I sort of don't understand how they grouse about how much work it is to come up with this new content constantly, then deprecate it immediately and start over again which introduces a myriad of issues.
Bungie seems to be terrible at anything not gameplay mechanics or art / skybox related.
The only reason I waffle about agreeing with this is that balancing for any sort of power creep/depreciated content is a gameplay mechanical issue, specifically working towards systems that jive well with each other without making their respective parts meaningless with new additions.
I'd say the strengths the designers exhibit are a good sense of environmental design (including but not limited to the visual presentation as well as the overall layout of the areas/stages/etc) and the interaction between the player and the tools they use, i.e. guns and class abilities. I feel like they also just maybe lucked into Public Events being more or less fun provided there's even one other person participating in them?
They seem pretty bad at balance, as well as taking some of the worst elements of MMOG play (heavy grinding, reliance on hub areas, power creep, pushing engagement via questionable design choices, etc) and not some of the better elements of said game types (leveled or modified content based on party size, robust non-voice chat options, matchmaking for all multiplayer activities, etc).
Basically, the game is fun and beautiful to play but there are some heavier barriers to entry of certain portions of content that feel more like a chore than a game, and I assume that's not what they're aiming for.
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Ironically I think they stopped wanting to bloat the game with samey activities. A lot of the post Opulence season stuff has been a remix of the Menagerie, and while it's fine for like a week or two gets old very very quick. They're retiring the previous season content partially to help with keeping players in the freshest content and queues, and I assume also because the game becomes horizontally bloated with side missions and alternate versions of the same few challenge modes. The exotic quests are becoming more sensationalized and I don't feel like I need them because my currents guns are really quite good.
They just need more variety in activities, and maybe put them on a yearly timer so they can come back for people who missed them
I sort of don't understand how they grouse about how much work it is to come up with this new content constantly, then deprecate it immediately and start over again which introduces a myriad of issues.
It introduces less issues and requires less work then the alternative where they are making new bespoke content every 3-4 months and then having to deal with that shit never going away and so all choices and mistakes they made are locked in forever.
The basic problem with all the new shit and why no one engages with the new mod system is that Armour 2.0 is a fucking failure. It increased the amount of time and effort and vault space it takes to put together a new armour set when it was supposed to do the opposite. As such no one has the space to carry all this new shit around (that you have to get now or it's gone forever) and also it takes forever to get a set together to actually make a build now and it's just a giant clusterfuck that makes everyone not want to even bother imo.
Lose the strictly this season mod slot; armor going forward just drops with a special mod slot that whatever the current season mods go into.
I'd say lose armor elements, but I know there needs to be an item chase, chasing the right element with the right stats that doesn't look like ass though....
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Sirialisof the Halite Throne.Registered Userregular
edited February 2020
Also Exotics should get a universal season slot, especially when you consider how shit expensive they are to upgrade.
Elemental affinity is also dog shit when getting good stat points distribution is already RNG enough for a lifetime.
The basic problem with all the new shit and why no one engages with the new mod system is that Armour 2.0 is a fucking failure. It increased the amount of time and effort and vault space it takes to put together a new armour set when it was supposed to do the opposite. As such no one has the space to carry all this new shit around (that you have to get now or it's gone forever) and also it takes forever to get a set together to actually make a build now and it's just a giant clusterfuck that makes everyone not want to even bother imo.
Agreed, but the main thing that bothers me about everything you just typed isn't that it's correct....it's that it's predictable along the lines of "How did Bungie not see this coming?"
The only thing I can think of is they thought the resultant seasonal builds would be so powerful as to necessitate the chase.
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Exotics costing 3 shards to masterwork is quite possibly the most baffling part of Armor 2.0 to me
Bungie Person 1: “Hey, why are we making it cost 3 times much to MW an exotic vs a legendary?”
Bungie Person 2: “Because it’s an exotic, they’re special!”
Bungie P1: “.... the stat rolls aren’t any better than the legendaries, and they don’t even have the seasonal mod slo-“
Bungie P2: “Special!!!”
Bungie P1: “but they aren-“
Bungie P2: “Shut up Kevin and get back to making changes to crucible maps that we took out of rotation that no one will notice once they’re back, this is my baby”
For 3 shards, they should get something like:
Universal elemental affinity
Universal seasonal mod slot
A +5 or +10 bonus to all stats instead of the normal +2.
It’s just crazy that it costs so much with how shit the baseline stat rolls are, and Bungie just justified the insane cost with “but lore!”
If only someone, anyone, had ever made a game with loot and builds in it that they then iterated on over the course of years that Bungie could observe and take lessons from.
