devwild

The mystical space horse was first spotted in Destiny 2 during Season of the Drifter

It was actually first in Year 1 D2 in the Flawless reward space for Trials of the Nine (the same Emissary space you now land in for the final reward of Prophecy, now sans horse). The Drifter scene/comment was a nod to everyone’s confusion about the significance of the horse.

There’s definitely something wonky going on for some players. Skill-based is definitely happening but at the same time I know several high skill players that are having extremely low win rates. It could be something weird going on with outliers in some skill brackets – them often being paired against teams and/or frequently getting paired up with people who haven’t been given a proper skill estimate yet (which would suck for those folks as well since they’d likely get wrecked, then maybe bail, making it worse for everyone else… it’s a snowball effect). 343 has said they are watching and will be tuning matchmaking, so hopefully it gets better.

Sorry, I explain in a reply to another post above. My bad.

See below, Skill based matchmaking. MMR being your matchmaking rank. It’s similar to your rank in the ranked playlist, but in the other playlists it’s just a numeric value and "hidden".

The idea is to always matchmake you against players roughly of your skill level. It makes things easier for casual players and more difficult for skilled players. SBMM is always highly controversial since it benefits half the population and makes things harder/less casual on the other half. Outside of ranked play it also makes it more difficult to feel if you’re actually improving over time. But, it also makes for a lot more close/interesting games. Personally I just don’t like that it means playing with friends of different skill levels is always painful for someone on the team, so I like having at least one playlist that is more free for all.

My point to the poster above was just that it contributes to the game feeling harder over the first few days. I’m only slightly above average at halo, and in fact my gun skill/accuracy is pretty trash. But I went from 2.0KD on the first day, to 1.5KD on the second, to a steady 1.0ish KD since due to now being matched mostly around my level. For better players they’d run into more cheaters or extremely good players who feel as though they might as well be cheating.

It’s not just cheaters, SBMM is currently on to some degree in every playlist, even the traditionally casual ones like Fiesta. So depending on your skill level after a couple days of play you can go from destroying a lobby to sweat fest most games. Consequently, the higher your skill level, the higher the chance you’ll run into cheaters, since their perfect aim will be driving up their MMR.

I enjoyed it, it’s fun. It’s not the anime, but at the same time captures a surprising amount of its feel for an adult live action series. Enough of the casting is great enough to make up for the weaker choices. It’s different from a lot of the same-serious-message content we’ve gotten lately.

I think part of the problem is the hate reviews are symptoms of the past couple years where everything has turned into love it or hate it with zero middle ground, zero room for empathy, and nearly zero ability to enjoy entertainment for what it is. Go look at the shows that have come out in recent months and nearly every one is a split of 5 star and 1 star reviews with few in between. Saying "hey that wasn’t perfect but it’s interesting" isn’t even an option in many people’s minds any more.

But not everyone. Even with the delays they will see an increase in subscribers because the fact is the bulk of the population watches whatever’s available to them when it’s available to them. They lose a chunk to piracy in the short term, but likely still make more money off of direct sales than they would from their licensing deal with Netflix. Or if nothing else keep the Paramount+ brand from dying out completely in some countries that they want to try to remain in for the long haul. That’s the calculation they’re making.

Honestly, they probably fully know they’ll lose sales to piracy this year but are prioritizing getting control back and subscriber counts up. Then next year they’ll work out any dwindling licensing and logistics issues to get it streaming simultaneously in as many regions as they can manage, they just have to run out their current agreements.

It’s been in that situation from the beginning. Most units weren’t going to ship until the second half of next year even before this delay. The design is great, but the timing on this device is… unfortunate.

That said, we already know the same delays impacting this product are likely going to delay the next Switch or similar as well (the OLED Switch was likely supposed to have more upgrades which were cut). The bigger problem may be that since it runs PC games, it suffers from the fact that developers are working a generation ahead of it.

Beyond that, just the huge delay between "release" and when people actually expect to get the unit in their hands is going to mean interests will move on in the interim. When the reviews come out people will go look at the sales page, see that they won’t be able to get one for 9 months, and walk away – forgetting to ever check again.

"Launch" was always stretching it though. They planned on an extremely limited supply for the first run, and only those lucky enough to get through their broken payment system within the first few minutes were going to get one. After battling the system timeouts for an hour, even though I had the product in my cart within a couple seconds of launch, I ended up Q2 (now "after Q2"), along with the vast majority of orders. Most people will be lucky to see a unit by next Christmas, and this isn’t even a high volume product like the Switch or PS5, nor were we competing with bots to buy.

Unfortunately this feels like a lot of past Valve products in that it’s more of an attempt to deliver a concept than a product. Thus why they made the architecture available to anyone – their real goal is to push Steam on Proton as a flexible platform to sell more games, and get developer cooperation with Proton compatibility. I hope I’m wrong and Steam Deck isn’t just another Valve one-off, cause I think the design is great, but I could also easily see them just stopping production at the end of 2022 because sales drop off hard after people get tired of the delays, and a product that’s going to ship well after the generation of games it was designed for.

Yes, it’s the same tactic a lot of companies take these days, in the software industry as well. They push the limit of what people find acceptable because they win either way – If they get away with it (e.g. non-replaceable batteries), even if only for a limited amount of time, they make more money on repairs and obsolescence-based sales. If they get backlash or things get dicey over time, they roll out a fix and rely on their loyalists to praise them for being customer friendly for righting a wrong they never should have done in the first place. Even if it’s not all rainbows and sunshine, they at least get more attention than the next guy.

Apple in particular is an absolute expert in this tactic and the market leader in slowly manipulating reparability and flexibility of devices – and their followers are incredibly loyal which helps a lot. The new Macbook Pro adding back ports is another master-class example – they get praise for bringing back what we used to have and get a new lead on PC manufacturers who had followed them down the rabbit hole of removing SD slots and HDMI ports.

It’s all business, and it’s all calculated.