Morning Raids, Grumpiness, Polygon, and Today's Hotfix.

[Dumien]

I really like this raid. It's a great raid. There are some bugs, but playing the thing without any cheese is fantastic and rewarding.

Last night my friends and I put together a team to have a friendly competition with some other friends of mine. We had two raid crews on at the server reset going triple raid and triple nightfall. Our team decided not to cheese any section of the raid (they did bwahaha), though both groups decided to simply skip the dropless (Deathsinger) section by abusing checkpoints. We finished well ahead of the other team even though they used some cheddary goodness. 3 people in both groups ended up getting the gear required to get to level 32...though shards will come later. I personally got wrecked...I now have 4 hungers of crota and am 1 warlock/titan drop away from a set of 32 armor. I did get Hardlight 2.0 from a chest, but Nightfall rewarded me nothing but legendary engrams (2 of which converted to 2 ascendant energy yay).

Regardless... I had a fantastic time.

After breakfast I decided to do some bounties since I was finally back on my sleep schedule. I get a 2 1/2 characters done when the hotfix release is announced. I decide to take a break.

Now, a while ago I had read this article from polygon. Normally I'm used (and opposed) to sloppy journalism targeted at Destiny. I like this game regardless of its Skinner Box tendencies. The fun is in playing with your friends and gaming the game itself. This article though? I'm almost 100% in agreement. Bro knows what he is talking about.

Especially this quote: "That means that the more exotics you collected and upgraded prior to The Dark Below, the more progress you'll lose. The system actually punishes players proportionately to their dedication to the game, and it's the stupidest thing I've ever seen a major game developer do to its community."

Real talk... The only reason the exotics thing didn't bother me as much personally, is because of the sheer volume of exotics I own and am free to dismantle for shards on a whim. This is not something your average slightly-more-than-casual-player will have...and it is something that people should be pissed at. It feels like Bungie has multiple developer philosophies occurring at the same time. You need to keep people playing so you have timed gates like the new shards and energies (marks and glimmer caps already served this function). You need to make your casuals feel like they aren't falling behind their harcore friends so you hold back the Touch Football friends by making their collection obsolete. You need to make the Touch Football players still have effort value so you buff their best weapons only make them obsolete in comparison to weapons that can be purchased from the tower by everyone. There is ALOT of confusion going on.

Now, that article came out yesterday. Let's look at a specific point on today's hotfix... "Raid helmet obtained in Crota's End now drops on Normal Mode and will be a more frequent drop on Hard Mode."

Why oh why was that not added in the first place? Instead, they are "punishing players proportionately to their dedication to the game" by making our early morning raid run less lucrative. Lol everyone else gets a chance at a raid helmet. It legitimately pissed me off. It might seem petty, but I was sitting there thinking about that article that I had read yesteday...and I was like "yeah...that makes perfect sense." Soured my perfect Destiny day.

Oh well.

[wittyscorpion]

Patches and hotfixes always come out on Tuesday, you guys should reschedule your thing to Wednesday morning . Also, it can go both ways. You could have dodged a bullet of some cheese spots got patched (which you did not take advantage, but your competitor group did).

With level 32 gated by radiant shards, missing 3 possible helmet drops is no big deal . At least you are guaranteed to run raid 3 times per week, I am still not sure whether I can do that. Having 3 characters of different classes also significantly slow down the speed to level 32. I will be happy if I can get 1 character there by January, even that may not happen. Probably not a bad thing though because with level 31s I will have reasons to play CsE on normal difficulty. I did LFG on VoG normal and hard last Sunday, and the normal run was so pleasant and relaxing , it's like taking a vacation...

Regarding the exotics re-leveling: I have made peace with it. For the ones that I fully upgraded, I will only bother with re-leveling the ones I play the most (e.g.: Ice Breaker, Suros Regime, Patience & TIme, Plan-C). For the others, I'll keep them at level 300, still good for all activities except CsE. No need to upgrade them to 330 just to become obsolete again when DLC 2 is out. I'll wait until then to upgrade them, when 300-attack weapons can no longer cut it.

