In Destiny, they changed matchmaking in the Crucible, causing more lag. The plans were apparently so secret that not even one of the key PvP designers knew about it.
It is quite difficult to see through the patterns of people and names to understand who is actually responsible for what in Destiny. Luke Smith, who was a lead contributor to The Taken King, has stepped back into the background in recent months.
Derek Carol has been the “PvP guy” in recent months; active on Twitter and rather extroverted, he was one of the talkative designers. Carol’s pet project is the Trials of Osiris, where he tweets every Friday about which map was selected and faces criticism. In such a position, he gets a lot of questions and occasionally answers some.
In December, he apparently said on Twitter: Nothing will change with matchmaking. At that time, they had already internally switched to skill-based matchmaking.
Information Gap Among Bungie’s Designers
Now, in the last Weekly Update, there was an announcement from Lars Bakken, a lead designer: We have changed matchmaking. We have been collecting data for months, have progressively expanded the new skill-based matchmaking, and told you nothing so that you wouldn’t feel influenced by it.
Oh, hey, Destiny Twitter. So, about that thing I said about “nothing changing” wrt matchmaking in December: I was wrong, plain and simple.
— Derek (@_mantis_) January 22, 2016
Carol then reached out to the fans and said: “Do you remember when I told you we were changing nothing about matchmaking? I was wrong.” In the background, plans had changed, and Carol had no knowledge of it.
Changes were made behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Now you guys have the official word from Lars in the BWU.
— Derek (@_mantis_) January 22, 2016
Carol adds that while much is kept secret, and they are also closed-lipped, he can rarely tell the WHOLE story (for business reasons), but he doesn’t want to mislead anyone with his statements. He just didn’t know.
Community Manager DeeJ Feels the Fans’ Mockery
The Community Manager DeeJ currently puts up with a lot for revealing so little about the plans. He is actually only there to say, “We are working on it,” as it is said in the heart of the Destiny community on Reddit. The now almost ritualized “Weekly Updates” shine with many words and very little content.
As if the position of a Community Manager wasn’t already hard enough:
DeeJ understands the fans; he knows all of this. Still, it sounds a bit desperate in the Reddit forum when he says: Lars Bakken has now promised to help me keep you updated on the Crucible.
This comes a few weeks after the community was fed false patch notes, because the PvP designers had overlooked double-checking the information they provided to the players. And the misinformation went unnoticed for a long time until the players had the changed weapons and realized: Wait, something is wrong here.
In this climate, an article from Kotaku appeared yesterday, which mentions that the “higher powers” at Bungie often decide on changes at short notice, and it takes a while for everyone on the team to be aware of the current state of affairs and the plan. With that part of the article, they are definitely correct.
