Atheon fight getting patched, but not how you think

[GodMars]

From Q&A: The Lead Designer Of Destiny's Vault of Glass

Q: Related to that, something that feels much more designed to me is, in the final boss battle, we worked out this crazy elaborate, very precise strategy where we had an away team and a home team, where the away team would stand farthest back because the people farthest back get beamed away, grab the relic, get through, everybody would run to the middle platform where we were safe from the supplicants, throw up the shield, unload on the boss, then run to the back, home team would stay under the titan shield… it was an incredibly specific thing that felt almost like the only way that you could hope to beat this boss, though I'm sure people have done it other ways. Was that designed? Was that the intended solution?

A: I think that version of the way you're describing the encounter is the way the encounter currently plays, there are some unintended elements from that that we are going to be addressing.

A: We're going to be, in the near future, we're going to be updating that encounter.

A: So to talk loosely about the final encounter for the raid, in the encounter, our goal was to have an encounter where each player in your raid needed to be able to do each job from the entire raid. So, to allow players to have some freedom over choosing or selecting who's going to do what job, while that's strategically interesting, and it's led to a bunch of really cool strategies, it actually doesn't align with the goal for the encounter. So that is an example of a case where we would make a change.

[malgato]

For phuk's sake. More really super lame dictation on how I will be required to have "fun." Spoiler alert - it will no longer be fun.

[GodMars]

MOAR RANDOMNESS!

[wittyscorpion]

Oct 16, 2014 17:11:58 GMT -5 malgato said:

For phuk's sake. More really super lame dictation on how I will be required to have "fun." Spoiler alert - it will no longer be fun.

I have not seen the Raid in any form to make any constructive comments. But isn't it that it's the Raid designer's right to dictate how to play it? After all, he put everything in there to make the thing to be played in certain way. It's just that some of the creative ways invented by the community really circumvented the intended design, probably making the thing too easy to beat.

I don't have a problem with them adding additional controls in place so players have to figure out the ways he originally envisioned. If you think positively, this can be considered as a way of adding new content, especially for the level 30s who start feeling bored.

In general: there is a trend in PvE to find the easiest way to achieve something. It's fine if the player's main goal is the reward I guess.

I am probably in the minority, IMHO the activities should be played mainly for the fun they provide, the mission rewards are just a nice bonus beyond beating the challenge. Cheese my way through just to get the mission rewards is not my kind of fun. On this sense, I am not very satisfied with how I currently play the game, due to limited options:

1) Play with higher level friends. The pros here is that I can get higher level rewards easily, the drawback is that the process itself is not very fun. My friends are doing all the heaving lifting and I am just tagging along for the ride;

2) Play solo. The missions are challenging, but I don't get to experience any co-op aspects of the experience. Also, the enemies are significantly nerfed vs. playing with 3 people, so in that sense this is not as challenging as intended (for Strike missions);

Ideally I would like to play with teammates near my level, say +/- 2. But daily/weekly don't support matchmaking, and all my friends are at much higher level. LFG channels are more geared towards higher level stuff. I guess that I'll have to solo for a while. Currently my game play most involves shooting enemies from a safe distance using Ice Breaker, could get boring soon. I really need to force myself to play without it once in a while.

[malgato]

Witty, I think once you get a chance to get into the raid, you will agree that it is not easy to beat, at least initially - I can see it becoming easier with experience. I have finished the raid 3 times and none felt easy - I had a significant sense of accomplishment and satisfaction each time. It is hard. And this was when the "exploits" were still in play. The raid takes serious coordination, communication, AND excecution. Failure is definitely an option...

[malgato]

I know groups are able to fly through in under an hour, but my experience has been the raid is a 3-4 hour marathon process.

[Dumien]

The designer's goal should not be combative with the player's initial experience. Instead it should adapt to it and embrace it (especially if the experience is positive or negative at the polar). The general raiding experience in professional reviews and from personal experience has been overwhelmingly positive.

So why is Bungie changing this stuff?

it is the developer either:

1) admitting that they released an untested product (by having things "not go as intended."

or

2) being unable to conceive of the fact that people are smarter than they had anticipated and thus their content was not as hard as they expected it to be.


imo both are unacceptable. We solved their puzzle. Adding more restrictions isn't adding more content...it is limiting it.

