Bungie unveils grand plan to "save" Destiny 2's Trials of Osiris – but will it work?

During the first week of Season of the Worthy the much loved competitive mode from the original Destiny, Trials of Osiris, returned to much fanfare.

The entire community was hyped up to team up with their friends and then make a run at achieving Flawless to access the elusive Lighthouse.

After the first weekend of Trials it quickly became apparent that the structure of rewards within the mode made it extremely unforgiving to both newer players and players within a lower skill bracket.

By the end of the second weekend the total number of unique players competing within Trials of Osiris had dropped over 40k from 380k the first week to 340k the second week.

From here, the mode began to quickly hemorrhage players as they become fed up with being beaten relentlessly by higher skill opponents and obtaining absolutely no rewards even when hours were poured into the mode.

At the present time, Trials of Osiris has lost almost half of its starting playerbase within only a month and a half.

Players held out hope that Bungie were watching and had some changes in the pipeline. It seems that with the newest ‘This Week at Bungie’ blog post our prayers have been answered.

Here is the list of changes Bungie plans to make both in this Season and in the Seasons to come:

• Problem: Token Rewards incentivizes players to farm to three wins and reset their card.
• Solution: In Season 11 we’re planning on creating token payout milestones at 3/5/7 wins that give successively larger chunks of tokens. Bonus Tokens Passage should increase these payouts, and on a flawless run it will generate a significant token payout.
• Problem: Trials is unrewarding for players stuck at 1-2 wins.
• Solution: Create a weekly bounty that encourages participation each weekend and does not require match wins. When redeemed, the bounty will reward the same item that comes from the three-win passage unlocking the engram for purchase that week.
• Problem: Trials feels unrewarding compared to other endgame activities.
• Solution: Inject more chances to earn Masterworking materials from Trials. Masterworking/infusion materials will come from 3/5/7 win payouts in Season 11. We’re also looking into possibly adding a new material-focused farming card in Season 12.

These are all extremely welcome changes that could go a long way to drawing players back in for another shoot at some exclusive Trials loot.

The biggest change here is the addition of a weekly bounty that will grant players a work-around to achieve the 3-win reward without actually having to win any games.

As stated earlier, it can be very discouraging for a Fireteam to play Trials for half a day only to achieve 0-2 wins on their card and leave without having obtained any kind of rewards.

The Fireteam may have been rewarded with some tokens for those handful of wins but unless the 3-win engram has been obtained they cannot actually purchase anything with these tokens.

Those of you who played the original Trials of Osiris would be familiar with the Adept variations of weapons as these weapons were given out upon achieving a Flawless run through.

Adept weapons were special variations of the normal Trials weapons that were almost the exact same except for a special Intrinsic perk named Last Resort. This perk increased the weapon’s Handling and Reload Speed stats when the weidler was the last member of their Fireteam alive.

These Adept weapons gave players a very good reason to achieve Flawless each week as since the Last Resort perk was Intrinsic it was a straight upgrade over the regular weapons.

Bungie has stated that the idea behind these special weapons could make a return to Trials of Osiris in a future season.

Here’s what Bungie Community Manager Chris ‘Cozmo’ Shannon had to say on the matter: “For example, you may be asking “What about Adept weapons?” We’re currently investigating a new form of Flawless aware weapons for a future Season.”

“They might not have the same name, but these weapons would have some differences in order to set them apart,” he continued.

“Right now we are currently looking at giving these weapons the ability to replaces the weapon mod slot with an adept mod slot (name may change) that can accept custom-built mods in addition to the normal list of weapon mods.”

All these changes, along with the possible introduction of Adept style weapons, could very well go a long way to bringing players back to Trials of Osiris.

The only problem is that all of these changes won't be coming until the following Season 11 and some won't even be coming until beyond that. Will Trials of Osiris be dead in the water by then?