this is a deeply weird post (Destiny)

by electricpirate , Wednesday, June 11, 2014, 19:55 (3609 days ago) @ Schooly D

All else being equal (important caveat) a shorter time-to-kill requires less technical skill than a longer time-to-kill. The reasoning is simple: with a longer TTK, you need to land more of your shots over a longer period of time.

This is true until more players are involved. With a team involved you get kind of a bell curve, where a TTK that's too long just means that you can be saved by your teammates, or mowed down by a cherry picker in FFA.

The counterpoint is: a shorter TTK requires less technical skill, but places more importance on things like positioning and map control. An example of this would be Counter-Strike. If you run out into the open on de_dust, you're going to get killed before you can see who's shooting you.

This is where it starts to get weird...
counterstrike requires less technical skill? I... huh?

This is a double-edged sword for people who suck. The upshot: if you suck, as long as you run around the map, you're eventually going to catch SOMEONE off guard and land enough shots to kill them. They won't have much of a chance to fight back. The downside: if luck isn't on your side, you could have a very very bad, very very un-fun game. Half the time you'd get ambushed, and the other half you'd get headshotted by the TTL guys on the other end.

Guaranteed-kill(s) supers (and, to a lesser extent, spawning with rockets/snipers) are Bungie's buffer against the downsides of a shorter TTK. Essentially what they're saying is "hopefully you, as an unskilled norb, will randomly run into enough peoples' backs to get enough kills to keep you happy. However, if the fates conspire against you, we've got these supers you can use to get some kills no matter what."

It's a noble philosophy. But it can go terribly, hair-pullingly wrong for someone like me who's heavily invested in playing and being given a fair shake.

This is a weirdly personalized view of the why something is in place. Bungie is just doing it to screw you and the people like you right? Gotta give the ever loving noob a shot! I mean, I'm sure accessibility vs. depth is a question that constantly goes through a game designer head, but I'm sure balancing out a hundred other things do also. From my own experience, any system you design goes through a thousand iterations as you try and balance hundreds of dynamics you want to promote. Trying to illustrate the entirety of a design and goals by working backwards through a design is about as effective as trying to psychoanalyze a politician from a speech.

Not too mention, these aren't really good examples of something that gives novice players a leg up. The good player is going to have a handle on how to keep their secondary ammo filled, and will have the map controlled to get to power weapon ammo first. The good player will understand blue orb generation and will time supers to give their team-mates more supers. These are mechanics do more to snowball for the players doing better than give the player doing worse a catchup. Is there a constant rate of generation for supers or is it all based on kills/orbs? I guess having some constant generation would be a sop to the team that's behind, but compared to the advantages the team that's winning gets, it seems paltry.

If it's a close game and I'm guarding a critical objective, have correctly predicted the enemy's movement and expected point of entry, and am waiting to reap the fruits of my labor, it sucks hard to be killed because the guy coming around the corner managed to activate the super (or rocket -- they're plentiful) I didn't/couldn't know he had, killed me, took the objective, and won the game, that sucks. It sucks sucks sucks in the worst way.

That seems more like a signal and information problem then doesn't it? If you know who on their team had a super, and someone could call it out you could take steps to work around it. You could wait out the golden gun guy, stay back from the titan, or get high around the nova bomb. That seems pretty sensible, as the lack of information about AA was one of the worst parts of Reach, I hope Bungie has learned something from it.

The moon level in particular has an issue with teams dominating in the worst ways. When you've gotten donged on by snipers on the outside, rockets on the inside, and two Interceptors patrolling the level, you will know pain. This is somewhat the inverse of the above complaints (good players donging vs. bad players getting free kills), but it's related to the sheer amount of power available to players and I felt like mentioning it.

Sooooo yea, you kind of gave my earlier point a nice example.