Serious question: is anyone having worse experience with the Crucible netcode in D2 than D1? Our Internet plan got “upgraded” since the last time I played D1 PvP so I can’t tell if our Internet actually got worse or if D2 is to blame. My shots often only register a second or two after dying in a trade.
the narration of this is brilliant
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i get a lot of dying around a corner i clearly passed a second ago, moreso than the first game
it’s definitely bad netcode either way so that’s going to be a hard thing to diagnose
there’s a destiny 2 youtube person with the username “Cool Guy”
are any of the ps4 crew going to be playing on pc? are any of the pc folks who haven’t played one of these before interested in putting a fair bit of time into the postgame? weighing up if i can be bothered having a break and picking up the pc version in a month and while the campaign is dramatically improved this would be even more miserable than the first game solo when that’s over
I hate how a third of every Destiny opinion video is preemptively apologizing for having an opinion
Slayerage has a really good post about his own issues with Destiny 2:
Titan skating exotic would be really welcome, and actually would play into their Year 2+ concept of exotics as alternate play style enablers as opposed to enhanced workhorses (Red Death, Bad Juju) or amazingly broken weapons (Pocket Infinity, Ghorn)
I’mma say it again: as a dude who didn’t get a gjallahorn for a year and a half, fuck anyone who thinks these games need more randomization and grind, really. I am perfectly happy leaving most of that shit behind.
Also lol at the part where he thinks Skyrim is a good RPG that should be emulated in the design of anything at all.
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I think it’s pretty fucking weird that I’m seemingly the only person in the clan who seems to have issues with this game’s system changes and I’m the crazy one with 960 hours played on Destiny 1 and the shirt to prove it.
I feel like I’m living in bizarro land.
It could just be that I am really happy that I have pretty much most of what I need at a 100 hours. I out in twice that in D1, and still didn’t get most of the best gear because everything was RNG and grind. Ain’t nobody want to play a game for 900 hours, at least not in my house.
I don’t get it. Every purple item in the game is RNG except for the Vanguard primary that’s given to you, MIDA Mini-Tool, Sturm, and the faction rally weapons (maybe IB too?). Every other purple in the game is given randomly from tokens or engrams. If you think D2 is better in this respect, then your problem was never with RNG itself.
You just aren’t feeling like you’re missing out on anything because big chase weapons like Ghorn have been designed out of the game entirely in favour of “do something different” exotics which are very hit-or-miss, and because 95% of the fixed rolls on weapons are mediocre. If nothing is good, everything is viable, and that means no matter how generous the loot system, nothing has any value. There are blues with better rolls than legendaries for fuck’s sake.
If loot has no value, why does your game have a loot system? Dump it and embrace being a Halo clone if you’re gonna do that.
I mean I have gripes too but I’m still playing, so I guess on that level it’s working.
I have come to really hate the mod system, though. I’ve dumped like 100k glimmer trying to get a legendary kinetic counterbalance just so I can switch my wizard robe to one that doesn’t look as dumb.
yeah i wrote and deleted a reply to that which redundantly repeated a bunch of stuff i already said on this topic lol
i logged only 430 hours but got flawless raider, flawless trials, the crota solo and all that other dumb bullshit done and i absolutely won’t miss the grindier bits of the first game however it might also be worth considering that future expacs could shake things up now they’ve secured that 85% on metacritic for the base game
it’s also worth noting that slayerage is uh
maybe a little… atypical
that one time undying mind was the nightfall he killed it+himself with a rocket for Not Even Kidding 20 hours a day the whole week to get a perfect imago loop
not to say that there isn’t a bunch of stuff i dislike/am legit confused by
all this balance with an emphasis on pvp then that whole side of the game ships so barebones??? my interest in the raid has already dwindled, by the second run i felt overlevelled and overgeared and like the only challenging section wasn’t so much challenging as ‘very buggy’ & now hard mode is delayed another week etc.
just a note that if you’re using a kinetic with ‘precision frame’ (this is most of the pvp/pve meta weapons) cb mods won’t do anything anyway & you’re probably better off with something else
they do a really good job explaining that
i still wanna do the raid with you guys, hopefully soon before everyone has moved on!