The basic problem with all the new shit and why no one engages with the new mod system is that Armour 2.0 is a fucking failure. It increased the amount of time and effort and vault space it takes to put together a new armour set when it was supposed to do the opposite. As such no one has the space to carry all this new shit around (that you have to get now or it's gone forever) and also it takes forever to get a set together to actually make a build now and it's just a giant clusterfuck that makes everyone not want to even bother imo.
Agreed, but the main thing that bothers me about everything you just typed isn't that it's correct....it's that it's predictable along the lines of "How did Bungie not see this coming?"
The only thing I can think of is they thought the resultant seasonal builds would be so powerful as to necessitate the chase.
I think it's the same problem Destiny development has faced for the entire time I've been playing the franchise... they're designing one ecosystem that has to support both the people who play "casually" a few hours a week, if that, and the people who play several hours a day, every day.
Back in D1 they had the Glass Needles that would let you reroll an item for a different set of random stats. They were moderately expensive, though nothing like current MW material costs, but for the essentially-inifitely-deep pockets of hardcore players there is no expense too high so of course every one of them had god-roll gear basically instantly. The meta went to shit and Bungie has spent the last, what, like 4 years or something trying to figure out what to do about random rolls without ever having come up with an answer besides, "*shrug* go get loot".
Fast forward to today and the issues with armor are the same basic problem as came up with Glass Needles. Armor has to have variable stats and elemental affinity-locked mods and time-locked seasonal mod slots because if they pare back the randomness, or introduce any way to alleviate the randomness, then the poopsocker contingent who make up a probably statistically significant percentage of the people who actually engage with high-dedication-required content like raids or competitive PvP will 'finish' the gear chase effectively instantly. And it leaves the casual player wearing mismatched, sub-optimal shit and feeling like the chase is worthless because the difference between "random stuff"-tier and "carefully-curated ensemble"-tier is probably hundreds of hours of grind.
Honestly I feel for the Bungie devs. I don't know that it's even possible to bridge the divide they constantly seem to stumble over. If you make it "easy" to get everything, to the extent that someone who plays a few hours a week can do it, then there's nothing for high-engagement players to chase. But if you provide those people with sufficiently elusive stuff to chase to keep them involved then you're basically telling people who aren't willing or able to dedicate that kind of time, "Sorry, none for you".
The basic problem with all the new shit and why no one engages with the new mod system is that Armour 2.0 is a fucking failure. It increased the amount of time and effort and vault space it takes to put together a new armour set when it was supposed to do the opposite. As such no one has the space to carry all this new shit around (that you have to get now or it's gone forever) and also it takes forever to get a set together to actually make a build now and it's just a giant clusterfuck that makes everyone not want to even bother imo.
Agreed, but the main thing that bothers me about everything you just typed isn't that it's correct....it's that it's predictable along the lines of "How did Bungie not see this coming?"
The only thing I can think of is they thought the resultant seasonal builds would be so powerful as to necessitate the chase.
I think it's the same problem Destiny development has faced for the entire time I've been playing the franchise... they're designing one ecosystem that has to support both the people who play "casually" a few hours a week, if that, and the people who play several hours a day, every day.
Back in D1 they had the Glass Needles that would let you reroll an item for a different set of random stats. They were moderately expensive, though nothing like current MW material costs, but for the essentially-inifitely-deep pockets of hardcore players there is no expense too high so of course every one of them had god-roll gear basically instantly. The meta went to shit and Bungie has spent the last, what, like 4 years or something trying to figure out what to do about random rolls without ever having come up with an answer besides, "*shrug* go get loot".
Fast forward to today and the issues with armor are the same basic problem as came up with Glass Needles. Armor has to have variable stats and elemental affinity-locked mods and time-locked seasonal mod slots because if they pare back the randomness, or introduce any way to alleviate the randomness, then the poopsocker contingent who make up a probably statistically significant percentage of the people who actually engage with high-dedication-required content like raids or competitive PvP will 'finish' the gear chase effectively instantly. And it leaves the casual player wearing mismatched, sub-optimal shit and feeling like the chase is worthless because the difference between "random stuff"-tier and "carefully-curated ensemble"-tier is probably hundreds of hours of grind.
Honestly I feel for the Bungie devs. I don't know that it's even possible to bridge the divide they constantly seem to stumble over. If you make it "easy" to get everything, to the extent that someone who plays a few hours a week can do it, then there's nothing for high-engagement players to chase. But if you provide those people with sufficiently elusive stuff to chase to keep them involved then you're basically telling people who aren't willing or able to dedicate that kind of time, "Sorry, none for you".
