match (assuming even distribution again).

Of those 130 players, assuming the distribution is similar to the population, maybe 60% of them are in the US, 30% are in Europe, and 10% are elsewhere.

Of the 60% who are in the US (78 is 60% of 130), some have terrible connections, some are brand new players who don't know what they're doing, some are streaming, some are idling AFK for the entire match just to grind rep/drops/Grimoire/whatever, and so on.

Now, I'm not saying the #s above are all accurate and quoted directly from Bungie. But what I'm doing is trying to illustrate a point that [you playing at odd hours] + [you playing a less popular playlist] + [you not having the ideal network setup] + [you making poor strategic/etc. choices during a match] + [other players not having the ideal network setup] + [other players making poor strategic/etc. choices during a match] + [Bungie's matchmaking servers having issues] + [literally hundreds of other variables] = your experience in the Crucible. SBMM affects some, but nowhere near all of the potential variables at play. In my example above, the 78 players in the last step is where SBMM comes in, and that's assuming everything else is ideal.

Let me be clear, though: none of this is meant to diminish your experience or make you feel stupid. I just think that there's a lot of "the Crucible is shit" "yeah, what he said" "yeah, what he said" "yeah, what he said" going on here. Probably 25% of the people venting on DTG are actually having any real issues with this stuff. The other 3/4 have poor network config, or aren't great players, or have terrible teammates, or whatever, and are looking for something to blame it all on, which happens to coincide nicely with the whole SBMM situation.

/r/DestinyTheGame Thread Parent