Isn't it great that there are other things to do in life? (Destiny)

by scarab , Monday, January 12, 2015, 14:18 (3397 days ago) @ Cody Miller

[snip]
Hell, they committed when I KNEW it was bad. And If I could tell, without having played a second of the game, then surely someone at Bungie thought "Gee, making your level progression depend on RNG is not such a good idea.

You can use RNG to control progress because you can set targets of what proportion of your population attain a given level then adjust probabilities accordingly. A small proportion of players will do amazingly well and that will be an encouragement and a goad to get other players sinking time into the game.

Of course, given that Destiny's state is held on servers and it is always online... Bungie could have just set progress targets over time, set milestones... then just have the server do a DateTime call every time the game does a GET and then look up the expected progress for that date and award progress to the character accordingly.

You could say, "3 months in a character should be level 30, with 7 exotics, 13 legendaries and x amount of upgrade units to spend on those things".

Let people work to reach level 20 but post 20 let progress be dependant on time since game first played.

Then you make the game amazingly fun to play so that anyone who hasn't played in x weeks has missed out on oodles of fun.

So a level 20 who has been playing since launch has had four months of fun plus level 30 progression.

A level 20+ player who missed 6 weeks during that time has level 30 progress but has missed out on a whole 6 weeks of the best fun you can have in a game. You would feel sorry for the guy who missed out on those 6 weeks.

Bungie still gets to gate progress but nobody is obliged to put in more hours than they want.