Pride pins came in! Hit me up if you want a pin or emblem.
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Tired of scrubby Destiny 2 PvPers using a gun that literally breaks the special ammo economy of PvP complaining that fusions are too strong. Fuck off.
Destiny PvP seems like Mario Kart am I right or
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Basically
My brother has likened our off-meta shenanigans to my maining Mother characters in Smash and leading our social circle to believe that Lucas was OP
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Sometimes I want them to let me re-do character creation
But 99% of bungie pls posts about this are regarding beards
From an article on a website I refuse to link because I hate one of their writers, but this snippet from someone talking about Destinyâs idiotic FOMO model is good.
Having spent the weekend trying to grind out a Demo/Trench Barrel PerfParadox without success, I am going to agree
paradox of trying to please both the raid runners and the toe dippers and everyone in between
no love for the horrible âtoe runners,â providing proof of ransom as a service
I think it is possible to please both parties, I just happen to think that Bungie has managed upon the systems design strategy that alienates both to no tangible benefit.
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Hmm, do you have examples of success? It feels like one of the biggest problems right now, we keep moving closer to monomaniacal âlifestyleâ games but this disturbs a huge chunk of the playerbase, more aware that they arenât unlocking everything than that the game is still twice as big as the one from a decade ago.
Sure!
To elaborate: The ideal path for a player to follow (imo) in your game is from casual â master. You start not knowing anything, a fresh-faced newbie in need of guidance; you end being the one giving guidance and participating in the structures that helped you. Itâs the classic tale of mastery, and the one thing that keeps players active ~in a healthy way~. Other investment strategies come with pretty severe flaws, like massive churn.
Destiny can and does have this path, but itâs aggressively lined with huge potholes like âlight level grindâ and âFOMO designâ and âstat bloatâ and âshit onboardingâ. So most people flame out before they even finish being a casual player, much less before they master the game.
I started as a casual and now I feel like a master. I can explain all of the gameâs systems, I can give perk advice, sherpa raids, and so on. I want to elevate other players and give them that same fulfilling experience. Except Bungie is screaming PLAY PLAY PLAY FOREVER YOU FUCKING WHALES in their faces the whole time, until they turn away and never come back in disgust.
In specific reference to this, I think the problem isnât so much âoh Iâll never be able to unlock everything,â because most people donât unlock everything even in short games. The goal is to fuel that sense of completionism by giving small goals that build up to big ones, and - most importantly - giving players the time and flexibility to reach those goals on their terms instead of through an artificially-induced âgrind stateâ.
Traditional games manage this pretty easily since youâre locked into a contract with the game designer that This-Is-What-The-Game-Is-And-It-Will-Not-Change-Significantly, although that contract has eroded over the years as singleplayer games start becoming GaaS games (ASSCREED). So you can pace out your challenges in a much more deliberate way and not rely on players to organically engross themselves in your game.
I think Monster Hunter World actually does this phenomenally well. Youâre constantly unlocking new things, the game tutorializes all of it, and you get little hits of completed goals - a finished armor set, a cool new weapon - basically every time you come back to port. The only seasonal content comes back every year, so you never truly miss out. And the way the entire game is structured encourages you to develop true mastery over your environment and the monsters you fight.
Destiny hits some of these notes, but thereâs so many offputting issues that dissuade both casual and master players. For casual players:
- You know that every 3 months the content is going to disappear, content you have to grind to get, so why bother trying?
- Other players are so far along in their grind that they can effortlessly annihilate you in PvP (legendary vs rare guns)
- All the best content is tied to having a steady group of people to play with
- Access to efficient grind methods is ironically locked behind a horribly inefficient grind
For master players:
- The grind quickly wears thin once you complete all outstanding challenges in one day, leaving you with nothing else.
- The rewards for repeated content arenât worth it because they have either grown stale from you having everything you want, or stale from no longer being meta-relevant
- Your friends gradually burn out over grind or lack of interesting content to do
- You see content you normally would do cool challenges for relegated to paid cosmetics
- The game has systemically both incentivized and disincentivized you from playing it daily, by making everything a crunch grind but removing all the stuff that would keep you around afterward
MMOs struggle with this problem all the time, and part of their answer - which WORKS - is to make sure everyone can do everything, forever, and just give people the ability to take the game at their pace until they are ready to be a part of the vanguard of âmaster playersâ.
