Meanwhile, top-tier players can take their winnings early in the weekend, and then go for the higher challenge of the tougher pool later on, as well. If we fail out in the early days, we can try again Sunday or Monday when the Flawless pool is in place, giving us an easier chance to get at least one Flawless for the weekend. With the Flawless pool held to Sunday, we can play early in the weekend and try to go Flawless once or even more. The tougher pool removed the incentive to keep playing and to help your friends once you'd succeeded. That was the main loss last week: GameSpot's David Ahmadi, a regular on my Trials team, went Flawless early, and thus playing with him meant I would be stuck in the Flawless pool with him-so we didn't end up playing together. The benefit is that the larger player pool persists throughout the weekend, and if you manage to Flawless early, you still have the incentive to keep playing and to keep earning drops, or even better, to jump onto a different team and help out your friends. So this weekend, Bungie is holding back the Flawless pool until Sunday, which hopefully gives all the upshots and fewer of the drawbacks. All the tweaks to the Trials of Osiris have made the mode a lot of fun to hit up every weekend. Effectively, the Flawless pool caused some players to quit after one Flawless and abandon the mode for the rest of the weekend, which undercuts the entire goal of getting more players into the mode to begin with. It cut the incentive to keep playing Trials to continue earning rewards because the likelihood of getting rolled over went way up. I didn't play much last weekend and thus didn't get a chance to Flawless, so I didn't experience this myself, but the anecdotes I heard from others at GameSpot was that the Flawless pool was too much of a pain.
So if you're a mid-tier PvP player most of the time, you were suddenly a bottom-tier player in the Flawless pool.
Suddenly, you went from a large pool of players with varying skill levels to a much tighter one where the best players congregate. If you went Flawless once, especially early on, you were placed in the Flawless pool, which made it tough to keep playing in the mode. The trouble was that mid-tier players kind of got the worst of both worlds with last week's system. Making at least one Flawless more attainable for more players is very healthy for Trials, in my opinion-making that goal and the rewards that come with it more attainable gets more people excited to play, and the more people who play Trials, the more fun it is. That continues to raise the floor so that more players are more likely to go Flawless over the course of a weekend as better players take themselves out of the rotation. Last week, as more players went Flawless, they were shunted off into their own player pool, which basically meant that the pool of non-Flawless players got easier to deal with over time. This weekend tweaks that a bit, but the thinking is the same.Īnd it's a line of thinking I like. During that weekend, we saw a cascade effect where the developer attempted to remedy some Trials issues by shunting off players who achieved a Flawless run into their own player pool-once you hit Flawless for the weekend, you were placed in a pool composed of only other Flawless players. First, you should be playing Trials, even if you were a little put off by Bungie's changes last week. This week's Trials of Osiris makes a few significant alterations to the mode. The Shattered Realm has quickly become one of my favorite things in Destiny 2 right now, and the last couple iterations of the mode have done some really cool things with story. Trials isn't the only thing going on this week, though. Now Playing: Destiny 2 Players NEED To Play Trials of Osiris By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's