tbh i’m totally content with the game as a guy who hops into it once or twice a week, i don’t miss the grind or the random rolls. i do feel the guns and perk choices on them are really lackluster though, and the exotics are incredibly boring. (one thing i do agree with slayerage: would you rather have people saying your game is boring or unbalanced?) bungie is so afraid of “unfairness” that it’s hampering the power-fantasy. i feel like they can let things go a little bit more and still not let the game get away from them in this regard.
but it’s funny how many people are complaining (on reddit) about the lack of the same features they complained about for years? i don’t miss any of this stuff — but i also feel like bungie did their research and realized most people playing their game are people like me, and that’s who they’re making it for. they want people to have a good time. they don’t want elitism or people waving their power-level or gear over people as an “i’m cooler” mark. they’re a bit too parental at times but that’s bungie.
i think the the game we have now is a good base for cooler stuff to come. i have a good time playing it everytime i turn it on, and i don’t ever feel like i have to play it more than i want to.
bring back badjuju tho
also some iron banner with y’all would be cool
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No, D2 is way better about this, per even the post you shared. In D1, per that post, there were over 180,000 possible combos for each gun. Let’s say there were 200 (legendary and such (i am making this number up, admittedly, but that doesn’t matter) guns you could get. Doing the math, that makes there be a 1 in 36 million chance of getting a specific gun. Let’s say there are 3 decent versions of every gun (being way generous here, as there was often one Perfect version, and many of the guns were crap), that puts it at a 1 in 60000 chance of getting a decent gun. This assumes that the whole thing is completely random, of course, but as far as I know Bungie hasn’t disclosed it, but whatever.
Now, let’s say in D2, there are the same 200 guns (yes, I know, by the end fo D1, there were way more than there are in Vanilla D2, but work with me here; I am keeping the number the same to illustrate a point). Now, there is only 1 version of each gun, by default the Perfect version, meaning that there is a 1 in 200 chance of getting any individual gun. The RNG is still there, and there is potential to get screwed by it, but way less potential.
Basically, I am perfectly happy with the “chase” for any weapon being an actual chase, not constantly doing the same ten minute activities, then rolling a 36 million sided die hoping to get lucky.
I will fully grant that the exotics should be…more exotic. Like right now, the best exotic armor perk is either “sprint faster” or “jump longer” or maybe “recharge faster”. These are kinda boring, and I can completely be on board with them making better ones. On the weapon side, shit is even more boring with “you have a radar” and “it’s like gjallahorn but less accurate” as the leaders, and I am really hoping this gets better in the game.
Yeah, the mod system is some really annoying bullshit, and looks like it was an attempt to reach out to the people who loved to grind against the RNG system, but it’s like the worst of both world, in that it is just rolling dice, but also for something that is largely useless aside from making a number go up.
Yeah, they really shipped PvP as a half-finished mess, without many of the modes that were in D1, which seems really silly. My interest in the raid is about the same at this point as it has been in past raids, so we differ on that, but the bugginess of the boss fight is annoying. I am hoping the hard mode delay is to address more than the “going to orbit” trick, because I would still like to be able to optimize the run even on normal.
Yeah, I am perfectly fine with them not designing a game to be played like this.
I will raid with you at any time, rye. I am pretty sure you are levelled enough for it, so we should be good. I bet we can get a crew going for it, no problem.
Also fuck yeah let’s Iron Banner.
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yeah but it’s a much chiller rng. like you can see the six weapons a vendor has and decide you want one and then get packages from them and one sixth of the weapons you get will be that weapon, and you don’t have to worry about whether you got the right roll
for all the talk about bad/boring weapon perks i don’t really feel like the number of “viable” weapons is that much different than it ever was in d1. i also basically don’t understand criticism of the exotic weapon selection? i feel like just a couple are boring and the rest are either hilarious or very very good. i do wish there were a few more fantastic exotic armor options, but that’s a space where i’m just sort of looking forward to seeing what happens in the future - as with whatever their mystery solution is for making getting multiple copies of the same gun rewarding, and as with the significance of seasons (is it impossible that this could mean new weapon rolls?). i don’t think working toward putting together armor/mod sets for different subclasses/game types is that bad, and, god help me, i don’t even know if i mind that prestige raid rewards sound like they’re gonna be a bunch of flashy cosmetic stuff
anyway yeah i like destiny loot and i think it’s fun, but i’m really playing this for, like, the kinetic experience of completing raid encounters and finishing the now-excellent nightfalls and the ultimate challenge of keeping sonford from having a breakdown for the first few trials games every week, and all that stuff rules and hasn’t been fucked with, so! it’s funny, there are plenty of things i don’t like, for sure, but really none of them are loot-related, or if they are they’re kind of silly (i wish there was a raid sparrow)
anyway really looking forward to prestige leviathan yeah
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yeah i think it’s worth keeping this in mind, the primary focus of this so far seems to have been addressing all of the complaints with the vanilla destiny launch - the campaign sucks, the approach to narrative is so terse i have no idea why i’m doing anything, i’ve been level 29 for three months and this number absolutely will not go up, no pc port etc.
