[quote]P.S. I know Destiny-tracker says the population is great and healthy (Yesterday Crucible Players 789.2K), however match-quality and the prevalence of lag mixed with constantly playing the same people vehemently disputes that. Meanwhile warmind.io puts the population-numbers WAY lower, which seem a lot more in line with the current state of match quality.[/quote] Why do people bring up player population numbers only to then say that they don't trust them unless they fit with their opinion of what's going on?

I brought it up because I'm basically saying the PvP population is dying off, and the match quality reflect that. Whenever I do that, people keep pointing to destiny-tracker going "no, population numbers are high and healthy as -blam!-, you're just wrong!". So then I bring in the counter-argument preemptively, because it's a tired discussion to me. Match-quality has taken a nose-dive. I keep matching the same people over and over. The game gets laggier for every passing month, implying population gets more and more spread out. On top of that warmind.io has vastly different population-numbers that actually corroborate how bad the population actually is. Basically, I'm saying the game plays and feels as if the population is dying. People keep pointing to one source (destinytracker) that says population is healthy AF, and that's their only argument. So I point to another source that directly disputes that claim, using the exact same metric. If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck... Maybe it's a duck??

Match quality can go down for reasons other than the player population going down at the same time. As a matter of fact, in the past, one of the ways matchmaking quality has gone down as the player population stayed the same was because of SBMM or SBMM-like things. Unfortunately people don't really remember those times so well, but even if its not SBMM there are other things it could be as well. As someone that actually plays the game a lot and has been looking at DT since it came out there are pretty discernable points at which the gameplay quality would change as the population on that site went up and down, regardless of what anyone thinks is a healthy player population. This season that just hasn't really been the case. All I'm trying to say is that there are far more logical reasons for why that hasn't been the case than DT lying about what the player population numbers are.

[quote]This season that just hasn't really been the case. All I'm trying to say is that there are far more logical reasons for why that hasn't been the case than DT lying about what the player population numbers are.[/quote] This is my dt-profile: https://destinytracker.com/destiny-2/profile/xbl/LovelyJoey21605/overview I've played this game A LOT. I've gotten the Flawless and Unbroken seals. I've gone from a Destiny 2 PvP-main, to not playing Destiny 2 at all. The only reason I've stopped playing is matchmaking. For me, this is the second time I've quit playing Destiny 2. BOTH of those times have been because poor matchmaking-quality during a period of CBMM in the casual playlists. For me, as a PvP-main that play A LOT of the PvP, the logical explanation is that a lot of people dropped PvP before I dropped PvP. Because A LOT of people don't give a -blam!- about PvP. For me, it IS logical that people dropping the PvP-part of the game, would cause a poor PvP-population. I would think most people are not having a lot of fun when matchmaking is literally making them get ROFL-stomped over and over and over by WAY better players, that they realistically can't do -blam!- all about. For me, that's what brought down the match-quality. Not Stasis, not AR/Shotgun/Fusion/whatever metas, although I'm sure some people hated those. It's getting matches where I can't do ANYTHING but wait in re-spawn, multiple times per session. For me, when match-quality goes down, I don't have fun and I then stop playing. I would argue, that's the same for most people. If the game's not fun, why play it? As for the destinytracker vs. Warmind, I don't really care. Both pull from Bungies API, but display vastly different numbers. One of them seem to correctly reflect how the game plays at the moment, and the other doesn't. Literally nothing I can say will ever convince you of thinking anything other than what you're already dead-set on.