I'd like to Revisit the Party Size Debate (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Monday, November 20, 2017, 11:23 (2356 days ago)

I've been thinking about why D2 is so much less compelling to me than D1, and an issue that keeps cropping up for me is party size. In D1, playing solo was not fun for me. I liked playing with my friends. Any time there were already 3 of my friends online and in a group, I wouldn't even bother playing - I'd just let them know I was around if someone had to go and I'd play a different game until there was space or it was my bedtime.

In D2, I feel the same about solo play. It's not as fun as team play by a large margin. But even team play suffers from this issue due to party size changes between pve and pvp activities.

In D1, it was all about switching back and forth between activities. Run a nightfall, then run some pvp, back to patrol mode for bounties, another pve match, a couple of heroic strikes, finish the night with some trials.

In D2, you simply can't do that. You're either in a group of 3 and your pvp games always include a blueberry, which sucks, or you're in a group of 4, and can't go to pve without booting someone. Which makes them a solo player. So they log off, just like D1.

Now let's look at raids. 6 players! Man, we just ran a great raid, so fun. What do you guys want to do now? Let's split up to...

In D1, you could split to two groups of 3 to do whatever you wanted. In D2 it's either two groups of pve with pvp+blueberry option, or one full group of pvp and two people who get the wrong end of the stick. Again, players are being forced into less than idea situations; either playing with a blueberry or alienating their friends.

It sucks. The solutions kind of suck, too. We need parity between activities, and the current design of Destiny is anything but that. Bring back 6v6 and 3v3 pvp modes, or force the already terrible matchmaking to only match teams of similar size, or make pve 4 players (and raids 8? Too many, imo).

Regardless, I think the weird party sizes for different activities is having a major impact on my playtime, and I wonder how you guys feel now that we've all played the game for a couple of months.