and they did pretty fuckin’ well there
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Iron Banner is good because I can finally play more than one game of Control every 3 hours of Crucible.
I feel like my argument is being mischaracterized: I’m not arguing for RNG or the return of random rolls, Slayerage is. We share a lot of opinions, but neither of those things are what would make me enjoy the game. The whole thing I’ve been bitching about is that the fallback systems that were there for people who did not want to engage in RNG grinding are now entirely gone.
You never had to care about getting a random roll in D1 because the vendors were there to provide a baseline of usability. Some weapons are iconic because of their vendor rolls. Vendor Hawksaw dominated PvP for a while, Hung Jury was the go-to PvE weapon for the last two years of the game, Palindrome was what people who didn’t want to grind for a specific roll of an Eyasluna put up with and it offered 95% of the performance of that roll.
Most of the weapons in D2 we would have dismantled without an afterthought in D1. The only reason we “care” about them now is because it’s what we’re stuck with and mostly everything is shit. The percentage of legendary weapons in this game that are good is probably exactly the same as the realistic value for what percentage of RNG rolls were good: 9%. But now we’re dealing with a much smaller pool of weapons, leading to limited play style options, and the fallbacks for not having to deal with RNG was taken away.
Why are those options gone? Token turn-ins are clearly an upgrade to faction packages. Why couldn’t other non-RNG game systems go through similar upgrades instead of being removed outright? Is there some game-breaking reason vendors can’t sell weapons anymore? If the hardcore players want some flexibility to their weapon perks, why can’t we have a category of Armsday weapons like in TTK that users can have some perk customization options over? (Slayerage’s suggested changes to the mod system also really interest me as it makes the player to think about what tradeoffs they want to make for their own weapons.)
Does Bungie think casual players are too stupid to handle more than one system at a time? If you’re gonna hand out engrams like candy anyway, won’t the casual players just ignore the other systems and use what they’re given if they’re confused by it?
I want to complete a Nessus armor set but I’ve done everything on Nessus. No way I’m gonna grind Nessus public events for tokens that will give me a 4% chance of getting the armor piece I want. In Destiny 1, I would have to play dailies for 3 or 4 days and then I’d have the marks to buy the damn thing outright. This is why I call you out when you say things that feel completely off to me about RNG: sometimes it feels like we aren’t even playing the same game.
I should probably just give up because we’re arguing ourselves into an endless Vex loop, and I hope I haven’t been coming off as confrontational in these posts. Y’all are cool even if you like the game I don’t like as much as I had hoped. 
At least now I have time to play Gran Turismo.
nah, i actually appreciate your takes on this even if i don’t quite land on either side because my relationship with the game is kind of flighty.
i think you’re making a reasonable argument for an approach to builds that’s more inclusive of varying levels of player commitment – a thing that D1 didn’t get right either, but was probably closer to the mark than just flatly saying “fuck RNG on principle tho” reflects
i don’t think playing the game for x years and not getting a gjallarhorn is the same thing as grinding for a gjallarhorn for x years. the premise is “wouldn’t that be nice” concurrent with you playing because you want to play regardless. i don’t really think it’s good or bad that i got some things and didn’t get other things; there were enough things in general for the result to be that i got to put together fun builds with what i happened to get, which is kind of the point.
