i got brown noted by the destiny loading screen when i had e coli

I mean, it’s been out for a month and I’m still playing it as are a lot of folks in the SB clan, so I dunno what to tell you. This is way more engagement than a lot of games get from me, so maybe I am weird. Their solution to the RPG problem might not be perfect this time, but I was never playing it for the RPG so it isn’t really bugging me.

The thing that originally sold me on a PS4 and Destiny was Persona saying on old SB that Bungie had made a Western take on Phantasy Star Online. I honestly don’t think I would have given the game any attention otherwise. So yeah, don’t be shocked if I’m disappointed that it’s not enough like PSO2 because that’s literally what I signed up for.

(I was honestly expecting Bungie to go F2P with Destiny by now, because I think they could probably just make Three of Coins a 3/7/30 day consumable item sold for real money and get away with it. Or at least, they could have with D1 exotics because those were actually kinda exciting.)

Destiny does have some things it could learn from PSO2 (aside from the loot system, which we’ve debated to death). PSO gets new stuff at a much slower pace than what we’ve become accustomed to with Destiny, and they’ve balanced that out with a slew of alternative modes through which you can play existing areas that open up every 10-15 levels as you approach level cap (which was 65 when I stopped playing around the time Destiny came out).

I don’t know how ambitious Bungie’s release schedule for D2 expansions is going to be, but I’d rather they take the time and get that kind of stuff in the game sooner rather than later so we at least have something in there to avoid The Great Destiny Content Droughts of 2016 and 2017.

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Avoiding the content droughts seems to be exactly what the casual players DON’T want. I suspect that when the expansion comes out you’re going to hear a lot of them complaining that they have to play the game again

I realize I am coming off as a huge fanboy for D2, and I am not necessarily as much of one as these posts might indicate, but I find myself in a weird place where my actual problems with the game are basically the exact opposite of what the fan community is complaining about that I feel really weird. The post linked by Sakurina was a good example of this. The problem I feel (and I think Sakurina echoed a bit above) are that RNG is still too much of a part of loot (so like getting a specific armor set can be a total pain, and while they made the process of levelling a lot smoother, they added different problems like this. And so it really is werid to me when people are like “but I want my grind for guns with unique traits back!” and I am like “no, getting rid of that was a good step that they then found a different way to screw up”.

Yes, this kind of stuff would be great, and Bungie did similar things with the Halo 3+ skull system, so I really wonder why they don’t just start implementing Halo skulls in D2. Basically modifiers that you can turn on for individual missions that provide different experiences in play and such. It seems like such a basic thing (since they have done it before) that the game not having it seems SUPER DUPER silly a tthis point.

The problem Bungie has is right now, the casuals are fine, but the hardcore are the ones saying “oh i only played this for a few weeks and now I am done”. Like I am perfectly fine with them taking months and months (hell, I would even be cool with a year) between expansions because then I just pick the game back up and go from there. But the hardcore right now are the ones yelling about there not being enough content/variety/etc, and I worry that that is going to push Bungie to launch expansions earlier than they should. The hardcore Destiny crowd seems to want a Destiny that is their only game to play ever, whereas like I am more than fine playing other games after 140 hours.

Jesus christ this is such a bad faith strawman post that I think replying to it will probably just get me in trouble

So, gr8 b8, congrats

but my take is that I don’t actually care about this (and don’t get why you do either) because you can get all but the most obsessively tuned perks of the game without grinding (and imo it’s more satisfying to set your own build parameters to work within than constantly chasing the meta anyway) so why not accommodate folks who do care especially since granularity of options still ultimately positively affects even the folks who spend less time with the game.

I’m fine with my relationship with d2 atm but it could also be more fine for more people. there’s nowhere to dig your heels in here, really

I have no idea what your problem is but OK sure, guy who tells people they don’t actually enjoy games that they enjoy.

Some people care about how their armor looks and want to collect sets. I don’t particularly care (aside from raid armor, which is still just as much a grind as it ever was), but I can understand why it bugs people that vendors don’t just sell their armor.

i care how my armor looks too that’s why i’d never do anything as gauche as wearing a complete uniform set :bbcool:

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What people mean when they say they want random rolls back isn’t that they want to spend hours and hours grinding the same things over and over in the hopes that the perfect gear drops. What they mean is that eliminating random rolls sounded good on paper, but has turned out to be a disaster because the gear is BORING and in a lot of cases, straight up stupid. I saw a gun the other day whose middle column perks were Extended Mag and Appended Mag. What is the point of this?