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PvP balance will forever be the anvil around Destinyâs neck
My belief is that a large portion of players does not want to, and will never transition from casual to elder player, and that when we look at single player games (and single/mmo hybrids like Destiny, even), we make a mistake when we assume the game has any power to move more than 20% of the population to an elder player.
At that point, part of the designerâs responsibility is to make sure that every player exits gracefully, at a point where they are satisfied. Dragon Quest XI, which rolls the credits (important for closure!) before asking if the player wants to engage in the elder game, feels like itâs giving excuses to the player to duck out â although, in browsing achievement/trophy completion, it looks like most players who make it to the normal end also begin Act 3, even though more than half fall off from there.
Traditional games manage this pretty easily since youâre locked into a contract with the game designer that This-Is-What-The-Game-Is-And-It-Will-Not-Change-Significantly, although that contract has eroded over the years as singleplayer games start becoming GaaS games (ASSCREED). So you can pace out your challenges in a much more deliberate way and not rely on players to organically engross themselves in your game.
Given what Iâm working on, this is the most interesting part of it to me, because youâre seeing these single-player games need to present as massive timesinks in order to lure a good chunk of players. They bring with them people who donât want to play that long, and some of those players are even aware of it. Most, though, are subject to the indiscriminate more content! hooks built to entice elder players and inflicting damage upon a traditional player base.
Like many things, this is something designers on their own were making slow steady progress in but the frenzied evolutionary struggle of mobile games has weaponized it. Itâs less that itâs antithetical to design patterns that have existed since experience points were first offered on a street corner, and more that nobody was as good at making them serve their function until now.
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I think this is a fair point, although I donât think the ideal is to transition everyone from casual to elder, but to have a pipeline to transition people that is effective and understandable, because you need casuals to convert to offset elders dropping out due to churn.
This to me is Destinyâs main problem: the path from casual to elder is fraught and annoying, and Bungieâs direction to fix it is âwell, just rely on having friendsâ. Not exactly friendly for solo players or people who donât want to trawl a toxic FPS fanbase for the one group that isnât full of racists.
This I definitely agree with, with a caveat: that the player can return to the game, if they wish, and re-engage with it on their terms. Destiny is ~awful~ at this, which is why the churn is so high, I think. They figure having an enticing carrot to dangle in front of people will encourage them to play more and become elder players, when really it tells casual players âeveryone else is so far ahead you may as well just give upâ and they do.
Yeah, in my limited view it looks like theyâre doing the most thinking around reducing barriers to entry (launching a Destiny 2 instead of an expansion pack, the âresetâ concept), but are having trouble reconciling that with its effects on the rest of their imported-MMO design.
Like so many old genres, when you start out with a deviation you often find yourself wandering back to the standard because the design has an encompassing logic of its own. All you managed to do was break stuff!
And if their original mistake and genius was trying to marry âtight skill-based gunplayâ with âMMOâ, well, they opened up a huge new world, are the consequences of an ill-fitting marriage worth it?
Certainly Destiny, by virtue of its differences, was the MMO I put the most time into since Star Wars Galaxies. World of Warcraft went exactly to where MMOs had been heading (always Blizzardâs genius, to take an existing genre and figure out where it should be in 5 years of UX revisions) and so âsolvedâ the loot MUD template, essentially.
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As someone who really dislikes the whole âhere are the end credits 2/3 of the way through the gameâ deal that has spread in recent years, let me just say that this only works when the game doesnât tease any additional story in that âelder gameâ section. I donât know how DQ XI handles it but I recall MGS V having a whole trailer showing all the story threads it had teased and not wrapped up after that first credits roll which kinda killed it as a jumping off point.
Even worse are games that take the âepisodicâ format too far and roll the credits after every stage, as if you were playing a TV show.
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