• After players completed the Imbaru Engine puzzle released this Tuesday, Bungie published the name of the next season (Season of the Wish), along with the following teaser art:

• In Season 23, there will be a reworked playlist menu for Crucible, with the following options:

• New node
• Prioritized connection and latency
• Rotates through weekly modes
• Starts with Elimination and Showdown in Season 23
• Trials will replace this node when it's active
• Rift is currently sitting out of the playlists, but may be reintegrated at some point in the future.
• They're also looking at adding more game types into this rotator in the future, along with potentially experimenting with testing rulesets and spawn changes for trials and competitive maps.

• Same as current competitive mode
• Prioritizes rank for matchmaking, but if rank and skill are widely different, it blends the two.
  • Ex: An Adept skill player who is at Platinum rank will be playing with other Platinum-ranked players. But an Adept skill player playing at a Silver rank will match Gold or low-Plat rank games.
• Affects Competitive Division rank
• Random playlist, including Survival (higher weight) and Countdown Rush (lower weight)

• Seems to essentially be replacing the current quickplay node
• Prioritizes connection, latency, and skill for loose skill-based matchmaking
• Rotates through different variations of Control, including normal Control, Checkmate Control, Sparrow Control (more on this below), and Momentum Control.
• Iron Banner replaces this node when active.
• Checkmate Control will be the primary control mode for the first few weeks of Season 23
• All the core rulesets for these modes are the same, just with slightly altered sandboxes.
• Sparrow Control is simply control with sparrows, similar to the bug that was present earlier this season.

• Prioritizes connection and latency
• Rotates through weekly modes
• Consolidates Party and Relentless nodes.

• Free for All
  • Prioritizes connection and latency
• Crucible Labs
• Private Lobby

• After experimenting with Checkmate Control, the positive feedback highlighted a community desire for a refined sandbox in the Crucible. They want to eventually take the lessons learned and apply them back to the base Crucible experience, not just as a Labs mode.
• They're not ready to slap Checkmate on everything yet, but they want to expose the modifier to a larger audience and gather more feedback and data.
• Some additional changes coming to Checkmate in Season 23 are as follows:
  • The ability cooldown penalty has decreased from 50% -> 30%
    • This comes along with other unannounced tuning changes coming next season, and they'll be watching to make further changes as necessary.
  • Crucible labs will include Checkmate 3v3 Clash and Checkmate 3v3 Countdown Rush
  • Trials Labs will include Checkmate Dominion
  • An additional mid-season tuning pass will be made based on feedback

• In Season 23 their first pass at improvements to lobby balancing. Now lobby balancing should operate more closely to a snake draft, where Team A gets one pick, then Team B gets the next two, then Team A gets the next two, etc.
• Fireteams will throw this balance off but the system does its best to correct for this.

• In Season 23, confidence in player skill will be able to be tuned per playlist.
• In the skill system Bungie uses, "confidence" refers to a measurement of how sure the system is in the player's demonstrated skill. The more matches played, the more confident the system becomes.
• Sometimes the system can become extremely confident, after many matches played it "knows" how good a player is. But that doesn't reflect reality, where players might have off days or decide to sometimes play off meta, or outside their normal loadout/class.
• They're planning tweaks starting with the Control playlist, to reduce this confidence rating, and have skill vary more from match to match.
• They hope these changes will allow for a wider range of skill in lobbies, while maintaining match fairness, and that players will feel more comfortable playing how they want without feeling stuck in a particular skill bracket.

• They're still working on general spawn changes that they had initially tested in Season 21. They have new features that should hopefully give more variance and unpredictability in spawns, while also avoiding spawn trapping and peeking issues. These features are still under development though, but expect more follow up soon.
• There will be more subtle tuning changes to spawns on Midtown, Meltdown, and Endless Vale coming soon. These changes will be along the lines of the changes made to Altar of Flam and Cauldron. These won't solve spawn trapping issues, but should work in conjunction with more changes planned for down the line, with the goal of spawning players in a safe and less predictable manner.