I tend to agree with the notion that they have a problem making the game for some wildly divergent audiences. And while there are other games that probably have solutions (they aren't the only MMO), they may be one of the few that has the specific kind of scope/complexity that they do (AAA first person shooter MMO is different from WoW - WoW being complex in different ways).
I tried to get a friend back into Destiny with Shadowkeep. Things felt easier to jump into, but he was concerned about being behind. I expressed that he wasn't that far behind. Then I thought about Legendary shards, and the literal thousands I have, and how materials and resources that weren't introduced new in Shadowkeep were a complete non-factor for me, but would be a barrier for him.
That balancing act is tough, and it makes sense they want to keep the grind going for the regular playing and paying Guardian. D2 started in the opposite direction, and we all know how that went. I'm not sure I agree that Armor 2.0 is a failure (even with both Elemental and Stat RNG), but I do think there should be some methodology to re-roll or improve your stats). But a lack of chase (both annual chase or seasonal) almost killed the game, so I'm sympathetic to why they swung so hard in the other direction.
Then again, outside of PVP, there doesn't truly seem to be a meaningful reason to worry about say Recovery 5 versus recovery 6, so I am my own worst enemy by not engaging with Dawn armor just because it's not "perfect" when perfect is essentially unnecessary.
Maybe it's about shutting my own head up so I can enjoy the new stuff, since new stuff is what drives me to play anyway.
But yeah, I'm the weirdo who thinks they should kill our entire collections for D3 because ooof there is just too much stuff to meaningfully manage sometimes.
The elemental system really just cratered any interest in giving a fuck about armors for me. I don't think I've claimed the season pass armors because it is just more shit to have to store and oh it'll be useless in a couple months? Yeah, kthxbye.
Even if they just made it a toggle element for some not irrelevant cost then that'd be like a thousand times better than this current shit.
The second round of season pass armor you claim is handy because it's all 60+ stats. That said, it's all void so uh, if you don't like hand cannons and such....
The more I think about it, the more i think they should just give exotics the ability to change affinities when MW. Doesn’t fuck with the the mod menu, shouldn’t break anything. I would totally grind out 12-15 shards for the ability to get a couple armor pieces to the “right” elements, even with the bad collection stat rolls
There were a few exotic pieces that worked specifically with say hand cannons....but you'd get them in an element that didn't allow for hand cannon mods.
Grr.
Not that it matters, missing most exotics in the new 2.0 flavor anyways.
My problems with the armor system (aside from general complaining about the degree of grind necessary to make three different RNG systems align to give me what I want) are:
* I don't even know what 'good' stats are. I can compare any given piece of armor against what I already have but I *think* the numbers go up when you increase the energy stat, maybe? I don't know what the max total stat value is to compare what I've got to the theoretical goal. I don't know whether the same piece of armor can drop with differently-distributed stats. I don't know how much difference a single point, or five points, or whatever in a stat makes for the associated gameplay values.
* I don't know what elements do what. I know, vaguely, which kinds of mods I like to use and which ones are valuable in which sort of gameplay scenario, but I don't know if any given mod I might want use void/solar/arc. And since I haven't actually unlocked 100% of the mods, I don't think, it's not like I can just look. Plus, even if I have unlocked a given mod I'm not entirely certain how to "look up" the element. I guess they're probably in the collections somewhere? I'm like 95% certain mods that I can't use due to affinity don't show up on gear greyed out or anything.
Sure this is all information I could google relatively easily but the fact that I'm already not very motivated to chase the numbers coupled with having to invest extra effort outside of the game to even figure out what numbers to chase ensured I wasn't going to be bothering.
The basic problem with all the new shit and why no one engages with the new mod system is that Armour 2.0 is a fucking failure. It increased the amount of time and effort and vault space it takes to put together a new armour set when it was supposed to do the opposite. As such no one has the space to carry all this new shit around (that you have to get now or it's gone forever) and also it takes forever to get a set together to actually make a build now and it's just a giant clusterfuck that makes everyone not want to even bother imo.
Agreed, but the main thing that bothers me about everything you just typed isn't that it's correct....it's that it's predictable along the lines of "How did Bungie not see this coming?"
The only thing I can think of is they thought the resultant seasonal builds would be so powerful as to necessitate the chase.
I have never once gotten the impression that Bungie both realised they were making an MMO and had people on board who had played MMOs long enough to see all the obvious pitfalls they keep falling in to.
Fast forward to today and the issues with armor are the same basic problem as came up with Glass Needles. Armor has to have variable stats and elemental affinity-locked mods and time-locked seasonal mod slots because if they pare back the randomness, or introduce any way to alleviate the randomness, then the poopsocker contingent who make up a probably statistically significant percentage of the people who actually engage with high-dedication-required content like raids or competitive PvP will 'finish' the gear chase effectively instantly. And it leaves the casual player wearing mismatched, sub-optimal shit and feeling like the chase is worthless because the difference between "random stuff"-tier and "carefully-curated ensemble"-tier is probably hundreds of hours of grind.