[mannon]

I don't understand why players finding things in the game that Bungie didn't find somehow means they didn't test it at all. The fact is there are WAY more people playing destiny than Bungie could have ever put testers through the game, and they had an entire game to test, not just the raid. Of course we're going to find things they didn't anticipate. That's inevitable. Even things that might seem obvious in hindsight. But the fact is things slip through the cracks. People develop habits and patterns and will miss things, and the only way to try to catch those things is to add more people and more time testing, but there's only so much of that you can do.

I'm not saying Bungie didn't think people would use the platforms, clearly they did, probably even intended it. But it turns out that there were some unintended consequences so they nerfed it. It's not the best nerf ever, but then PvE nerfs are always tough to take. Still, I don't think that the fact that Bungie is implementing nerfs means they screwed the pooch on development. It just means they are continuing to tweak the game as needed, and that's a good thing, even if not everybody likes all the changes.

As for 2 I imagine that Bungie didn't quite anticipate players getting as good at the raid as they have. Why should they. They have never made a game like this before. There really aren't any games exactly like this. So they are reacting to the situation they have rather than the situation they thought they would have. They have to adapt as players adapt. In a way it's an arms race with an army of players finding exploits, and cheese spots, ect and Bungie doing what they can to keep things from getting out of hand. It's a balancing act and there will be stumbles. I just don't see that as somehow being evidence of a major failure in development. (Though other things definitely point to development not going totally smoothly, but that's that and this is this.)

[Dumien]

I might be overreaching a bit but hey...lets continue.

Some of those "unintentional" bits were very easy to notice...

Having low spawn timers with minimal spawn trigger requirements means people are going to farm your spawns. Doesn't matter where they are... You could get that from studying even the most basic RPG strats. This displays a serious lack of forethought on Bungie's part if this was unintended. Most people want convenience. Convenience over focus. That is human behavior. This is why the loot cave was incredibly popular. It was mindless. I could watch TV. I could read a book. I could type things up. All while holding down the trigger of my vision of confluence. Sure it wasn't "fun," but in this case...most players weren't looking for fun. They were looking for the loot to get to the real fun...

The Atheon fight itself is important to understand before you rush to Bungie's defense. Three players are teleported to a random map. Mars or Venus. To the raid noob, these teleports might seem random. However, Bungie purposefully programed Atheon to teleport the SAME three people every time... as in the three people FARTHEST from him. That is not random in the slightest. It would be easy enough to write a code that would send three random players, but no... that wasn't their design choice. Thus, teams learned how to manipulate the teleports and have the same three people get teleported every time. To change the current code would be making the game artificially difficult by introducing chaos to a perfectly solvable puzzle.

My main issue is what Bungie has been considering exploitative and solution. A developer should be embracing this sort of player innovation. I want to draw your attention to this last line of what GodMars quoted...

"So, to allow players to have some freedom over choosing or selecting who's going to do what job, while that's strategically interesting, and it's led to a bunch of really cool strategies..."

This acknowledgement seems like a fantastic sentiment. It is the approach that the Borderlands 2 devs took when they realized that players had used skills and weapons in unintended ways. Watching the players who were in the process of breaking the game converse with creators during the AGDQ speedrun of Borderlands was fantastic. They pretty much only patched one or two terrifyingly gamebreaking items (evil smasher/B-shield). During the speedrun the creators displayed an intense appreciation for the ways that the players had "taken their game to the next level" by manipulating unintended elements of the game. IMO this is a very healthy approach that fosters a fantastic player/designer relationship.

...instead the quote continues...

"it actually doesn't align with the goal for the encounter. So that is an example of a case where we would make a change."

So let me get this straight. They appreciate the cool strategies and freedom...but naw. This isn't intended. We want the gameplay to be more restrictive...with less possible strategies. They are inflating the difficulty by restricting gameplay. We saw this with the multiple loot cave fixes. We saw this with the templar fix (changing "playable" area). I'm sure we will see this again.

