Yeesh. (Destiny)

by slycrel , Friday, October 14, 2016, 20:38 (2758 days ago) @ Kahzgul

I am apparently not hardcore enough for this game anymore. My single character running at 369 is incredibly behind. I haven't even bothered with the nightfall yet, guess I should do that before the changes.

Behind what? You're not behind, you just have a smaller number. I guess that matters for hard mode raiding and trials, but that's the only place I can think of where that would really matter. Even IB is super forgiving of lower light levels. Nothing else in the game really cares about your light, and you shouldn't either.

See my above post. It does matter in some contexts, though to be fair, all content is indeed playable at my current light level.

Don't like the new "time sink"-ness. I'd be less worried, but I feel content is dropping way way too quickly. I'd have to be playing 15-20 hrs a week of destiny to even come close to keeping up with their aggressive schedule.

There's nothing new about Destiny being a time-sink for bigger light level numbers. If anything the new content is the fastest they've had, even though it's still super slow. Enjoy the journey!

As for "new content" you're saying hard mode raid coming 1 month after normal mode raid is too quickly? Because there is no other new content being dropped here. I think you're being distracted by the bigger numbers and forgetting that there's very little of actual substance going on here.

I'd have preferred the raid come out a month after release and the HM raid 6-8 weeks after the normal raid. I don't want the content super fast and then have 3-4 months of whatever. I'd like to enjoy the ride of moving through things rather than rushing to try and raid with my fellow DBOers that play more than me. With HoW I moved to only maintaining one character. I missed out a little due to not having extra etheric light and such and felt behind because I wasn't running 3. TTK largely fixed that, and I felt I could progress very well with only 1 primary character. I really liked that. I feel like things have again regressed, I am "behind" because I'm not running more than one character actively. My other characters could be 365 likely no sweat with what I've amassed with only one, but that doesn't help much -- since drops are now a range based on overall LL's a few low items can keep your drops in a range where most drops are barely upgrades until the key pieces go up. And to be fair, they are acknowledging and fixing that with increased ghost/artifact drops in this patch. Anyhow, point is, previously I had choices in what activities I could play in both PvP and PvE to be "smart" about LL. Now it seems totally time-based -in addition to- playing the right activities. Which is where the grind comes from.

I don't understand why they don't stretch the content out a bit longer. Maybe they have more planned as they go, but TTK kind of went this direction as well, with a few months of very little after challenge modes dropped. Seems like a mistake, but maybe statistics say otherwise and I'm no longer their target market.

Please no. There's so little content in this xpac that stretching it further would be horrible. Was TTK slow as hell with months of nothing? Yes. But making the existing content fill that gap is not nearly the same as making enough content to fill that gap. Either way you slice it, the game lacks content. Front load it or slowly drizzle it out, it's still not enough to cover the ground it needs to.

Destiny is a MMO, as much as people don't want it to be. Too much content too fast leads to burnout. It's designed to be social. Which is great! But gating with LL needs to be carefully done or you risk breaking up one of the huge draws -- playing with your friends. Deliberate pacing will keep a larger playerbase around more consistently. IMO. Bungie obviously doesn't agree, or at least they're not doing that for whatever reason. I kind of touched on this above... I don't think they are losing anything by slowing it down a little. If anything I think some content is getting rushed past depending on what the player wants to do.

They're in this weird middle ground of staging release content, but I guess I think they are doing more harm than good by the current pacing. I suspect they are staging it for development reasons as opposed to being intentional about it -- and their primary goal is to get things out ASAP. I think it's more nuanced than that, but overall that's what it looks like from this side of things.