PvP to Receive Major Overhaul with the Launch of Destiny 2: New Light

All three parts of Luke Smith's blog series - Director's Cut - are now available on bungie.net, filled with details about the past, present and future of Destiny 2. If you have  time, I certainly recommend checking it out.

For this post, we're going to focus specifically on Smith's comments regarding the future of PvP, which, as he concedes, could really use some restructuring and quaity-of-life improvements.

With New Light, PvP is going to be something everyone gets for free. With that in mind, Bungie is targeting two main goals with this overhaul: First, they want players to have some more agency with respect to “pick a playlist, play a mode.” Second, they want the playlists to drift back to the “everything is a factor of teams of 3” rule that Destiny 1 used to use, and that Destiny 2 mostly uses.

Smith compiled a list of changes to be expected:

• Trials of the 9 remains on indefinite hiatus.
• They've removed the Quickplay and Competitive nodes from the Crucible Director.
• If you’re looking for an experience like Quickplay, they've added Classic Mix (a connection-based playlist, like Quickplay today). Classic Mix includes Control, Clash, and Supremacy.
• Competitive is replaced by 3v3 Survival (which now awards Glory).
• They've also added a Survival Solo Queue playlist that also awards Glory.
• They've added 6v6 Control as its own playlist.
• With the potential influx of new players this Fall, they want to have a playlist that signals to new players 'this is where to start.'
• They feel like 6v6 Control is the right starting place when introducing new friends to Destiny 2 PvP.
• They've added a weekly 6v6 rotator and a weekly 4v4 rotator.
• These rotator playlists are where modes like Clash, Supremacy, Mayhem, Lockdown, and Countdown will appear.
• They've removed some underperforming maps from matchmaking. No word on which maps got cut (I have a few suggestions!)
• They're making some changes to Heavy ammo in Destiny 2: Heavy ammo will be communal in 6v6 playlists (i.e. when a player cracks open the Heavy crate, other players have a window of time to interact with it and get their Heavy ammo). They're also reducing the amount of ammo per brick for certain 6v6 archetypes.
• Matchmaking is being tweaked too, to seperate new players from more experienced Guardians more effectively.

Looking at this list I can tell you a couple changes that make me happy right away:

1. A Survival Solo Queue? Finally a mode that caters to solo players who don't want to fight alongside blueberries vs an organized team. Unless I'm reading that wrong and the queue just throws them into a regular 3v3?
2. Control should have always had its own playlist. Sometimes I'm in the mood for Control, somtimes I'm not. What I'm never in the mood for is Control turning up all the damn time in Quickplay.
3. Communal Heavy ammo is a blessing. Teams shouldn't be fighting amongst themselves over who gets to use their big guns. This change alone has the potential to really mix things up in Crucible.

Beyond that I  hope that the new matchmaking system extends beyond just seperating new and experienced Guardians. I'm constantly seeing teams being broken up  due to uneven matchmaking. Bungie need to do a better job of putting similar K/D ratio players together and ditch whatever ranking system they're using now.

Smith claims they are going to be monitoring the New Light PvP situation carefully, to see how everything shakes out in the wash. Fingers crossed all modes come out in a good place.

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