Same thinking goes to legendaries.

I guess my point is: people who have dedicated substantial playing time to Destiny can still enjoy their 300-attack weapons in most cases, including VoG, Weekly, NIghtfall. I wouldn't consider them (actually I should say "us" because I am part of this group too) "screwed" by the DLC.

I will end this wall of text with a saying we often use in software development circle: "if you can't make everybody happy, then make everybody equally unhappy"

[Dumien]

Ah, but it shouldn't go both ways. In many many many similar games...gamechanging patches and hotfixes are *clearly* communicated a reasonable amount of time prior to a change. When changes are economy/collection shattering some games (Hearthstone guarantees temporary full buyback value for any changed items) have checks and balances in place to make sure people aren't screwed over. So many of Destiny's current problems lie in the wake of damages caused by lack of clear communication.

[wittyscorpion]

Can Bungie do better with their communications? Absolutely.

Do they have to announce that they plan to release a hotfix ahead of the time? Not necessarily. Hotfix is a sensitive release type and could very well be cancelled at the last second. I am good with patch notes and actual release going out at the same time.

On a related topic: does any bro know why the entire gaming development industry is so obsessed with Tuesdays? Games launch on Tuesday, patches/hotfixes come out on Tuesday, weekly cycles start on Tuesday... What's the deal with that?

[mannon]

My guess is it gives them Monday to look over the weekend's data for any last minute stuff. As for launches it's probably the same thing with movies where they try to launch as early in the week as possible so that it buff up their "opening weekend" numbers... although why anybody would be fooled by that instead of just comparing only full opening weeks is beyond me. (Okay I take it back... because "The Media". They are a bunch of retards that don't know or care about anything other than a good quote or sound byte. Truth in journalism is an oxymoron...)

[iw5000]

Post

What your article says....i was saying almost EXACTLY the same thing days ago and have been whining about recently. Almost word for word. It's what has really soured me on this whole game right now, and gives me no faith in Bungie's running of this game.

To quote another great line....

"That means that the more exotics you collected and upgraded prior to The Dark Below, the more progress you'll lose. The system actually punishes players proportionately to their dedication to the game, and it's the stupidest thing I've ever seen a major game developer do to its community."


Bravo. Someone else is finally seeing the bullshit for what it is, and it's nice to see the media calling out Bungie, and not licking their balls. I like this one too...

"The only justification anyone can seem to offer for this is that you aren't supposed to have a collection of upgraded exotics, and you're only supposed to pick and choose a few that are actually worth grinding multiple times. I wish somebody had told me that before I upgraded them the first time."

But Bungie didn't tell anyone. Why? Because they want to hide content quality and quantity behind a bullshit cover of 'grinding' .They know once they get people hooked, many of the players, they'll have blinders on, not see what's going on, and then not even notice (or care) that they are endlessly repeating another 12 hours of effort for some gun that has at best marginally different stats. "Oh look, something bright, shiny and new, with +0.2324 agility! I'm going to play 21 hours this weekend to get it !!!" Drink the Koolaid!!!

Again....great article. What Bungie did ranks as one of the STUPIDEST gaming patches/DLC ever done in console history.

[wings]

If you weren't supposed to have a large number of exotics, why is there no limit cap (besides equipping) on them like Glimmer and Marks then?

I wouldn't mind some of the hotfixes but it appears bugs where players benefit are quickly corrected, while bugs where players are hindered by are waiting forever for a correction.

Also, the grind is pretty big for PvP so even PvE players are punished if the gear they want is sold by a Crucible vendor.

[iw5000]

Dec 16, 2014 18:50:36 GMT -5 Dumien said:

Now, that article came out yesterday. Let's look at a specific point on today's hotfix... "Raid helmet obtained in Crota's End now drops on Normal Mode and will be a more frequent drop on Hard Mode."