Honestly I feel for the Bungie devs. I don't know that it's even possible to bridge the divide they constantly seem to stumble over. If you make it "easy" to get everything, to the extent that someone who plays a few hours a week can do it, then there's nothing for high-engagement players to chase. But if you provide those people with sufficiently elusive stuff to chase to keep them involved then you're basically telling people who aren't willing or able to dedicate that kind of time, "Sorry, none for you".
The thing is, I don't even think the poopsockers are bothering with this. That's why it's a failure that should've been predictable.
I agree with you in that that might've been their thought process in making it how it is, but then they left vault size the same, etc., and it failed.
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If anything, if it was like D1 they'd be retiring old gear to make us go get new stuff
One of the core problems they are running in to is that they are refusing to embrace a seasonal/expansion style system like most MMOs do. That's more with weapons then armour though, but still it's becoming an issue. It's why they got rid of pinnacle weapons.
At some point you either have power creep or you run out of new loot to make because there's already a better version of almost anything you can come up with. And also there stop being interesting things to chase. Gear resets are good for solving that.
Fast forward to today and the issues with armor are the same basic problem as came up with Glass Needles. Armor has to have variable stats and elemental affinity-locked mods and time-locked seasonal mod slots because if they pare back the randomness, or introduce any way to alleviate the randomness, then the poopsocker contingent who make up a probably statistically significant percentage of the people who actually engage with high-dedication-required content like raids or competitive PvP will 'finish' the gear chase effectively instantly. And it leaves the casual player wearing mismatched, sub-optimal shit and feeling like the chase is worthless because the difference between "random stuff"-tier and "carefully-curated ensemble"-tier is probably hundreds of hours of grind.
Honestly I feel for the Bungie devs. I don't know that it's even possible to bridge the divide they constantly seem to stumble over. If you make it "easy" to get everything, to the extent that someone who plays a few hours a week can do it, then there's nothing for high-engagement players to chase. But if you provide those people with sufficiently elusive stuff to chase to keep them involved then you're basically telling people who aren't willing or able to dedicate that kind of time, "Sorry, none for you".
The thing is, I don't even think the poopsockers are bothering with this. That's why it's a failure that should've been predictable.
I agree with you in that that might've been their thought process in making it how it is, but then they left vault size the same, etc., and it failed.
As a semi-poopsocker, I'm not engaging with it really because it's all just too much. Too much randonmess and gear I can never get again if I clear it out of my limited inventory space.
I don't think the basic system they have designed for armour is actually that bad. The problem is it's too random. They need to much more heavily constrain the randomness so that it's much easier to build a specific set with a specific look for a specific purpose. Especially with the new seasonal system.
Weapons I think have actually gotten pretty good on this front. They are random but not too random given how easy most of them are to farm. Armour has just way too many variables.
Fast forward to today and the issues with armor are the same basic problem as came up with Glass Needles. Armor has to have variable stats and elemental affinity-locked mods and time-locked seasonal mod slots because if they pare back the randomness, or introduce any way to alleviate the randomness, then the poopsocker contingent who make up a probably statistically significant percentage of the people who actually engage with high-dedication-required content like raids or competitive PvP will 'finish' the gear chase effectively instantly. And it leaves the casual player wearing mismatched, sub-optimal shit and feeling like the chase is worthless because the difference between "random stuff"-tier and "carefully-curated ensemble"-tier is probably hundreds of hours of grind.
Honestly I feel for the Bungie devs. I don't know that it's even possible to bridge the divide they constantly seem to stumble over. If you make it "easy" to get everything, to the extent that someone who plays a few hours a week can do it, then there's nothing for high-engagement players to chase. But if you provide those people with sufficiently elusive stuff to chase to keep them involved then you're basically telling people who aren't willing or able to dedicate that kind of time, "Sorry, none for you".
The thing is, I don't even think the poopsockers are bothering with this. That's why it's a failure that should've been predictable.
I agree with you in that that might've been their thought process in making it how it is, but then they left vault size the same, etc., and it failed.
Bungie has never seemed to really internalize the idea that people want to have access to different gear they've collected, not merely access to the fact that they've collected it.
At least, that's the only rationale I've been able to come up with for them continuing to release more armor sets as sets that need to be vaulted if you want to keep them (as opposed to unlockable ornaments) and the fact that the collection still only functions for non-randomly-rolled gear.
