Last week, Trials of Osiris returned to Destiny 2 for the first time in Season of the Lost and with a lot of changes.
The changes to the mode, which including adding matchmaking and allowing solo players, eliminating the need to reset cards, and more made for the most played weekend of Trials in a long time.
Here are some stats from the first weekend of Trials during Season of the Lost:
- 750k players played Trials – more than we have seen since the early days of Destiny 2. Not only that, 120k of those were first-time-ever players, and another 470k hadn’t played recently.
- 237k players went flawless, with 105K players going flawless for the first time ever!
Historical:
- An average of 30% of active players played Trials each day this weekend, topping out at over 32% on Saturday. No day prior had ever gone above 21%.
- Over 2.8M hours of Trials were played this weekend, eclipsing the highest prior single week total by a whopping 600K hours! Here is a look at a graph showing the historical data of player count over time to give you an idea of just how impactful this past weekend was.
As detailed in the TWAB, Bungie is introducing some more changes to Trials beginning tomorrow and then again next week.
Upcoming Changes
Tomorrow, there will be a few changes going live for the second week of Trials of Osiris.
We aren’t satisfied with the matchmaking experience for players after seven wins. That area of matchmaking has a significantly higher rate of 5-0 games than we would like, so we are enabling a ‘flawless matchmaking’ pool. However, we want to make sure that there are enough flawless players to maintain good matchmaking times – so we are waiting until Friday afternoon to turn this on, and we will be watching player reactions and matchmaking analytics all weekend to make sure it is behaving properly.
We are also not happy with the experience of players who have a bad streak of getting repeatedly thrashed 5-0, so we are enabling some matchmaking help if someone runs into several blowout matches. This temporary help mechanic clears up once they start winning again, so don’t think someone will cheese a flawless by tanking for a few games and then have a weekend of smooth sailing.
Lastly, we are enabling the quitter penalties that we use on the Glory playlists – giving you a 30-minute timeout if you quit out of too many games. We are going to be watching this, and have some harsher plans if players continue to abandon their fireteams.
Next week, in addition to our first Trials Labs (spoiler alert: It’s Capture Zone Trials!), we will be disabling the Special ammo replenishment on revive – you still get special ammo if you kill someone, or when you start the next round. We are also disabling the matchmaking counter on the Trials of Osiris lobby, so you won’t be able to tell how many players have joined but will still be told when they join. We also fixed an issue preventing you from being able to Masterwork weapons from Saint-14’s rank rewards.
Patriot’s Position: Count me among the first time Flawless last week, duo-queuing with Monk. Actually got there without needing the Mercy and had an 11 game win streak before losing for the first time. Previously, my high wins on a card was five, and that was like one or two times.
Trials used to frustrate me so much because the player pool was so limited, and was full of paid recoveries and carries and I’m a primarily PvE player. My biggest gripe with the playlist had been that you could spend hours in it and get the 3-win bounty done, maybe get 3 wins, and possibly get enough tokens to grab one engram. Hours spent for maybe three of the same item. Wasn’t fun or worth it.
With these changes, I was able to get the entire armor set on my Hunter, plus a couple on my Warlock (who didn’t even play), and a lot of the weapons including a few adepts and a Ascendant Shards and Prisms. Making the activity rewarding will bring more folks into the playlist and keep folks playing as they farm for materials or engrams or whatever.
So I went from someone who didn’t like Trials, to now I like it a lot and will continue to so long as it remains rewarding. It’s a fun now, and if you didn’t try it last week I definitely recommend hopping in and trying it out this weekend.
Vortainment 