Why oh why was that not added in the first place? Instead, they are "punishing players proportionately to their dedication to the game" by making our early morning raid run less lucrative. Lol everyone else gets a chance at a raid helmet. It legitimately pissed me off. It might seem petty, but I was sitting there thinking about that article that I had read yesteday...and I was like "yeah...that makes perfect sense." Soured my perfect Destiny day.

Oh well.

It seems like Boots are the hard item to get. Right now, I have three Raid Chest pieces, and three Raid Gloves. No boots. All this in addition to my four or five Lv 33 gear pieces (gloves, boots and chest). I have yet to see ANY Raid boots anywhere in this raid. Do they only show up upon completion? And the helmet, if that's on Normal mode now, does that only show up at the end?

I'm not to concerned about the helmet stuff. I have two Exotic helmets at 36 done.

[markopolo]

Here's a simple solution to this whole mess...

Let Xur sell you a item (Potion of Eternal Light or something prophetic like that) for 5 <insert currency name here>, and with 15 mats (spinmetal for rares, spirit bloom for legendaries, iron for exotics... or whatever... you're all smart, you can figure this out) that will allow you, without resetting your item, to 331 damage (if weapon) or 36 light (if armour) or to a new exotic... I only have one and it was new so I dunno what the exact specs are there... but you can figure it out

Bingo Bango, wango tango... everyone is happy. No more problems.

No releveling of weapons or armour.
No reset of previous upgrades of weapons or armour.
No changing weapons or armour or need to break it/them down.

Take your old weapon/armour, take your mats, take your Potion of Eternal Light... put them in a bowl, stir and mix thoroughly until smooth and shiny, preheat the oven to 425, grease your tin, pour the bowl's contents into the tin, and cook for 3 hours, basting and rotating every 30 minutes.

Make its availablity for one Xur time only... it's not like Xur has these Potion in the same factory that mass produces voidfang vestments and sunslinger gauntlets.

EDIT: PART DEUX

Now if they choose to do this, give me a reason to actually buy the new vanguard stuff (especially their weapons) Make the perks better, make them shoot harder, faster, better, more. Murmur was a great start... give me more of that... give me a primary handcannon that I can switch damage out, and give it 3rd eye. You get the idea.

[iw5000]

The problem is this. Bungie's internal stats show a bulk of the player base hasn't even done the regular VoG yet. It's in Bungie's own self preservation needs to keep everyone moving along, near each other. Or else the game dies. Having four million players and only 400,000 raiding, isn't going to work. They'll keep falling further and further behind with each DLC, and the game will die.

Bungie's solution was flawed. First...it was ok to give a lifting hand to those behind. That's a good move. Allow those behind a way to catch up a little with the masses. Nothing wrong there and we all benefit from having more friends to play with. But it was the second part of Bungie's solution, that was just the dumbest in gaming history. They didn't just lift a hand to those behind, but they took their giant Bungie boot and simply foot-stomped all of those people who were at the top. Stomped these players down, took shit on them, and then basically laughed at what they did. Bungie to those players....

"Hahaha dumbasses, you spent days on the IB, days leveling your exotics? LOL, THE JOKE IS ON YOU. REDO IT ALL!!!!"


That's so wrong, I don't even know where to start. And it's becoming even more wrong how many media and other people keep making excuses for them. There is no 'grey' here. It's wrong on every level. They didn't needed to have done that. They could have helped people behind, while also not penalizing those who were ahead.

[mannon]

Naw, not enough grinding.

Next patch... item durability! Spend planetary resources to repair your items! Super shards! The last upgrade slot on all items now requires a special shard obtained by dismantling 10 of the same item to retrieve special item specific material and then having Xur craft it into a special super shard (for only that specific item) for 20 AE or AS and 30,000 glimmer! Also to make VoG relevant again CsE armor final upgrades require materials from dismantling VoG raid gear as well as CsE! Also introducing... player crafting! Create upgrades to attach to weapons that will increase their attack by up to 30 points. Crafting each requires planetary resources, AE, weapon parts, and legendary weapons themselves, and a special casing sold by Xur for 1 strange coin. Start by crafting +5 atk items and increase your crafting skill, (by rote repetition and crafting hundreds of items) until your crafting reaches level 50, then look out for item drops with the "Eureka" stat. Equip items with enough total "Eureka" and raise your crafting to level 70 to finally craft the highest +30 atk items!

