Destiny and Multiplicative Design (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Saturday, April 08, 2017, 02:00 (2576 days ago) @ ManKitten

A great example of what you're describing here is the Aetheon fight. Remember when he would just move out of aoe grenades until he walked off of the ledge?

Bungie could have fixed this in soooo many ways. What they actually did was tell people "If you do that, it's cheating and we'll ban you." That's super shitty. Like, beyond shitty. These people are just playing the game you gave them.

Guard rails were the ultimate fix after player outcry, but they could have done other things:

- Made Aetheon less nervous about AoE damage.
- Given Aetheon an ability to absorb AoE damage.
- Made his body drop actual engrams so that if he walked off the edge you got nothing (not my favorite option, but it would certainly have discouraged knocking him off the edge)
- Given him a super form with wings where if he walks of the edge, oh wow, NOW HE FLIES!!!
- etc.

And I'll give a counter-example here: In Kingdom of Loathing, someone found an exploit to give themselves infinite money (you could give away more money than you had, and once people figured out how big the integer max was, they realized they could give away an amount of money so big that it would flip your income from maximally negative to maximally positive and end up with trillions of dollars). The dev response was to (a) fix the exploit and then (b) declare that there was massive inflation in the game world, write a few quests about how there was suddenly craploads of money everywhere, create a mafia that would sell hits on players for exorbitant amounts of cash, create a few cosmetic items that cost insane amounts of money to buy, and drain the bug-money that way. It turned into a really fun event for the players, plus they got the vast majority of the money out of the economy pretty quickly, all without rollbacks or nerfs to the players or game.

It makes me sad that pretty much all of Destiny 1's changes have been reactionary to whatever internet echo chamber outcry is the loudest. I wish Bungie had a clear plan for what they wanted the game to be and made incremental changes towards that without resorting to nerfs and pigeonholing the player's actions into their specific molds along the way.