Fast forward to today and the issues with armor are the same basic problem as came up with Glass Needles. Armor has to have variable stats and elemental affinity-locked mods and time-locked seasonal mod slots because if they pare back the randomness, or introduce any way to alleviate the randomness, then the poopsocker contingent who make up a probably statistically significant percentage of the people who actually engage with high-dedication-required content like raids or competitive PvP will 'finish' the gear chase effectively instantly. And it leaves the casual player wearing mismatched, sub-optimal shit and feeling like the chase is worthless because the difference between "random stuff"-tier and "carefully-curated ensemble"-tier is probably hundreds of hours of grind.
Honestly I feel for the Bungie devs. I don't know that it's even possible to bridge the divide they constantly seem to stumble over. If you make it "easy" to get everything, to the extent that someone who plays a few hours a week can do it, then there's nothing for high-engagement players to chase. But if you provide those people with sufficiently elusive stuff to chase to keep them involved then you're basically telling people who aren't willing or able to dedicate that kind of time, "Sorry, none for you".
The thing is, I don't even think the poopsockers are bothering with this. That's why it's a failure that should've been predictable.
I agree with you in that that might've been their thought process in making it how it is, but then they left vault size the same, etc., and it failed.
Bungie has never seemed to really internalize the idea that people want to have access to different gear they've collected, not merely access to the fact that they've collected it.
At least, that's the only rationale I've been able to come up with for them continuing to release more armor sets as sets that need to be vaulted if you want to keep them (as opposed to unlockable ornaments) and the fact that the collection still only functions for non-randomly-rolled gear.
My assumption is they always intended to fix that "later" and don't have the manpower to actually assign someone to getting it done with any amount of speed.
My assumption is they just continue to ignore it and never address it that folks will ignore their broken/half-kept promises.
They are certainly ignoring the fact that just added like 30 more items with this season, some with three flavors, that further pack vaults to the brim.
My problems with the armor system (aside from general complaining about the degree of grind necessary to make three different RNG systems align to give me what I want) are:
* I don't even know what 'good' stats are. I can compare any given piece of armor against what I already have but I *think* the numbers go up when you increase the energy stat, maybe?
Good stats depend on your class and your goal. The stats will only go up if you bring the piece of armor to the full 10 Energy. At that point, each stat goes up +2 on that piece of armor.
I don't know what the max total stat value is to compare what I've got to the theoretical goal.
Depends on the piece and where it's coming from. Seems like Raid and IB armor have the possibility to drop with a higher max compared to just random stuff dropped from the world.
I don't know whether the same piece of armor can drop with differently-distributed stats.
They can.
I don't know how much difference a single point, or five points, or whatever in a stat makes for the associated gameplay values.
The stats only affect their respective perk or ability at intervals of 10. A single point won't matter unless that stat is already at, for example, 69. You can hover over the column of stats on your character screen to see what its current bonus is, then swap armor and hover over again to see the difference.
I don't know what elements do what. I know, vaguely, which kinds of mods I like to use and which ones are valuable in which sort of gameplay scenario, but I don't know if any given mod I might want use void/solar/arc. And since I haven't actually unlocked 100% of the mods, I don't think, it's not like I can just look. Plus, even if I have unlocked a given mod I'm not entirely certain how to "look up" the element. I guess they're probably in the collections somewhere? I'm like 95% certain mods that I can't use due to affinity don't show up on gear greyed out or anything.
On your Collections page, there is a Mods section. It's the bottom left I think. I'm pretty sure you can see all the mods and their elements, even the ones you don't have yet.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
Since there's the feature to infuse a higher score armor into a lower score armor, and since you can combine that for glimmer instead of the Upgrade Module-thingies, it feels like it would make sense to allow for a change in element if the armor were the same exact thing, and you'd be charged an Upgrade Module for that function.
The modules aren't impossible to grab a few of but they're not really sprinkled liberally everywhere (I'm thinking of the cube ones).
And then keep the stats randomly generated. It feels like the element should be the changeable feature, using something that isn't really a grinding target (considering they cost planet specific materials, the chances are about a month or so in you'll be sifting through quite a few of those elements, more if you have that season pass, of course).
I mean, they could also introduce some kind of weekly or even monthly cap on [element changing resource] that wasn't the cube-with-nubs, something that couldn't exactly be brute-forced. Something like "every month, every player gets X elemental switches and that's it and they don't carry over". It still might sting the players who drop for months and months a bit, maybe, but at that point the player obviously just isn't engaged.
And making it monthly allows a person 4 whole weeks, average of 28 days to redeem those element changes.
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Sirialisof the Halite Throne.Registered Userregular
It increased the amount of time and effort and vault space it takes to put together a new armour set when it was supposed to do the opposite.