And when you're done with that, do it all again! Turn in a fully upgraded complete set of CsE, VoG, and Legendary armor to completely erase your character but receive a special "Prestige 1" emblem and a tag next to your name. Complete up to 15 times for the ultimate "Prestige 15" emblem so everyone knows how hardcore you are!!!!1

;p

[markopolo]

*sigh*

We might look back on yer post Mannon, as true in a few updates time

[mannon]

Sadly... it could happen. I've seen worse in MMO's. The Destiny grind is still fairly tame by comparison and Bungie could always decide that is a flaw...

[markopolo]

Dec 17, 2014 11:24:09 GMT -5 mannon said:

Sadly... it could happen. I've seen worse in MMO's. The Destiny grind is still fairly tame by comparison and Bungie could always decide that is a flaw...

So long as they remember they are a MMOoter.... and not a MMO... they'll be okay.

They'll always have players like us who never/rarely raid... and have taken the scenic route to level 30... rather than the power/balls to the walls gamers

[Dumien]

Dec 17, 2014 9:15:51 GMT -5 iw5000 said:

Dec 16, 2014 18:50:36 GMT -5 Dumien said:

Now, that article came out yesterday. Let's look at a specific point on today's hotfix... "Raid helmet obtained in Crota's End now drops on Normal Mode and will be a more frequent drop on Hard Mode."

Why oh why was that not added in the first place? Instead, they are "punishing players proportionately to their dedication to the game" by making our early morning raid run less lucrative. Lol everyone else gets a chance at a raid helmet. It legitimately pissed me off. It might seem petty, but I was sitting there thinking about that article that I had read yesteday...and I was like "yeah...that makes perfect sense." Soured my perfect Destiny day.

Oh well.

It seems like Boots are the hard item to get. Right now, I have three Raid Chest pieces, and three Raid Gloves. No boots. All this in addition to my four or five Lv 33 gear pieces (gloves, boots and chest). I have yet to see ANY Raid boots anywhere in this raid. Do they only show up upon completion? And the helmet, if that's on Normal mode now, does that only show up at the end?

I'm not to concerned about the helmet stuff. I have two Exotic helmets at 36 done.

I seem to have had an opposite experience. Boots have been my most common armor drop at 3 total...with only 1 gauntlet and armor piece dropping across all characters.

[iw5000]

That is some weird stuff there. I've done six Raids so far (2/3rdsof the Raid)....and have not seen a boot yet. Just lots of Chest pieces and gloves.

What stage are you getting your boots?

[Dumien]

Dec 17, 2014 11:58:09 GMT -5 iw5000 said:

That is some weird stuff there. I've done six Raids so far (2/3rdsof the Raid)....and have not seen a boot yet. Just lots of Chest pieces and gloves.

What stage are you getting your boots?

The 1st and 2nd area.

[iw5000]

That is weird. I am 0-6 right now with boots.

[hebbnh]

RNG gonna RNG!

[wittyscorpion]

You guys need to look at this issue (more dedicated players feel more screwed by the investment system) positively:

With this investment system in place, you should have the peace of mind that you can take a long break from Destiny and still won't feel "left" behind by your friends.

