me (2016): buying up all the fusion rifles every week
me, crying at the television (2017) “please, I’ll do anything, just give me a fusion rifle, I haven’t seen one in a month”
you’ve got good rng m8
i still don’t have an antiope-d
i miss voop nation
crucible radio interviewed Jon Weisnewski and i’m copying and pasting this from reddit:
So in this week’s CR Podcast they talk to Mr.W about many of the design and gameplay philosophies that went into D2.
Nuggets:
- Sunshot = Firefly (too bad they had to take it away from Legendaries)
- purposely reduced our access to high powered weapons to make the Crucible and the whole game better (wat)
- moving secondaries to the power slot sucks but makes those moments more “potent”
- focus on combined weapon loadout vs single-weapon-focused loadout
- nerfing of cooldowns supposed to increase potency of the moments when you get to use them
- slowing down TTK helps us decide what we should do at that moment (thanks!)
- wanted to make PvP more exciting to watch on Twitch (I nearly spit out my coffee at this one)
- team shooting doesn’t put stress on us to land shots (lol holy shit at this one)
- Wardcliff coil was supposed to be in D1 but it didn’t have the proper launch platform
- random to fixed rolls: random rolls too difficult to talk about with friends (no… seriously), fixed rolls better for casuals
- players get items quickly and easily on purpose: for casuals and to attract new players to the game, tough shit for people who want to grind
- random rolls too complicated to balance in PvP, goal to make fewer guns but spend more time on them and make them have their own identity/role (valid argument IMO, and I loved random rolls)
- subclass set paths easier for us!!! “advanced players” pair their subclass with Exotics (= “depth”)
- “the depth is still there” (coffee spit-take somehow avoided)
- ricochet rounds greatly help range
- intrinsic weapon perks taken directly from D1 (Lightweight = lightweight, Rapid = spray and play, Precision = counterbalance, Aggressive = high caliber rounds)
- high caliber rounds flinch greatly multiplied if you/your opponent is moving and is also scaled by weapon damage
- every weapon has a degree of hcr (affecting both outgoing and incoming flinch)
I wanna go read the comments now
edit I regret reading the comments now
that was the fastest response to anything i’ve ever seen from them
1 Like
there are a bunch of exotics and abilities in d2 that do feel very powerful: wardcliff is an auto-loading gjallarhorn, merciless, orpheus rigs, celestial nighthawk is better than in the first game, pulse grenades are ridiculous (titans running double pulse just throw their grenades on the raid dogs for the kill and go help someone else), legend of acrius has the og vex mythoclast effect where people run away and leave the game if you get heavy, warlocks can heal fully mid engagement etc.
a little worried all of this stuff is going to get nerfed into blandness after reading that crucible radio post but it is there
deej put more broken stuff in
i feel like all those things happening are guaranteed considering past events.
Next week we find out if the D2 team is siding with me or booji
edit also it is super strange to see the community get bent out of shape because of this XP thing, with people campaigning to go to the FTC because they feel “scammed” out of XP for using either the Pop Tarts promo codes (lol) or fireteam medallions they paid for
I dunno, once you’re past level cap, the only value XP has is bright engrams, but sorta like how buying booster packs aren’t a reliable way to get the singles you need to build a deck in TCGs, bright engrams are an unreliable way of getting the cosmetics you desire. Just save up dust and buy them when they rotate into the shop if you aren’t in a hurry. Besides, if the complaints about the endgame being terrible are honest, why are they complaining about a game they probably shouldn’t be playing anymore? Ugh
It just feels like people found a way to keep bitching about microtransactions and are latching onto this even if I’m pretty sure deep down nobody fucking cares
this controversy is how I found out you could buy Bright Engrams with real money
it’s a bunch of internet dudes discovering a space where capitalism isn’t privileging them in precisely the way they thought they were being privileged, they love that shit
2 Likes
I’m betting somewhere in between, really. Random rolls won’t be back, but they will do something to make the vendor token system not give you so much duplicate shit.
My expectations are pretty low, I just want some part of the loot table to be directly purchasable from vendors; anything more seems unreasonable given the timeframe they had to work with
2 Likes
We are 100% in agreement on that then, yeah. Like I don’t hate the vendor system as much as (I think, iirc) you, but I definitely can see a lot of room for fixing it.
I think the outrage is generally misplaced anger over other shortcomings of the game coming to a head. At a friends right now. Detailed post to come later?
I have to say implementing a rested XP system and not telling anyone subverts its intended shaping of player behavior. If I had to guess they removed it fast because it was a half-forgotten system they once thought they needed but let it sit for a while, and have changed their minds.
I’m very sympathetic to how many decisions they make feel like ‘in theory’ decisions; as simple as it should be, it’s very hard to play your own game enough to reconcile elder player views with your planned structures.
Well like, doesn’t the game have an explicit Well Rested thing that comes up once a week? This controversial thing sat on top of that as an additional modifier that lied to you about the amount of XP you were getting, which is utterly baffling.
I have only played 20-ish hours of Destiny so maybe I’m talking out of my ass
Well Rested claims you will get 3x the experience for your first 3 levels that week. However, if you are only completing easily repeatable activities like patrols or special events, you’ll only be getting somewhere between 55-60% the EXP the game says you are earning on the in-game UI. That throttling factor remains the same whether the Well Rested buff is active or not, so the claim of 3x experience is not false, but you are earning 1.65-1.70x the values that are reported to you in game (when the Well Rested buff is not active), not 3x.
My proposed fixes:
- Do not lie about experience values in the game UI. The Destiny public API reports accurate XP values, so you aren’t fooling anyone.
- Buff rather than de-buff. If you want to reward players for playing activities of a more predictable, less grindable nature, then grant players of those activities a buff, rather than silently debuff those playing more repeatable activities. This was done rather well in D1 with the Vanguard streak buff, which would reward you for staying in the Vanguard playlist for extended periods of time without returning to orbit.
- Base XP should be nerfed to whatever easily repeatable activities are getting. If you booted into the game for the first time this week (when XP throttling was live), went into a destination, and shot a bunch of dudes without explicitly engaging in any kind of activity, you were rewarded full XP. It’s as soon as you complete a patrol or public event that your account is flipped into “easily repeatable activity” mode and then 40% XP gets knocked off from anything you do from that point onwards until you flip back into “Rewarding Activity” mode. Theoretically, if there was a loot cave in D2, you could just sit in front of it all week and get more XP out of it than if you had completed a single public event and then done the same thing. This is stupid, because you are being rewarded for not engaging with the game in the way it was meant to. Nerfing base XP to easily repeatable activity level means you avoid this issue entirely while keeping some control on how quickly players are gaining bright engrams.