It happened to me: I was looking for groups in Destiny 2 app to play Trials of Osiris com, I joined one, and then found myself jumping off a cliff for the next few minutes in a tribute to how little fun the competitive PVP loot grind game can be.
Trials of Osiris was praised in the original game for its tense shootouts and powerful rewards. Last spring, Bungie finally added the mode for Destiny 2, but his return was not perfect. In between cheating player, spying on exploits, and unbalanced weaponsTrials of Osiris can be hellish, especially for anyone with only a passing interest in competitive PVP. Tired of carrying a Felwinter’s Lie shotgun in the face, but not being able to return the favor since this mission is no longer in the game? You are not alone! And then some players march from cliffs, in the style of lemmings, to grind their loot as painlessly as possible.
While the best Trials of Osiris equipment can only be obtained by winning seven consecutive matches without a single defeat, Trials of Osiris rewards allow players to seek smaller versions of their coveted loot. A particular reward guarantees you the Trials item of the week simply for completing matches, winning or losing. And since giving up and losing immediately is quicker than trying your best and eventually losing anyway, many prefer quick rather than prolonged death.
That’s how I found myself part of a group performing improvised speedruns on the Mercury Altar of Flame map a week ago. Suspended in the air, the map was perfectly suited for players who were in the mode. The addition of new loot with the start of the Chosen Season, however, provided additional incentive. The guaranteed reward of the week was The Messenger, a wrist rifle that is easy to handle and has an incredible range that also had the possibility of falling with the Desperado perk, which increases its rate of fire after killing someone with a precision hit. The result was that even when I was trying to play for real, I occasionally found teams dying out seconds after the start of the round.
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Last weekend’s reward was Astral Horizon, a super high-impact kinetic shotgun. Although the map, Exodus Blue, is practically landlocked, I still occasionally found teams running to the open side to jump overboard instead of betting on a slow defeat. “Kys [kill yourself] for reward ”, read one of the Fireteams that I joined over the weekend, when I still had 1% to go on my Trials Engram Bounty.
How Shacknews and countless posts on the Destiny subreddit pointed out, all this shows how distorted the mode and the players’ relationship with him has become. There are several reasons for this, but the main one seems to be a skills gap. Players routinely complain about getting a win in a sea of defeats just to end up facing a team of professionals who were already perfect (seven wins without defeat) and have Adept versions of the Trial equipment to prove it. “We don’t have matchmaking, so no casuals are really going to play,” wrote one player in a post that exploded on Reddit over the weekend. “Speaking of matchmaking, why am I playing against people with perfect golden titles in my second win?”
Then there is the problem of how the rest of the Trials of Osiris economy is currently structured. At the end of the original Destiny, players could grow Trial equipment simply by playing games, because they won tokens after each one, winning or losing. These tokens could eventually be exchanged for the equipment that other players obtained more quickly by simply winning several consecutive matches. It was a good solution for Osiris Testing enthusiasts with mediocre or negative KDAs. In the current iteration, however, you only receive victory tokens, and even then, they are distributed sparingly.
Trials of Osiris is what Bungie calls aspirational activity, which means that it is something that players should work on. I have no problem dragging myself through Trials, getting kicked in the ass for months, just to achieve a humble five-game winning streak at the end of the season. But at the moment it doesn’t look like a mountain that I can climb slowly, and it’s certainly not the one I would like. Like everything else in the game, it looks more like a garbage dump and, with so many good things to do in the game these days, it’s no surprise that many players prefer to spend as little time as possible on testing.