[psychlon]

They should only fix really broken things and use what they learned for future encounter. "Fixing" programming which was done exactly the way people used it as soon as they had done the raid several times is a waste of time. They should spend more focus on other content rather than "fixing" working content.

[iw5000]

Oct 16, 2014 18:01:26 GMT -5 malgato said:

I know groups are able to fly through in under an hour, but my experience has been the raid is a 3-4 hour marathon process.

I honestly think that most recent one we did Mal, could have easily been 90 to 120 minutes if we would have had some breaks. I think it took us like 3:15?I've done it four times and that run we did was the best one (at least for me). A number of reasons:

1. We ran it with what two people who had never done it before. Not only never done it, but two complete strangers who had never played with us before. That's not easy. They turned out to be great guys, but still, no one was used to playing with each other.

2. We pretty much had to do our own strategy on the 2nd boss fight (Templar), start from scratch as the far left pillar (& relic) hide move was nerfed. Seeing how none of us in our group had seen the re-patched VoG on this stage, our run at this part was sort of a first time/experiment for us all. We spent a good 45 minutes here discussing things on the ledge. And some time before that, before we figured out our own cheese move in the far cave.

3. The last Atheon stage/boss fight. Our first four attempts, ....three of the failures were due to Bungie's glitchy/flawed portal logic. We didnt' mess up, Bungie did (at least that's how it looked on my end). Once those errors ended, I think we flawlessly knocked off Atheon on the next attempt.

Anyways...

as far as the topic....

I don't think it's a bad thing tightening up the VoG and/or other parts of the game. To an extent.


...


btw.....anyone else seeing similarities here? Game developers not understanding that players will have unintended behaviors that at times fly in the face of what developers want? The law of unintended consequences: When simple system (game environment) tries to regulate a complex system (game environment with millions of humans interacting), you will get unintended consequences. CoD screws the pooch with this ALL the time with some of gamings dumb decisions.

[mannon]

tl;dr I'm not arguing whether the nerf was good or bad, just that if Bungie deems it necessary it will happen, and that this is merely normal for any game of this type. So far I'd say Bungie is handling it better than what I saw in most MMO's I've played.

You keep compairing this to BL, and I can see some paralells to those games, but really I see more paralells to MMO's in this situation, and well. This kind of nerf is not just common it's basically manditory. VoG is THE endgame content. Bungie clearly does want players to come up with their own strategies and figure things out, but apparently the community surprised them and came up with a strategy Bungie deemed was a bit too good. If something in VoG can be cheesed or done in a way that makes it less risky, less of a challenge, than what Bungie things VoG should be for the good of the game, then yes... it will get nerfed. What's the alternative? Should they throw up their hands and say, "Oops... oh well, let's do better on the next raid?" Right now there's only one raid, so there is no next raid. That's not an option. They also have to manage the economy to keep things happening within a certain pace. Sure, they made the endgame grindy and random, clearly that's intended to keep us playing the game long after we've technically exhausted the content. But, it's working and players still seem to be having fun with it, so they can't let us get too good with our shortcuts or it defeats the point. In fact I wager that's part of the reason it is such a grind, because they knew there would be some shortcuts.

I just don't understand the attitude that they shouldn't touch anything but the most outragious exploits or they failed as a developer. Maybe they did or didn't fail or were lazy or whatever, but I don't see a couple of nerfs being an evidence of that. Look at any MMO's history. This is normal. You build a game with an idea how it will be played. Then you put it out there and let the community surprise you. Most of those surprises you let slide, but a few that disrupt the flow of things have to be addressed. It's inevitable. Granted, some patches and changes will be better thought out than others as well. That's okay too. It can always be repatched later if it's a big problem.

With an online game like this there is no final "release" version of the game... ever. The game will continue to be tweaked and patched until it's dead and one heralds the coming of the other. When Bungie finally does back off and patch less is the day we know the end is neigh.


PS. I still don't consider Destiny a full fledged MMO, but it has more similarities to an MMO than to games that are merely coop.

[mannon]

Oct 17, 2014 6:10:59 GMT -5 iw5000 said:

btw.....anyone else seeing similarities here? Game developers not understanding that players will have unintended behaviors that at times fly in the face of what developers want? The law of unintended consequences: When simple system (game environment) tries to regulate a complex system (game environment with millions of humans interacting), you will get unintended consequences. CoD screws the pooch with this ALL the time with some of gamings dumb decisions.