The elimination of random rolls was announced MONTHS ago, and nobody complained about it then. The complaints only started when we actually got the game in our hands and saw what that actually meant, which was that every gun is more or less the same now.

Random rolls meant so many guns had a chance to be REALLY COOL. The synergy between many of the perks was exciting, and worth chasing because of how interesting, distinct, and unique using them was. Now, not only is the possibility of being excited for a gun drop gone, but so are most of those exciting perks. Rangefinder is gone, Icarus is gone, Headseeker is gone, Luck in the Chamber is gone.

Everything interesting is just GONE, and you’re trying to tell me that what I really want, despite everything I’ve said, is GRIND. That I just want to do the same thing over and over in the hopes of getting a shiny, when that’s my EXACT complaint about D2. You’re trying to paint yourself as an enlightened golden-child and my arguments as the puckered-faced grunts of a basement-dwelling nerd, and that’s what makes your argument so divisive

Fair. The only complete armor set I’d want right now is the Lost Pacific one, because it looks like a combo of a cosmonaut and an old time football player, which is pretty great.

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…the raid? pvp? trials? the prestige nightfalls? (which are legit challenging this time)

like the campaign is better than the previous game and all but the raid is still the main event

the rejection of the very idea of playing the endgame because the activities themselves are fun is the thing i guess i take issue with in all of these arguments

i understand datto and slayerage feeling that way - datto ran 13 raids back to back to get the bugged legend of acrius quest uh, half-finished, slayerage has probably finished it while clinically dead at this point, being a Content Creator is definitely not conducive to a healthy relationship with these things

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What I am saying is that there is no way to implement the random rolls that isn’t going to turn into grinding for the rolls, which in turn translates into an in game activity of …doing the same thing over and over again to get that gachapon (or the curent state of getting the materials to play the gachapon (not much different)). The only way to avoid this would be (and I would totally be OK with this) insert a crafting system into the game that allowed you to rework guns you have with different perks available from the gunsmith, using parts you get from stuff, which is like halfway to being what the gunsmith does now (he uses parts but then…for RNG) and could be really neat. The thing I see here though is the MIDA complain happening all over again, in which a certain segment of people will complain because everyone will just use whatever perks the community decides is “the new meta” and that will be that. I don’t personally care about the meta thing, but the same people that are complaining about the random rolls being gone seem like they would (I could be wrong here, sure).

And you are right, a lot of the interesting perks are gone (I was kinda thinking/talking about this in the exotic/legendary thing a couple days ago), and those should come back somehow. But barring some kind of system in which I can pick the ones I want to graft onto what guns I want them on or some such, I don’t see them finding a way to do this that isn’t RNG, and the last thing Destiny needs is more RNG. I really think maybe some kind of actual crafting system is probabyl the best solution to the customization of guns, one that is completely RNG free, but I don’t know that Bungie wants to do that.

Yeah, this is kinda what I don’t get. I still haven’t done all the little adventures, and running the raid with the crew gets more fun the more we get it down, and there is a new version of that coming real soon to get hype about. And yeah, some of the later stuff is challenging as heck (even the regular nightfalls can be) in a really fun way.

Compare the amount of checkboxes and progress bars in D1 and D2. You had 15 daily bounties, ~20 weekly bounties, and 5 monthly bounties (Iron Banner). There were daily and weekly activities you could complete, some of which awarded currency you could use to put together your own builds and armor sets, and others which awarded what we now know as Powerful Gear. All of the kiosks in the game doubled as checklists for all of the collectible items in the game. Weapon and armor perks had to be fully levelled up and you needed to gain experience and pay resources to unlock them. And don’t forget the record books.

In no way am I arguing that this is a healthy way to play the game, but it is the way many of us played.

And that’s the main issue with Destiny 2 for a lot of hardcore players: there is no compulsive behaviour sink in this game, and it is fucking with our sense of reward. I don’t think anyone wants to admit it in those words, but that’s the core issue more than anything specific with loot, exotics, or anything else.

I had to stop playing beatmania IIDX a few years ago because unfortunately it just became too hard to go spend 8 hours coding a day when my wrists were completely dead. In music games, there are two classes of serious player: people who chase score and people who chase clears (because score is tied to timing, whereas clear is tied to whether you can nail the ending, generally). Clear chasing is pretty binary: either you’ve cleared the song or not. Score chasing is a spectrum; because of the tight timing windows, it’s unrealistic to get a maximum score beyond a certain level, and there isn’t really a point to doing it.