To illustrate my point, let's time travel to December 2015:

Imagine for a second that you are a real astronaut and just come back from a space trip. Your friends have been taunting you on the weekly video calls with them (yes, Destiny Den bros are just as important as family to spend these precious communication resources on) about the "great" weapons they have acquired, and how much higher leveled up they are (for dramatic effects: level 100 vs. your puny level 30). So:

1) You shake off the "rocket" lag (like the jet lag but 10x worse) and boot your dust covered XONE (yes, real astronauts play XONEs ), and started Destiny;
2) 200GB download worth of 100 updates later (meanwhile you went through 200+ videos of DattoDoesDestiny), you see the familiar face (or the lack of) of your level 30 warlocks;
3) You fly to Tower, which you can hardly recognize because EVERYTHING has changed. All the vendors have a new look and they are offering stuff with strange names that defy any pronunciation attempts, even you can speak 6 languages, including Klingon;
4)You stroll through the tower and bought the new stuff you need the most. It's a good thing that you had glimmer/marks all maxed out before you leave, so you are able to get a level 99 character ready in 10 minutes (your earth bound friends on the other hand have devoted 1000+ play time to get there);
5) It happens to be Xur's Day as well, so you spend a few coins to level up your 300-attack exotic to their 1000-attack equivalent, enough to get you ready for the new raid;
6) You jump into raid using LFG-on-steroids, play through it 3 times and are able to get one new exotic Sniper Rifle! It is called "Ocaam's Razor" and have some insane talents (one of them called "mind bullets", literally speaking) that make Ice Breaker feel like a toy only appropriate for age 3 and under;
7) You join your friend's party, after a few rounds of "what's up" greetings, you showed them the Sniper Rifle. Your friends instantly become silent, because they have played the new raid 100 times and still haven't got it yet. Apparently It is THE best weapon of Destiny! To kill enemy you only need to use Jedi mind tricks...

[wittyscorpion]

The morale of the story:

No need to feel forced to play anything in Destiny, just play whatever you enjoy the most. Why? Because whatever the "must have" things that are available now, you will be able to get something better with much less play time in the near future.

IMHO this is a good thing. We should all feel mentally free from grinding due to this design. If you played 100 more hours than your neighbor, it should be because the game is fun enough to deserve the 100 hours, not because you must get "Occam's Razor"

[Dumien]

lol tell me more stories.

[mannon]

I want a sword named "Occam's Razor"!

And a sparrow named "Schrodinger's Cat!" heh You only find out whether or not the "cat" was real when you get off at your destination. 50/50 chance of just being back where you summoned the "cat" in the first place and all you did was stand there making vroom vroom noises. ;p

[iw5000]

Dec 17, 2014 16:53:30 GMT -5 wittyscorpion said:

The morale of the story:

No need to feel forced to play anything in Destiny, just play whatever you enjoy the most. Why? Because whatever the "must have" things that are available now, you will be able to get something better with much less play time in the near future.

IMHO this is a good thing. We should all feel mentally free from grinding due to this design. If you played 100 more hours than your neighbor, it should be because the game is fun enough to deserve the 100 hours, not because you must get "Occam's Razor"

Witty,

Do appreciate the positive spin on things, but there is another part of this story that needs said. Something Bungie needs to pay attention too. A gaming company like Bungie can keep their player base close together, by just helping those behind. They don't need to sh1t on the players out in front too.

[wittyscorpion]

Dec 17, 2014 17:01:28 GMT -5 mannon said:

I want a sword named "Occam's Razor"!

And a sparrow named "Schrodinger's Cat!" heh You only find out whether or not the "cat" was real when you get off at your destination. 50/50 chance of just being back where you summoned the "cat" in the first place and all you did was stand there making vroom vroom noises. ;p

"Schrodinger's Cat!" is the weapon to make "Occam's Razor" feel like child play, to be made available to general public on March, 2016

[wittyscorpion]

Dec 17, 2014 17:03:22 GMT -5 iw5000 said:

Dec 17, 2014 16:53:30 GMT -5 wittyscorpion said:

The morale of the story:

IMHO this is a good thing. We should all feel mentally free from grinding due to this design. If you played 100 more hours than your neighbor, it should be because the game is fun enough to deserve the 100 hours, not because you must get "Occam's Razor"

Witty,

Do appreciate the positive spin on things, but there is another part of this story that needs said. Something Bungie needs to pay attention too. A gaming company like Bungie can keep their player base close together, by just helping those behind. They don't need to sh1t on the players out in front too.

