Community Spotlight: Ascendant Nomad

Protheon: So Nomad I'm excited to do this with you. I thought you'd be a great first edition for this first Community Focus. So right off the bat how would you describe yourself and the content that you provide in Destiny?

AN: Well first off thank you for having me! So the way I have been describing myself for a while now has been “The Crucible Doctor” which is basically my whole stick and my whole reason for being a creator in this community. I basically try to make videos to help players get better at the crucible. I try to focus specifically on the average to… well sort of the average player, not necessarily the high end players although I have coached a few in the past.

I try to explain the fundamentals of PvP and share tips on how to get better in gunfights, game sense, and general tilt management, which I find a lot of people struggle with. My whole area of expertise is surrounding the mental side of it moreso the mechanical side. A lot of people do not speak on the mental side and that is what I try to engineer my content around.

Protheon: Yeah I mean I definitely watched a few of your videos and I have taken some of those tips you gave to heart, and it has helped me! So I would say “Crucible Doctor is a good fitting name for your type of content.

AN: That's great! Something we actually do in our discord server is we have people submit gameplay of their games and I go over them on stream and breakdown what they did well, what they did badly, and what they can improve on. I think now with Trials of Osiris being a thing for the average player now, we are probably going to have our hands full with submissions once we open those back up.

Protheon: Definitely. So how did you get started with content creation? Is this something you always wanted to do? I know one of your earlier videos was back during The Taken King era.

AN: In Taken King I was still in the film industry at the time so I was just making quick little montage edits of things in between projects for my job. So during Taken King I made a gun sync video where basically I took the weapons noises out of the new weapons at the time, and I created a beat with them and I named that video “The Sounds of The Taken King.”

I also had a previous life as a Halo 3 creator where I made machinima using theatre mode and told these short stories and films that I wrote back in High School. But back to Destiny, when Taken King dropped, auto rifles received a huge buff, so one of my first videos was analyzing auto rifles in the Taken King sandbox.

Protheon: That's awesome! You mentioned it earlier with Halo 3, but what other games do you enjoy and what would you say draws you most to Destiny specifically?

AN: So Halo 3 is and was a big one! I also really like Rocket League right now which is obviously not a traditional fps game… its quite the opposite… its car soccer. But I love the competition aspect of it and the self improvement aspect of it. It is such a foriegn game to what I typically play that I love relearning and getting stuck in the grind again. I love the notions of being bad at something and becoming good at it…

Protheon: I have to interrupt you really quick as a fellow Rocket League Player, what rank are you in?

AN: I am currently floating between Platinum 1 and Gold 3? [Nice!] I am still in that phase where I am blaming my teammates for everything. [Laughter]

Other PvP games I play is CS:GO which I play very casually, and dabbled in Apex Legends although BR’s don't really speak to me. Somebody recommended Splitgate which I will try out… but right now I spend most of my spare time playing Halo 3 in The Master Chief Collection in preparation for Halo Infinite.

Protheon: In a little over a year, you have doubled the amount of subscribers you have on YouTube. Would you say that you changed anything about your content within the year? Also, what makes you think people specifically like your content?

AN: The biggest thing I changed over the last year was making more. You see all these big creators out there and how much they upload. Some creators get away with releasing a video maybe once a week or once every 2 weeks.

However in a game like Destiny which is very information driven, it is important to be on the money all the time. The more content you make, the more on the money you could be, which then helps your videos be more relevant, which helps the algorithm decide whether or not its going to boost that video. It is very rare that you can make a video on Youtube in Destiny 2 that is not relevant to the discussions being had at the moment and have that video go viral or get clicks.

As for why people come and watch me, I think my natural inclination of stay level headed, and to stay calm and optimistic. In a space where it is so easy to be negative, I think my channel tries to separate itself from that crowd by giving a more reasoned and impartial perspective on all of Destiny. I think people have watched my videos and thought “Okay well I might not agree with you but I appreciate the effort that you put in.”

Protheon: That is a fair point. I have to ask, out of all the uploads that you have had over the years, is there a specific video that might be your favorite?

AN: I think my favorite video I ever made was with CammyCakes and Pattycakes, about the biggest skill gap in Destiny 2. Which I know is a bit of a meme now, but at the time when I made it the concept of there being a skill gap wasn’t really a thing. But what I love most about that video is moreso the experience that I had with Cammy and Patty.

It really felt like a journey. I tried to reflect that with the way I made that video. It allowed me to develop a rule in Destiny, which I created a video on, that can improve their Destiny gameplay overnight. And that rule ended up being my most viewed video. That rule is called the Two Second Rule.

Protheon: The Two Second Rule! That is a great video. It definitely has improved my PvP game a lot. That is actually the video that I discovered you on. I am happy that your favorite videos were received very well by your community and other Destiny 2 players. That has to be a good feeling.

AN: Yeah! I wasn’t expecting it. I had a feeling that if I put CammyCakes in the title it would do better [Laughter]. But overall I was like “this video needs to be made because I want to make it.” Everytime I have done that, a video has done rather well.

Protheon: So Season of the Lost has been out for a little over 3 weeks now. What are your overall thoughts on it?

AN: I am loving the narrative around Season of the Lost. I am loving the new weapons, the new perks. I love Shattered Realms, the new sort of pinnacle element of the Seasonal Activity. Astral Alignment is bloody good fun and it reminds me of those marathon sessions of running endless Blind Well back in Forsaken. Kill a bunch of stuff with a dope aesthetic in the backdrop. I have nothing negative to say, it has been very intriguing with Savathun and all the narrative developments. Especially in light of what's going to come next in all of this. I am having fun.

Protheon: What are your thoughts on Trials so far? I know you only had maybe a day or two to experiment with it, but what are your first impressions?

AN: My first impressions of it are overwhelmingly positive. I am going to be making a video on this soon. (He did, it's right up there) I think the fact that there are so many people on my discord server and on my socials who I know are not hardcore PvP players saying “I just went flawless.” I think that is the biggest takeaway for Trials for this first week. The community is engaging in it, and they are finding success in it. It's very different from before.

When the rerelease happened obviously there were a lot of people playing because they were curious and of course more people than normal went flawless just by virtue of there being a higher population. The difference between now and then is that people are having fun. Even the people who are self-admitted saying “Oh I am a 0.5 K/D I usually get curb stomped in quickplay” even they are being positive. They might be getting curb stomped but at least they are getting loot, and loot that I never had before.

I think because of that, that sets Trials up to be more self-sustaining than previous iterations. I hope it continues on in this way, and I think the best way to keep the population up is to ideally rotate loot. Because once everyone has all the loot there is no reason to play that activity. The Elimination/Capture the Point hybrid coming in Labs later is going to be really interesting to try out. They nailed the ruleset changes, the matchmaking for solo players has been net positive, and I am curious how that holds up as the population will naturally dive off as the year goes on. But as for this first weekend it has been a revelation. It has been amazing.

Protheon: I played a few rounds last night and overall had a good time. I got curb stomped maybe one or two times, and this is when I was queuing solo. But it was still a lot of fun and I am getting some great loot out of it.

Thank you so much for this interview! If I wanted to learn how to be a better PvP player, or be a patient of the great Crucible Doctor, where should people go to find you?

AN: So I am on YouTube more than anywhere else. You can find me on YouTube here

You can find my streams on twitch.tv/ascendantnomad

And if you really wanted to hear my thoughts on everything you can follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/AscendantNomad