So put in more raw terms: clear chasers have one big progress bar (clear progress across all songs in the game) and hundreds of checkboxes to tick off, and score chasers have hundreds of progress bars with the understanding that they will never reach 100% on most of these, but will hone their skill to get that bar as high as possible. I was a clear chaser when I played IIDX because i just found it more satisfying to tick off as many boxes as possible. Now that I think about it, this has bled into my task management at work, where I break things down into as many granular tasks as possible so I can tick off more boxes.

Destiny 2 doesn’t really accommodate either the clear chaser or score chaser mentalities. It has no progress bars aside from levelling to 20 and vendor turn-ins and no checkboxes aside from weekly milestones and challenges. I never felt bored with Destiny 1 aside from the very end of my record book grind because there were checkboxes and progress bars hidden under every corner of the UI. That’s why it feels like there’s “nothing to do”.

I’m not advocating for them to take things into any specific direction, I’m just trying to get down to why this game bugs me so much. If anything, D2 has made me learn more about myself than any other game in the past so there ya go. I would really love to see a Bungie GDC talk on player psychology and how that plays into the design of their games, because I’m sure there had to be some sort of internal discussion about this kind of stuff, and it’s probably really interesting.

Datto and Slayerage have been asking basically since vanilla Destiny for an Actually “Prestigious” Strata of (mostly cosmetic) rewards that would come from activities at a difficulty level that would kick the ass of the highest-tier PvE clans like Math Class and TLH, as well as a “post-light level progression system”.

Not sure about the post-light thing, but I would be down for an aspirational ridiculous difficulty tier that is designed assuming maybe a fraction of a single percent of players will ever complete it just for the entertainment value of watching people trying to complete it on Twitch. Probably makes no financial sense though.

Which is pretty much exactly the idea I laid out in my first post above

The problem with the MIDA right now is that it completely bypasses the (new to D2) excruciatingly long radar cooldown penalty for aiming in the crucible. Nobody’s arguing that it’s too easy to get (at least that I’ve seen), the thing they’re complaining about is that since it’s the only weapon that has that effect, NOT using it puts you at a severe disadvantage in pvp. If you’re not using MIDA you may as well be running around with your ghost out.

The core idea central to this complaint is that since MIDA gives you such an advantage, EVERYONE is using MIDA, and that makes the pvp a flat, single-note, boring experience.

That makes a lot of sense, yeah. A lot of the checkboxes in D1 had the opposite effect on me, as in the books often just had goals in them that made me think “yeah, never gonna complete that” and it was weirdly discouraging. The D2 weekly things I like because I can get them done in a day or two and have fun doing whatever I want in the game. They often reward things I want to do (the raid) and aren’t prohibitively difficult for things that I am not great at but aren’t my main thing (PvP). But I can see how for someone who was really into the long term goals of the books, they would most certainly not meet that goal. SO I can get the disappointment, even if I don’t share that.

No, you still had guns getting random rolls, then combining the random rolls to get what you want. When I said “parts” I didn’t mean “rolls from guns”; I meant the generic gunsmith parts, and you pick the perks from a menu that just has all the possible ones for that gun, turn in X number of parts, get that perk applied to a gun. This gets rid of RNG entirely in a way your post didn’t (at least as I read it).

In which case, just like in D1, wait for the inevitable nerf? I mean, I have had a lot of fun in MP not using MIDA, as well as using it, but what do I know. I mean, I get the complaint, but I feel like there are enough other guns out there that are pretty decent to make it not that big a deal. I mean, Uriel’s Gift is the other “everyone uses it” gun and doesn’t have that perk. But yeah, the way Destiny PvP works, there has almost always been a favored gun or two at any current moment of the game. It’s part of why I stayed out fo D1 PvP a lot, because I often didn’t have that gun. And I have definitely seen complaints about it being too easy to get (which it is really easy to get, but I think that’s a good thing).

i’m mad because i’m bad at iron banner

irn bnnr

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nah

it’s still popular, sure, but uriel’s gift has clearly overtaken it according to the stats and now people have map knowledge and can close the gap more effectively than they could in the first week it’s on the decline, plus legend of acrius is creeping in now we’ve had a few resets and more players have access to the upgraded version

didn’t see much of it at all in last weeks trials? a little more this week because it’s a very Scout Rifle map

someone in the psn thread give me a stern talking to ok

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what I thought you were trolling