People wanted something like the D1 armor system, and they got it.
Except its twice the different stats and also Elemental affinity.
So instead of 3 different modifiers, its 7.
Though the elemental affinity consolidates some of the "I need arms for every different loader perk and duplicates of at least a few of those for choosing between melee attack speed and regen-ing grenades on melee hits and such," doesn't it?
If anything, if it was like D1 they'd be retiring old gear to make us go get new stuff
One of the core problems they are running in to is that they are refusing to embrace a seasonal/expansion style system like most MMOs do. That's more with weapons then armour though, but still it's becoming an issue. It's why they got rid of pinnacle weapons.
At some point you either have power creep or you run out of new loot to make because there's already a better version of almost anything you can come up with. And also there stop being interesting things to chase. Gear resets are good for solving that.
While I am definitely in the camp that agrees that periodic gear resets/catch up periods (like at the beginning of an Xpack) are really an integral part to any long running MMO style game...you would not believe the unholy hell that was unleashed in D1 when they did what was effectively a hard reset. There are a good amount of people that once they find the three weapons they like want to continue using those three weapons ad infinitum and have no desire to check out anything else.
The community as a whole swings between the two poles of the thought process on resets. And in another example of the above mentioned " super hard if not impossible to please both regular hobbyist/hardcore level players and those that play a couple hours a week" the gear resets are often seen as a punch in the dick to casual players who now feel that their limited time is going to be spent re earning guns comparable to what they had and new power level available exotics.
Still flummoxed as to why there are not more ornaments. Armor 2.0 is 2.0 steps forward, 3.0 steps back.
edit: Hey, does the weekly reset reset win streaks? Got an 8 streak in comp going and was going to take the night off, but if the weekly will cancel that...I'll hop on and see how far I can run the streak.
I've played this season a lot less than the previous (mostly because of time issues), but Savior is going to be the first title I get in D2. I guess they made it way less of a grind? I thought completing the sundial without dying was going to trip me up, but I got lucky in a match made this morning and managed it. I just need to get a run-through on legendary and should be good to go...
Possibly a dumb question, but do I need to do something to unlock Legend difficulty for the Sundial? I have decided I want to get the Season of Dawn Triumph so I can buy that pin for my collection.
I don't think so. You probably have to have base Sundial unlocked but I don't think their is an extra step. Legend really isn't that bad though it do not have any matchmaking.
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The only reason I waffle about agreeing with this is that balancing for any sort of power creep/depreciated content is a gameplay mechanical issue, specifically working towards systems that jive well with each other without making their respective parts meaningless with new additions.
I'd say the strengths the designers exhibit are a good sense of environmental design (including but not limited to the visual presentation as well as the overall layout of the areas/stages/etc) and the interaction between the player and the tools they use, i.e. guns and class abilities. I feel like they also just maybe lucked into Public Events being more or less fun provided there's even one other person participating in them?
They seem pretty bad at balance, as well as taking some of the worst elements of MMOG play (heavy grinding, reliance on hub areas, power creep, pushing engagement via questionable design choices, etc) and not some of the better elements of said game types (leveled or modified content based on party size, robust non-voice chat options, matchmaking for all multiplayer activities, etc).
Basically, the game is fun and beautiful to play but there are some heavier barriers to entry of certain portions of content that feel more like a chore than a game, and I assume that's not what they're aiming for.
They just need more variety in activities, and maybe put them on a yearly timer so they can come back for people who missed them
It introduces less issues and requires less work then the alternative where they are making new bespoke content every 3-4 months and then having to deal with that shit never going away and so all choices and mistakes they made are locked in forever.
I'd say lose armor elements, but I know there needs to be an item chase, chasing the right element with the right stats that doesn't look like ass though....
Elemental affinity is also dog shit when getting good stat points distribution is already RNG enough for a lifetime.
Agreed, but the main thing that bothers me about everything you just typed isn't that it's correct....it's that it's predictable along the lines of "How did Bungie not see this coming?"
The only thing I can think of is they thought the resultant seasonal builds would be so powerful as to necessitate the chase.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Bungie Person 1: “Hey, why are we making it cost 3 times much to MW an exotic vs a legendary?”
Bungie Person 2: “Because it’s an exotic, they’re special!”
Bungie P1: “.... the stat rolls aren’t any better than the legendaries, and they don’t even have the seasonal mod slo-“
Bungie P2: “Special!!!”
Bungie P1: “but they aren-“
Bungie P2: “Shut up Kevin and get back to making changes to crucible maps that we took out of rotation that no one will notice once they’re back, this is my baby”
For 3 shards, they should get something like:
Universal elemental affinity
Universal seasonal mod slot
A +5 or +10 bonus to all stats instead of the normal +2.