Absolutely. The question is not whether or not a developer can adequitely test and foresee how the game will be played. The answer there is, no. No they cannot. No developer can do that. Even CCGs that are merely played with printed cards and some rulesets which by their nature cannot obfuscate any systems or stats WILL have unintended consequences and have to be adjusted. That's why tournaments have ban lists, and rulesets change. No, the question is whether or not the developer can assess the developments and identify which behaviours are actually harmful to the game as a whole and address them appropriately. It's always going to be an iterative process of observation, assessment, and reaction (or inaction).

To expect this not to happen is to hold a developer to an impossible standard, (or expect them to not give a shit...)

[hebbnh]

I'll second what Dumien said. Any set pattern put into any encounter in any game is going to get figured out eventually. It's inevitable and it's foreseeable, and Bungie are fools if they really didn't see this coming. If they didn't want players to figure out how the teleports work and come up with strategies based on those mechanics, then why not make the teleports completely random in the first place and avoid the problem altogether? Changing it now is nothing more than artificially increasing the difficulty because they're butthurt that their precious "hardest content ever" is nowhere near as tough as they thought it was. What they really need to do instead is fix the fucking teleporters so you don't walk right through them but still end up stuck in Mars or Venus instead of going back to the boss room like you're supposed to, because overcoming that random BS is the hardest part of that encounter right now.

[mannon]

It seems to me like they are deliberately not random on purpose, but that one aspect of the encounter turned out to be more exploitable than they foresaw so they patched it. Would you really be less butthurt if they made the teleport random?

I don't think Bungie is butthurt that people are figuring out effective strategies for the raid. But it IS still endgame content and they have to react. With VoG getting cleared in ever faster times and ways to cheese certain encounters cropping up how is anyone surprised that Bungie is tweaking it?

Not saying Bungie walks on water or doesn't need to fix the teleports or anything. It just feels like there's a lot of over reacting over a less than popular nerf. eh... Then again why am I surprised at that. That's par for the course with any PvE nerf.

[hebbnh]

And yes, FWIW, I do think the correct response would be to say "let's do better on the next raid." If they want to change the playable area for Templar to eliminate cheese spots, fine (although they still haven't done that right). If they want to change Templar and Atheon to avoid AOE grenades pushing them off the sides of the arena, fine (although they still haven't done that right either). Those are both things I think everyone here would consider "cheap" at the very least. Changing the teleport mechanics because the obvious pattern they had to have placed there deliberately led to strategies that are somehow too good that they didn't foresee? That's 100% BS. If they want to change it, that's their prerogative, but that doesn't change the fact that it's BS.

[markopolo]

After the next update, no one will care or remember.

Everyone will be on to the next best pony/place/thing

[iw5000]

Oct 17, 2014 10:03:52 GMT -5 hebbnh said:

And yes, FWIW, I do think the correct response would be to say "let's do better on the next raid." If they want to change the playable area for Templar to eliminate cheese spots, fine (although they still haven't done that right). If they want to change Templar and Atheon to avoid AOE grenades pushing them off the sides of the arena, fine (although they still haven't done that right either). Those are both things I think everyone here would consider "cheap" at the very least. Changing the teleport mechanics because the obvious pattern they had to have placed there deliberately led to strategies that are somehow too good that they didn't foresee? That's 100% BS. If they want to change it, that's their prerogative, but that doesn't change the fact that it's BS.

That was summarized well ^^^ agree.

I can't for the life of me believe that Bungie was caught off guard that people would figure out the VoG. And get it done blazingly fast.

