Pretty sure all those "mistakes" were intentional... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, January 26, 2015, 08:07 (3381 days ago) @ Leviathan

I think, perhaps, the triple negative is confusing everyone - including myself - about what I said there. I literally now find myself unsure of what point any person not me is trying to make and whether I agree or disagree with them. I'm equally sure it's not important enought to straighten out.

Thank you for making me laugh aloud. :) I too feel like people are not having the same conversation with each other here, hah. All I've gotten for sure is material for a meme: "Bungie makes decisions; makes fans angry. Bungie acknowledges errors; makes fans angry." ;)

This is about where I REALLY start to miss the old Bungie Podcast, where we'd get to hear Bungie talk in-depth about some of their decisions and thought process.

The problem, as I see it, is that we have Luke Smith coming out and making what is a perfectly reasonable statement if taken on it's own.

"We did some stuff, and we're not happy with how it turned out. Won't make that mistake again".

Where it gets tricky (and where I think some of us get frustrated) is when we start trying to understand why Bungie created these systems in the first place. Put another way:

"what did Bungie think would happen when they added Radiant materials?"

This is a point of frustration because to some of us, there is only 1 possible reason for them to exist: to slow/gate progression. So when a Bungie employee comes out saying "we didn't mean to slow progression, it didn't work out the way we wanted", it's confusing.

I love it when guys like Smith reach out and share some insight with us, I just wish we could be given a more complete picture.

As far as House of Wolves goes, I'm afraid my pessimistic side kicks in a little bit. Let's look at Destiny's progression system. In the early game, upgrading armor is gated by materials (harmonic essences, plasteel plating, wire). By the time we climbed up to the mid 20s, we all had so much of this stuff that it had lost all value. I've got somewhere around 2500 harmonic essences in my vault right now.

So Bungie felt like they needed to add another currency to keep our progression slow. Ascendant materials come into play, giving us another (rarer) currency to grind for. But once again, the grind is drawn out so long that we acquire these materials faster than we acquire new ways to level up. I've now got about 150 pieces of ascendant energy, and that number continues to climb every week.

So once again, Bungie makes the same decision. "We don't want people to use ascendant materials to hit 32, because people have too much of it already. They'll hit 32 too fast". So they add ANOTHER currency.

This is where I get a bit frustrated by the claim that Radiant materials didn't work the way they'd hoped. They are another level of the exact same system of escalating currencies that has been in place since day 1. There should be zero surprises about how they turned out.