the rarity isn’t supposed to just be a means of gatekeeping the less obsessive, it’s supposed to actually maintain some sense of scarcity because not everybody having a thing is part of the sense of ownership over the things you do have. destiny already had a huge problem with: a.) player/playstyle individuation/expression, b.) presenting material challenging enough to inspire meaningful application of specialization; this is probably not the area it needed smoothed out beyond recognition
i basically agree: why even fuss with loot as a pretense, then? why would you want the illusion of scarcity in the form not getting the thing you want maybe one or two times but almost definitely getting it the third time because everybody’s going to have everything soon enough? it’s arguably less respectful of your time to delay the inevitable than it is to legitimately threaten to never give you the thing you want. that the potential of getting some mythical exact thing was technically still there (even if prohibitively so) allowed for vastly more possibility space without changing the fact that it’s destiny so 99% of everything was Perfectly Fine to use in 99% of situations anyway. even having played D1 for whatever hideous amount of time i don’t recall active pursuit of a specific Perfect Roll on gear attributes because why would you even care unless you were in the top .01% of dead seriousness about pvp or raid optimization?
the only way this affects you is if you entirely buy into the meta with everything that entails but also entirely resent being complicit in its feedback loop – at which point . . . idgi i guess. quit one or the other. or both.
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We’re cool, Sak, no worries. I like talking about this, and why I am enjoying D2. I mean, I am already at about half as many hours in D2 as I was in D1 for all three years, so something in this one is working for me. Maybe I am just the dreaded Casual this is made for (though shit, if 120 hours of a game is casual though, fuck gaming as a hobby).
[quote=“Sakurina, post:439, topic:4975”]
I feel like my argument is being mischaracterized: I’m not arguing for RNG or the return of random rolls, Slayerage is. We share a lot of opinions, but neither of those things are what would make me enjoy the game. [/quote]
That’s fair; I was mostly arguing against Slayerage, not you. The fallback options are there, but oddly they are just a sped up grind with more rewards for doing it, which feels better to me, but I could be alone in that.
Yeah, tell that to my Gjallahorn problem. I actually got one, about a week before they gave them to everyone. And remember how much easier that weapon alone made doing the original raid and subsequent ones (to the point where other clans (not ours, because we are a decent group of people (PMODS 4 lyfe)) were not letting people even in on the raid unless they had one). This is why people compliaing about them giving out MIDA to everyone pissed me off; if they are going to put a high-desirability weapon into the game, making them something everyone gets is a good call.
I mean, I did actively try to get Gjallahorn for several months, when we would all do the raid on a weekly basis and such, and it never happened. It was endlessly frustrating, so I am not going to mourn the loss of that frustration.
Yes, this is still RNG, but 4% odds are still way better than the odds in D1 for drops. The vendor change is that they sell non-legendary items now, which I kinda am with you in not totally liking, and I feel like they might change in a later version. In the end, this is all still just a reconfigured grind, but I feel like this grind fucks me over less and demands less time, so I am somewhat more happy with it.
This is one of the things Bungie has failed to nail with the exotics in both games. They either make them way too useful (Gjallahorn, Thorn pre-nerf, probably some others I can’t think of) or not significant improvements over legendary versions (most of the exotics in D2, but also some of the legendary vs. exotics in 1). Part of this is that they didn’t really have a clear delineation between what made something a legendary or an exotic. For armor, legendary is just the top tier of regular stuff, so it doesn’t have any particular perks, but it is modifiable and such. For weapons, who even knows? Like some things that you would think would be exotic (cluster bombs, for example) show up on legendary gear, while other legendary gear is just like the best version of a basic auto rifle or some shit.
This kinda ties into the exotic/legendary problem for me, in that I didn’t (and don’t really) give a shit about the meta, but stuff like g-horn was so useful that not having it felt like missing out on a part of the game. And in a way, I think it is part of what led to me moving away from D1. That frustration and having no control over it was…not good.
Part of me wonders if the reason the exotic problem exists is that exotics are part of the RNG. If only legendaries were RNG, and exotics were all relegated to “do a quest to get this”, the would potentially be way less of a balance issue, because you could just count on everyone getting one if they wanted it. They started to do this in 2, but didn’t go all the way with it, which led to them making a lot of the RNG exotics…not so great, and led to people complaing about MIDA being everywhere. BUt if they implemented this, they could then actually make the exotics more powerful, leading to the availability of specialization as an option. Keep legendaries as RNG, with small perks and such, and make exotics separate from the grind like they started to do but then…didn’t for some reason.
That something might also be called “unemployment” as well, though that is coming to an end soon.
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