As part of a foundational restructuring of the Destiny 2 Crucible experience next season, a new ranked playlist—the Competitive Division—is replacing the old Glory mode to provide a proper, fully-fledged competitive experience, Bungie announced today.
All the details about Competitive Division were unveiled in This Week At Bungie, including its new ladder-based system and the rewards players can expect to earn through grinding the seven new divisions available.
Destiny 2 players will know that the title has been missing a true ranked playlist for many years now. The Glory: Survival playlist has rarely seen updates, and the majority of the rewards for playing the mode were removed when the Pinnacle weapons like Mountaintop were sunset during Beyond Light.
“While the Glory playlist had been home to our core 3v3 skill-based offering for years, it had fallen behind in the rewards department since we sunset the pinnacle weapons and their quests,” community manager Dmg04 explained in the blog. “We knew we had to revisit the reward structure as well as fit the ranking system to more closely reflect player skill. We also wanted to create something that would be familiar to players of other competitive games in multiple genres while adding our own flair.”
That unique flair comes in the form of Competitive Division, the three-vs-three playlist replacing Glory, which will now feature three game modes instead of just Survival. Showdown and Rift will be joining Survival in the ranked mode’s offerings, with the developers hoping that the variety of modes will demand a variety of playstyles. This way, players hoping to climb the ranks and sit atop the rest of the competition will need to prove themselves across more than one style of PvP experience.
Ranks really exist now too, compared to the incremental Glory grind that each season previously had. “Our goal is to provide players with ladders to climb and divisions to achieve, giving a more accurate representation of skill than our current Glory system,” Dmg04 said.
Competitive Division ranks
There are seven divisions in total, with each division then having three subdivisions:
- Copper
- Bronze
- Silver
- Gold
- Platinum
- Adept
- Ascendant
“Players who surpass Gold and begin to chip away at Platinum, Adept, and Ascendant will represent some of the best Crucible players that our community has to offer,” Dmg04 said.
This is an important distinction to make when compared to the Glory playlist of the past since the skill/persistence model that it used would allow even more casual players to aim for the highest echelons of Glory score. This was a side effect of the Pinnacle weapons that the playlist had to chase, with Bungie not wanting to gatekeep the rewards at levels of Glory that the majority of the player base couldn’t otherwise obtain.
Because Competitive Division features a tighter skill-based matchmaking system instead, any rewards available in the mode will at first be focused on weekly participation. Bungie aims to be “very careful” about dishing out loot that’s exclusive to the highest divisions but hasn’t entirely ruled out the concept for when further cosmetic rewards come to the playlist post-Lightfall.
The format for Competitive Division will be very familiar to fans of other shooter titles on the market at the moment. At the start of each season, players will undergo a “placement series” of seven games that will decide which division they start in. For the first season, the highest anyone can place is Gold III, but future seasons will allow a closer placing to your previous division.
From there, your ascension through the ranks will be decided by four major factors:
- The outcome of the match
- The player’s individual performance in a match
- How far above or below the player’s current division is compared to their skill
- How the player’s skill compares to everyone else in the lobby
Leveling up between subdivisions like Gold II to Gold III only requires you to achieve the necessary points, but upgrading your division from the likes of Gold to Platinum will require you to win a “promotion series.”
Unlike other titles, Destiny 2’s competitive playlist is mostly focused on players developing within their appropriate division instead of constantly pushing higher. If a player is truly worthy of competing in the division above their current standing, the promotion series is effectively a trial. In the promotion series, players must win two of the three games played to upgrade to the next division.
A “relegation series” operates on a similar level, where players instead have to win two out of three games played to remain in their current division and not be downgraded. Players who are in Gold or higher will also be subject to rank decay if they don’t play enough matches regularly to retain their spot on the leaderboard.
Competitive Division rewards
But what about rewards? While the first season of Competitive Division won’t include cosmetics that Bungie plans to add later down the line, weekly participation in the playlist still offers one major reward in season 19. This comes in the form of the old Legendary handcannon Rose, which is being reprised next season as an exclusive piece of loot for the ranked mode.
With its return, it now will include random rolls and an updated perk pool. The perk pool in question is hand-crafted with the most “popular consistency perks” that highlight three-vs-three play, with the slot traditionally reserved for an Origin Trait instead featuring randomly rolled grips. For players who missed out on Rose before it was sunset, it also has a unique hybrid frame, with the fire rate of a 140 RPM hand cannon but the mobility of a 150 RPM hand cannon.
Rose will no doubt be a popular excuse for many guardians to hop in and try Competitive Division, with at least one drop guaranteed upon completion of the mode’s introductory quest launching alongside it. Beyond the intro quest, though, all players will have a character-based weekly challenge in Competitive Division that will net them another roll week in and week out.
Your current division in the playlist will additionally grant you a multiplier on all the Crucible reputation you earn across every node in the directory. By completing your placement series and pushing up a few ranks, it’s easy to make your grind for Crucible Engrams, reputation resets, and seasonal weapons much faster. The bonus also stacks with the one given during the scheduled bonus reputation weeks in the Crucible.
Finally, there’s a new title to chase, with Unbroken getting sunset with Glory in tow. Glorious has a variety of triumphs in the seal that can be achieved in the casual Crucible playlists, but to get the title itself, a few key milestones have to be reached in Competitive Division. Most notably, players must achieve the Platinum division in at least one season. Whether or not gilding the title in future seasons requires players to consistently hit a high rank in the mode remains to be seen.
Guardians can dive into the Competitive Division playlist and try out Destiny 2’s newest attempt at a ranked mode when season 19 goes live on Dec. 6.
