Destiny 2’s Trials of Osiris is worse than ever, players say

Destiny 2 and Bungie can’t seem to catch a break with Trials of Osiris. After delivering a major revamp for Bungie’s competitive, reward-based PvP mode with Season of the Lost, the studio has consistently changed things up to find a sweet spot for players. A major change made over the weekend resulted in what players consider the worst Trials of Osiris week ever.

Trials Of Osiris operates on a card-based model. Each weekend, players purchase a Trials card at Saint-14’s Tower. There are various bonus offers. These cards track their wins. They give players special rewards once they have reached certain thresholds. Most players, however, reset their cards regularly in an attempt to go “Flawless,” meaning they win seven games before losing a single one. You can win a lot of prizes and even a trip to Lighthouse.

Bungie created a Flawless pool for its players weeks ago. It was designed so that players who earned Flawless during a week would be separated into special matchmaking pools that only allowed them to play against Flawless. Bungie decided to change the Flawless pool to run only from Sunday morning through Tuesday morning. That way, less experienced players could wait until the best were selected.

The Flawless pool was good in theory but it created strange social pressure. If a friend goes Flawless on Friday, you won’t be able to play with them on Sunday without matching up against the PvP players that already proved their mettle that week, resulting in much harder games. Bungie said that Sunday’s activation was for US players and the handoff in other countries was difficult.

Bungie came up with a plan for this weekend’s event. In the Oct. 28 Bungie blog, the studio revealed that they’d move Trials of Osiris to a win-based matchmaking system for the foreseeable future. Players would primarily match against players with the same number of wins that weekend, regardless of how many times they’d reset their card.

Aztecross (a Destiny PvP YouTuber) explains in this video his frustrations and how he dealt with the change.

Again, it is a theory that works. People who participate in and win most Trials game eventually become bottlenecked, which makes for extremely competitive games. This gives players who’ve barely gotten the chance to play a good shot at Flawless that weekend. This system has its limitations. Every win increases the difficulty of your next game, meaning a bad game that results in resetting your card doesn’t set you back to zero like it should — your next game is still going to be tougher than your last. That means players who are struggling to get a Flawless — getting maybe two wins before resetting after a loss — actually have a far worse time the next time they go for a Flawless.

Bungie hasn’t let Trials rest since Season of the Lost, making sweeping changes after its first, very successful weekend. But each subsequent change has made the mode progressively worse, with the most recent change dealing major damage to player’s interest and confidence levels. Bungie will likely reveal the stats for this weekend’s experiment on Nov. 4, but the calls for reversion are already starting to echo through the Destiny community.