[markopolo]

BTW.... did they fix it so the bugger doesn't get stuck in the wall and you can kill him in like 20 seconds? Or even better, did they fix it so he doesn't walk off the edge like a dumbass

[GodMars]

Oct 17, 2014 11:35:05 GMT -5 iw5000 said:

Oct 17, 2014 10:03:52 GMT -5 hebbnh said:

And yes, FWIW, I do think the correct response would be to say "let's do better on the next raid." If they want to change the playable area for Templar to eliminate cheese spots, fine (although they still haven't done that right). If they want to change Templar and Atheon to avoid AOE grenades pushing them off the sides of the arena, fine (although they still haven't done that right either). Those are both things I think everyone here would consider "cheap" at the very least. Changing the teleport mechanics because the obvious pattern they had to have placed there deliberately led to strategies that are somehow too good that they didn't foresee? That's 100% BS. If they want to change it, that's their prerogative, but that doesn't change the fact that it's BS.

That was summarized well ^^^ agree.

I can't for the life of me believe that Bungie was caught off guard that people would figure out the VoG. And get it done blazingly fast.

Again, they fail to learn anything from Activision Blizzard. You patch exploits and broken mechanics, not new, more efficient strategies you missed in-house.

[iw5000]

They should know this from CoD. Look at that game. A glitch pops up and within hours (via Youtube) entire lobbies are filled with people doing it. Which is kind of the problem with PvE games that have things like the VoG. It's only as difficult as the most recent person who did it. Everyone who does it in basically 'gets' the advancements of the people who went before them. Only the first true 'pioneers', day one people who went in, get the true mind numbing/frustrating/bewildering/challenging 'WTF' experience of how the designers intended it to be. Everyone else? Right down the line, they build off each other's successes.

Not saying the VoG can't still fun. It is.

[TheHawkNY]

I don't know why you would think that because they're changing something, that means they made a mistake somewhere. I don't know why you would believe that, even if that's what they said.

Reflect on the Vex Mythoclast for a second. Do you really think that they made a mistake in making it too powerful? That they didn't notice it pooped all over every other gun? Or do you think it was deliberately designed to be that way to encourage players to do the Raid on hard and push to get the gun, and then they would nerf it, just as they did? The answer is pretty obvious.

Now think about the Atheon fight. Is making who gets teleported random them fixing a big outstanding issue? Or is it them making a small tweak that requires players to adapt new strategies, increases the difficulty, and ultimately extends the lifespan of the Raid?

[GodMars]

I think Bungie made the classic mistake many first-time MMOs devs do: they assumed it would take longer to get through the hard/heroic/top tier content than players actually did. They likely assumed Vex would be so rare it wouldn't be an issue. Then not only was hard mode quickly beaten, but it an exploit was used to essentially farm the Vex.

If it had a very low drop rate (say 1%), it wouldn't have been an issue, either. Most MMO devs keep such weapons ultra rare.

[wittyscorpion]

With 2 months to go before expansion pack 1 drops, and the rate of people joining finish-VoG-hard club is becoming faster and faster, the game's biggest weakness, playable-content-shortage, does look bigger and bigger.

Bungie taunted something-new-to-play-everyday, that certainly is not happening. I thought that they will introduce different events every week to fulfill that promise, but after Queen's Wrath and Iron Banner it seems to me they have exhausted that variety. If not for players' natural obsession of reaching level 30 which is tightly gated by the rare drops of Raid Gear, many high level players probably would have stopped playing the game.

I can see the above interview as Bungie paving the way of adding replayability to VoG, once there are enough level 30s and playing VoG just for gear drop is no longer appealing.

[malgato]

Available content to ensure longevity is by far Bungie's greatest failing. They totally screwed the pooch on this issue. Sure, there is plenty for casual players (but even for them it will be repetitive). But vastly underwhelming content for hard core gamers. 4 planets (with only a single open world explore option each)? Lame. 5 or 6 strikes? Lame. 1 raid? Lame. Overall, just not enough to do.

And that is said admitting that I really enjoy playing. But I can see burning out very soon. Destiny will not hold my attention in its current state come November when a flood of interesting games release.

[wittyscorpion]

Oct 17, 2014 14:37:36 GMT -5 malgato said:

Available content to ensure longevity is by far Bungie's greatest failing. They totally screwed the pooch on this issue. Sure, there is plenty for casual players (but even for them it will be repetitive). But vastly underwhelming content for hard core gamers. 4 planets (with only a single open world explore option each)? Lame. 5 or 6 strikes? Lame. 1 raid? Lame. Overall, just not enough to do.