As a player who spent insane amount of time playing this game (probably not so much compared to many bros here, but definitely way more than the median of the player base. I did make up these play time with time spent on this board though ), I am trying to decide whether I feel being sh1t on with this new design.

Right now, not too much. This is because I had a lot of fun playing during these hours (destination material farming excluded). I enjoyed leveling many weapons and put their "talents" to use in interesting ways, so that's not a waste. At this moment: I can choose to either upgrade to the newer version, which have better attack out of the gate and no hurry to grind to max, or keep using my old maxed-out one and enjoy the already unlocked talents (mainly outside of CsE, but maybe even in CsE). IMHO: the need to upgrade is nowhere near urgent, and if I am not grinding that intentionally, it will just happen naturally. After all, I need new weapons to "burn" those bounty reward XP on.

From my point of view: I would rather have a player community that are relatively "flat", in that the "elite" players are not so far ahead of a newbie in terms of gears. The elite players are still "elite-ish" because they had fun and experience that come from that play time, and the peace of mind that they have gotten more than the money's worth from playing Destiny.

[mannon]

Elite players definitely enjoyed something of an advantage, but perhaps not as much as expected.

Having said that what exactly is it that we're all so butthurt about? We knew this would be an expansion, that there would be a higher level cap that would require new armor, that there would be new weapons with more attack so that we would have to replace our old ones... The only real surprises are the exotic trade in (which turns out to be not as good a deal as repurchasing) and that players can now buy their way up to level 31 without ever stepping in VoG... But, ultimately... how does lower level players getting a free ride affect you? They still have the same grind that you do to 32, and a harder time of it without stockpiled resources and already being level 30ish to make the content easier. (I can testify that level 30 dailies/weeklies are much tougher at 28 than the level 28 ones were.) As for the new weapons, it's not like the old ones do less damage than they did before, there are just newer ones that might do approximately 14% more damage... all other stats being equal... only those other stats aren't equal. Seems like only a few of the 330 damage weapons really stack up. Feels like impact over all has been reduced on this new tier of weapons. And the extra attack only helps at all on mobs over level 20. It doesn't necessarily make all 300 attack weapons as obsolete as we though, but then, we knew it was coming. If the new weapons were only 300 attack the butthurt would have been even worse!

In the end all it really means is other players don't have to go through the same grind from 28 to 30 that has been in the game up to this point. But how many posts were out there complaining about that same grind? Should we expect other players to have to go through it? Ultimately it doesn't matter. We say Bungie is all about making us grind, and there's a lot of truth to that. How else would they keep us playing after we've beat every mission six ways to Sunday? But honestly Destiny post-TDB is less grindy than before. CsE is actually a little more forgiving than VoG and the vendors are more generous, plus you can even quest for a 33 light piece of armor. It took me a lot of grinding to get my first set of all legendary armor. Upgrading to new 33/36 light gear took me less than a week. Sure I got a lucky drop on the gloves, but I will get the gloves anyway when I finish that quest.

I'm not saying our feelings aren't valid. Bungie has once again been very poor in their communication. However, what's important isn't what the game was before, but what it is now. And while I would prefer vendors didn't just offer up gear that is only a hair below the best gear in the game, it's not really that big an issue. We will see more tweaks and improvements over time.

It's the type of game that really draws people in, but we all need to step back from it a bit from time to time.

[wittyscorpion]

One quick comment on the following:

The only real surprises are the exotic trade in (which turns out to be not as good a deal as repurchasing)

1) If dismantling fully upgraded exotic gears only produces 1 exotic shard most of the time, then the trade-in option is still more attractive than re-purchase for weapons in terms of coin consumption. More so on primary (cost 23 coins to buy) than special/heavy (cost 17 coins to buy);

2) One main value of trade-in is the "opportunity cost". Even for armors when the re-purchase is more attractive, sometimes we just can't afford to lose the opportunity, because who knows when the item can be available for purchase. Armamentarium last week is a great example of this.