Luke Smith on mistakes made in TDB and improvements with HoW (Destiny)

by slycrel , Sunday, January 25, 2015, 18:48 (3381 days ago) @ bluerunner

You know, bungie really messed up with the engram system. But only a little. They just applied the wrong fix.

Back before engrams were changed I was getting blue and purple engrams much more frequently. The pacing was really really good. If I put in 4ish hours in an evening I was likely to have a legendary engram in that time.

The problem was that people felt ripped off because of how the engrams were labeled. They implied that they were legendary items, not a chance to receive a legendary item.

Bungie made a good, but very drastic, fix. They kept their original math, but reduced the drops. So you'd still get a legendary at about the same rate as before, but you got many less engram drops. This killed some of the "fun" and added a more grind-y feel.

I think Bungie has been making up for this and applying ad-hoc fixes since then in regards to drops.

Add that to the early comments they made such as "we are surprised that people are playing so much".... and you get commendation marks and new raid currencies. The raid currencies are somewhat appropriate, but they really up the amount of time you have to spend to keep up.

Which is fine, but if you don't keep up with that new time investment bar, you get less for your investment. Not to mention it adds to the grind and leans more hardcore -- and with that will come burnout.

Also, a big stumble was VoG being obsoleted. They missed the boat on this big time. There is no reason that the VoG should be giving out sub-par gear. If they had added a couple new pieces with light equal to the new vendor gear, many groups would have continued raiding the vault in addition to adding crota into their raid rotation. Only having one raid viable at a time seems like almost a cop-out. Also, it break the immersion factor.

They can't sustain this grind game with the playerbase long term. I'm looking forward to them improving this situation, hopefully as early as house of wolves.