• In Season 23, they're tweaking how rank points are adjusted post match, to simplify the formula and put more emphasis on wins and losses. Specifically:
  • They are removing the performance factor in the calculation. Wins and losses are what matters.
  • They are removing inflation protection, so rank point gains will no longer reduce when your rank exceeds your skill. Deflation protection is still enabled however, so if your rank is below you skill level it will accelerate you upward.
• They still expect rank to correlate with skill, but they are now being less heavy handed about how they do it.
• Promotion and Relegation series are also being removed for all divisions except Adept and Ascendant.

• Survival
  • Increased respawn count from 4 to 6
• Countdown Rush
  • Points to win down 6 -> 5
  • Decreased the round time 120s -> 90s (time is refreshed with the second bomb)
  • Due to the round time decrease, heavy ammo spawn time is also lowered 90s -> 60s
  • Respawns and revives are enabled and unlimited
  • If the game goes to 4-4, the final round will have elimination ruleset enabled, which will show up as sudden death.

• Season 23 will have some small changes to Trials rewards, in preparation for larger changes coming alongside The Final Shape (more details to come later)
• They're adding a set of small weekly rewards that trigger depending on how many wins you can get in a row before the card becomes flawed. They will drop once your card becomes flawed, and each reward only drops once a week.
  • 3 wins: trials armor
  • 4 wins: 5 enhancement cores
  • 5 wins: trials weapon
  • 6 wins: 3 enhancement prisms
• This is the first step to making Trials more rewarding to those who can't go flawless consistently.
• As mentioned above, during season 23 they will also run a Trials Labs weekend to test the Checkmate modifier within Trials.

• Rose and Mercurial Overreach will now be focusable for anyone, and any retired competitive rewards will be added as time goes on.
• Your ability to focus is restricted to the higher rank you have achieved so far in a season, with Copper getting 1 focus, Bronze 2, Silver 3, and so on, up to Ascendant getting 7. Untested (anyone who has not completed their placements yet) cannot focus at all.
• You will be able to take advantage of additional focuses even if you rank up in the middle of the week.
• You will have to keep completing your weekly matches in order to focus each week.
• The price of focusing these weapons (outside of the weekly restrictions) will be 3 Crucible engrams and 25,000 glimmer.
• They will monitor and are prepared to adjust the drop rates of materials and engrams in order to make sure that players can reasonably spend their competitive focusing uses.

• Also coming in Season 23, as previously announced, is the Iron Banner Tribute mode, Relic mode revisions, and the Dreaming City crucible map "The Citadel" reprisal.
• Additional updates will be shared in the future, such as increasing ritual activity post-match rewards (more glimmer and cores).
• There's plenty more they want to do.

• The ritual weapon next season will be the first Void Caster Sword, "Chivalric Fire".
• It will come with the perk combo of Repulsor Brace and Destabilizing Rounds.
• It also comes with a new perk being added in Season 23:
  • Attrition Orbs: Dealing sustained damage creates an Orb of Power
• This combines well with the other perk on the weapon, Relentless Strikes.
• See the base skin, as well as every ritual skin of the weapon, below:

• Trials
  • Leaving: The Immortal SMG and Astral Horizon Shotgun
  • New: Incisor Strand Adaptive Trace Rifle (!!!!!!)
  • Returning: Eye of Sol Kinetic Adaptive Sniper Rifle (Cassoid foundry)
• Iron Banner
  • Leaving: Dark Decider Auto Rifle and Gunnora's Axe Slug Shotgun
  • New: Lethal Abundance Strand High Impact Auto Rifle
  • Returning: Riiswalker Kinetic Lightweight Shotgun
• Nightfall
  • Leaving: Buzzard Sidearm and THE SWARM Machine Gun
  • Undercurrent: Arc Wave Frame Breech-Loaded Grenade Launcher)
  • Returning: Uzume RR4 Arc Adaptive Sniper Rifle

• With DST now being active in the US, reset has "moved" an hour earlier for every US timezone.

 

Did we miss anything? Let us known on Twitter or in the #tips channel on our Discord.

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Sources:

• This Week In Destiny - 11/09/2023