It’s just crazy that it costs so much with how shit the baseline stat rolls are, and Bungie just justified the insane cost with “but lore!”
I think it's the same problem Destiny development has faced for the entire time I've been playing the franchise... they're designing one ecosystem that has to support both the people who play "casually" a few hours a week, if that, and the people who play several hours a day, every day.
Back in D1 they had the Glass Needles that would let you reroll an item for a different set of random stats. They were moderately expensive, though nothing like current MW material costs, but for the essentially-inifitely-deep pockets of hardcore players there is no expense too high so of course every one of them had god-roll gear basically instantly. The meta went to shit and Bungie has spent the last, what, like 4 years or something trying to figure out what to do about random rolls without ever having come up with an answer besides, "*shrug* go get loot".
Fast forward to today and the issues with armor are the same basic problem as came up with Glass Needles. Armor has to have variable stats and elemental affinity-locked mods and time-locked seasonal mod slots because if they pare back the randomness, or introduce any way to alleviate the randomness, then the poopsocker contingent who make up a probably statistically significant percentage of the people who actually engage with high-dedication-required content like raids or competitive PvP will 'finish' the gear chase effectively instantly. And it leaves the casual player wearing mismatched, sub-optimal shit and feeling like the chase is worthless because the difference between "random stuff"-tier and "carefully-curated ensemble"-tier is probably hundreds of hours of grind.
Honestly I feel for the Bungie devs. I don't know that it's even possible to bridge the divide they constantly seem to stumble over. If you make it "easy" to get everything, to the extent that someone who plays a few hours a week can do it, then there's nothing for high-engagement players to chase. But if you provide those people with sufficiently elusive stuff to chase to keep them involved then you're basically telling people who aren't willing or able to dedicate that kind of time, "Sorry, none for you".
I tend to agree with the notion that they have a problem making the game for some wildly divergent audiences. And while there are other games that probably have solutions (they aren't the only MMO), they may be one of the few that has the specific kind of scope/complexity that they do (AAA first person shooter MMO is different from WoW - WoW being complex in different ways).
I tried to get a friend back into Destiny with Shadowkeep. Things felt easier to jump into, but he was concerned about being behind. I expressed that he wasn't that far behind. Then I thought about Legendary shards, and the literal thousands I have, and how materials and resources that weren't introduced new in Shadowkeep were a complete non-factor for me, but would be a barrier for him.
That balancing act is tough, and it makes sense they want to keep the grind going for the regular playing and paying Guardian. D2 started in the opposite direction, and we all know how that went. I'm not sure I agree that Armor 2.0 is a failure (even with both Elemental and Stat RNG), but I do think there should be some methodology to re-roll or improve your stats). But a lack of chase (both annual chase or seasonal) almost killed the game, so I'm sympathetic to why they swung so hard in the other direction.
Then again, outside of PVP, there doesn't truly seem to be a meaningful reason to worry about say Recovery 5 versus recovery 6, so I am my own worst enemy by not engaging with Dawn armor just because it's not "perfect" when perfect is essentially unnecessary.
Maybe it's about shutting my own head up so I can enjoy the new stuff, since new stuff is what drives me to play anyway.
But yeah, I'm the weirdo who thinks they should kill our entire collections for D3 because ooof there is just too much stuff to meaningfully manage sometimes.
Even if they just made it a toggle element for some not irrelevant cost then that'd be like a thousand times better than this current shit.
Grr.
Not that it matters, missing most exotics in the new 2.0 flavor anyways.
* I don't even know what 'good' stats are. I can compare any given piece of armor against what I already have but I *think* the numbers go up when you increase the energy stat, maybe? I don't know what the max total stat value is to compare what I've got to the theoretical goal. I don't know whether the same piece of armor can drop with differently-distributed stats. I don't know how much difference a single point, or five points, or whatever in a stat makes for the associated gameplay values.
* I don't know what elements do what. I know, vaguely, which kinds of mods I like to use and which ones are valuable in which sort of gameplay scenario, but I don't know if any given mod I might want use void/solar/arc. And since I haven't actually unlocked 100% of the mods, I don't think, it's not like I can just look. Plus, even if I have unlocked a given mod I'm not entirely certain how to "look up" the element. I guess they're probably in the collections somewhere? I'm like 95% certain mods that I can't use due to affinity don't show up on gear greyed out or anything.
Sure this is all information I could google relatively easily but the fact that I'm already not very motivated to chase the numbers coupled with having to invest extra effort outside of the game to even figure out what numbers to chase ensured I wasn't going to be bothering.
