"50%" (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, May 23, 2017, 22:51 (2522 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Sure. But if they didn't even hit the level cap, are they really relevant to the discussion?

Maybe not.

If 50% of the player base at the level cap did the raid, and 22% of the entire player base completed a raid, that means that about half the players who played Destiny didn't reach the level cap.

I reached the level cap on the final story mission, without doing anything unusual. If we use that as a benchmark, that means about half the people who played Destiny didn't even finish the story missions. I was going to say that this was a huge deal, but that seems roughly in line with other games.

Looking at it from that perspective, it kind of seems like 22% is a lot actually. A raid is the hardest activity in the game (ostensibly). Most people are clearly casual players. So a 22% completion for the raid actually seems pretty high when you look at it broadly. According to my trophy data, 5.8% of the people completed Uncharted 4 on Hard mode (not the hardest mode). 41.8% beat the game at all.

I actually don't see a problem with Bungie's numbers. In fact, they look pretty good to me.

Exactly.

That's why I was more than a bit surprised at the reveal of Guided Games and the focus on getting more people to do the raid.

That's also why I wondered whether it was publisher pressure to spend less time developing raids. If story level 20 doesn't take more time and effort to make than story level 5 or story level 10, the only thing you need to tune is how many of them you make, knowing that not everybody will finish the game.

It's a different kettle of fish when you're spending more time tuning a set of encounters that are more complicated than any story mission, to make content that only 50% of eligible players, 22% of players overall, will ever see. That same effort put into making more patrol destinations or more story missions would get more exposure and perhaps reflect better on the game as a whole.

So Guided Games is a way of saying that Bungie will get the raid completion percentage up so they can continue to justify spending extra effort on those encounters. IMHO.