And that is said admitting that I really enjoy playing. But I can see burning out very soon. Destiny will not hold my attention in its current state come November when a flood of interesting games release.

Conspiracy theory obsessed people may argue that ActiVision/Bungie moved polished content from release to expansion pack intentionally (say another Raid), so Destiny won't interfere with CoD:AW . As it stands now, many non-hardcore players will exhaust Destiny by end of month, just in time for AW on 11/03

One cool thing about Destiny is that you can play it on and off. At the minimum: play a few "maintenance" games every week (weekly, Nightfall, VoG) to earn stuff, and check out what Xur has for sale to buy stuff. The excitement of getting exotic weapons/armors to enrich your loadout options is still toally worth it

[TheHawkNY]

While I wouldn't complain if they added more worlds or levels, I don't think that's really a huge issue.

Patrols should be a way you should want to invest a lot of time, but they're...really boring. There isn't enough variety in the patrol missions, and Scout/Scan Area are not fun at all. Public Events are fun, but they need to make more of them. It's also an issue that they occur much more frequently on Earth than the other planets - because of this, everyone generally just does Patrol Cosmodrome, rather than hitting up the patrols on other planets. I'm just disappointed that they haven't actively been tweaking these and adding a few new things periodically.

Probably the biggest issue is the PvP. It wouldn't feel like a lack of content to anyone if the PvP was such that you wanted to spend hours and hours every day playing it. But that's not the case. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but there's just a lack of fun in PvP.

[psychlon]

They only need to fix the throwing off the ledge... anything else is wasted time. Fixing working content just because player figured out other ways than intended... I thought the idea was to have fun and not necessary follow the playbook 1 by 1.

[wittyscorpion]

Oct 17, 2014 18:00:26 GMT -5 TheHawkNY said:

While I wouldn't complain if they added more worlds or levels, I don't think that's really a huge issue.

Patrols should be a way you should want to invest a lot of time, but they're...really boring. There isn't enough variety in the patrol missions, and Scout/Scan Area are not fun at all. Public Events are fun, but they need to make more of them. It's also an issue that they occur much more frequently on Earth than the other planets - because of this, everyone generally just does Patrol Cosmodrome, rather than hitting up the patrols on other planets. I'm just disappointed that they haven't actively been tweaking these and adding a few new things periodically.

Probably the biggest issue is the PvP. It wouldn't feel like a lack of content to anyone if the PvP was such that you wanted to spend hours and hours every day playing it. But that's not the case. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but there's just a lack of fun in PvP.

Here is another way to put what we discussed, with a lot of profanity

www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/2jlg18/dear_bungie_i_quit_i_apologize_for_the_profanity/

[hebbnh]

A point that I haven't seen made here yet: Bungie wants everyone to be able to do each job. That's all well and good, but how are we supposed to learn to do each job when we have no control over which job we stuck with? Want to learn how to run the relic today? Easy. Ask your raid team and you can practice for a few runs to get a feel for it, with the team understanding it's something new and that you'll probably be wiping a few times. That understanding reduces frustration. Rinse and repeat for the other jobs.

Want to learn how to run relic with random teleports? First, hope you hit your 50% chance to get teleported. Then hope in the chaos that somebody else doesn't grab the relic first, because you don't really have time to sort out who's been teleported, who's got relic, who's got oracles, and who's helping out relic with the adds before oracles start popping in. Too late, you just wiped. Try again. Oh, this time you didn't get teleported, 3 other guys with no relic experience did instead. Insta-wipe, better luck next time. Oh good, you got teleported but couldn't quite take out the adds with the relic and got downed. Another wipe! And so forth and so on until either a) you get extremely lucky with teleports and are able to clear it quickly, b) you get unlucky with teleports but keep playing for hours until you get all the mechanics down and clear it, or c) you or your team gets frustrated and gives up. And that's with a team full of guys that at least have some idea what's going on. Going in with a couple or more total raid noobs? Good luck, and have fun insta-wiping for the next hour or more!

That's not fun. That's an artificially difficult RNG-fest in place of an encounter that's currently highly strategy-based and not random at all. Bungie's forums have been flooded with complaints about this potential change--hopefully they'll come to their senses and listen to the community on this one.