I have never once gotten the impression that Bungie both realised they were making an MMO and had people on board who had played MMOs long enough to see all the obvious pitfalls they keep falling in to.
I agree with you in that that might've been their thought process in making it how it is, but then they left vault size the same, etc., and it failed.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
One of the core problems they are running in to is that they are refusing to embrace a seasonal/expansion style system like most MMOs do. That's more with weapons then armour though, but still it's becoming an issue. It's why they got rid of pinnacle weapons.
At some point you either have power creep or you run out of new loot to make because there's already a better version of almost anything you can come up with. And also there stop being interesting things to chase. Gear resets are good for solving that.
As a semi-poopsocker, I'm not engaging with it really because it's all just too much. Too much randonmess and gear I can never get again if I clear it out of my limited inventory space.
I don't think the basic system they have designed for armour is actually that bad. The problem is it's too random. They need to much more heavily constrain the randomness so that it's much easier to build a specific set with a specific look for a specific purpose. Especially with the new seasonal system.
Weapons I think have actually gotten pretty good on this front. They are random but not too random given how easy most of them are to farm. Armour has just way too many variables.
Bungie has never seemed to really internalize the idea that people want to have access to different gear they've collected, not merely access to the fact that they've collected it.
At least, that's the only rationale I've been able to come up with for them continuing to release more armor sets as sets that need to be vaulted if you want to keep them (as opposed to unlockable ornaments) and the fact that the collection still only functions for non-randomly-rolled gear.
My assumption is they always intended to fix that "later" and don't have the manpower to actually assign someone to getting it done with any amount of speed.
They are certainly ignoring the fact that just added like 30 more items with this season, some with three flavors, that further pack vaults to the brim.
Good stats depend on your class and your goal. The stats will only go up if you bring the piece of armor to the full 10 Energy. At that point, each stat goes up +2 on that piece of armor.
Depends on the piece and where it's coming from. Seems like Raid and IB armor have the possibility to drop with a higher max compared to just random stuff dropped from the world.
They can.
The stats only affect their respective perk or ability at intervals of 10. A single point won't matter unless that stat is already at, for example, 69. You can hover over the column of stats on your character screen to see what its current bonus is, then swap armor and hover over again to see the difference.
On your Collections page, there is a Mods section. It's the bottom left I think. I'm pretty sure you can see all the mods and their elements, even the ones you don't have yet.
XBL - Foreverender | 3DS FC - 1418 6696 1012 | Steam ID | LoL
The modules aren't impossible to grab a few of but they're not really sprinkled liberally everywhere (I'm thinking of the cube ones).
And then keep the stats randomly generated. It feels like the element should be the changeable feature, using something that isn't really a grinding target (considering they cost planet specific materials, the chances are about a month or so in you'll be sifting through quite a few of those elements, more if you have that season pass, of course).
I mean, they could also introduce some kind of weekly or even monthly cap on [element changing resource] that wasn't the cube-with-nubs, something that couldn't exactly be brute-forced. Something like "every month, every player gets X elemental switches and that's it and they don't carry over". It still might sting the players who drop for months and months a bit, maybe, but at that point the player obviously just isn't engaged.
And making it monthly allows a person 4 whole weeks, average of 28 days to redeem those element changes.
Except its twice the different stats and also Elemental affinity.
So instead of 3 different modifiers, its 7.
I sure as hell didnt ask for this.
Main beef is that they seem to expect you to make a new armor set per 3 months though, if season slots were universal it would be a big step.
It's number of stat points, distribution of stat points across 6 stats, elemental affinity, seasonal mod slot and the actual look of the armour.
While I am definitely in the camp that agrees that periodic gear resets/catch up periods (like at the beginning of an Xpack) are really an integral part to any long running MMO style game...you would not believe the unholy hell that was unleashed in D1 when they did what was effectively a hard reset. There are a good amount of people that once they find the three weapons they like want to continue using those three weapons ad infinitum and have no desire to check out anything else.
The community as a whole swings between the two poles of the thought process on resets. And in another example of the above mentioned " super hard if not impossible to please both regular hobbyist/hardcore level players and those that play a couple hours a week" the gear resets are often seen as a punch in the dick to casual players who now feel that their limited time is going to be spent re earning guns comparable to what they had and new power level available exotics.
edit: Hey, does the weekly reset reset win streaks? Got an 8 streak in comp going and was going to take the night off, but if the weekly will cancel that...I'll hop on and see how far I can run the streak.
Bungie.net's fireteams page has been letting me just hop into groups really quickly.
I haven't dared pug a raid yet, but for something like legend sundial that doesn't need vocal communication it works fantastically.