No way to prove incremental skill/power? (Destiny)

by Earendil, Monday, February 02, 2015, 17:28 (3373 days ago)
edited by Earendil, Monday, February 02, 2015, 17:33

I absolutely love the raids, and am much less bothered by many of the things that seem to eat at others. I consider myself blessed :)

But there is one thing that has slowly dawned on me. The hardest raid stage (be that normal or hard) makes for a poor show of incremental improvement. It's also a poor show of consistency in yourself or your team. I believe this makes the raid (or whatever you find hard in Destiny) a lot more tedious, because it's hard to show improvement.

The analogy that comes to mind is playing Tetris. Imagine a game of tetris where the game only increase your score every thousand blocks. It would be significantly harder to figure out based on score if you were getting any better.

Now, I do not believe the raids should be changed. I only use them as an example of something in Destiny that I still fail at. I don't fail at bounties or missions. If the Crucible TrueSkill is doing it's job, I'll never notice improvement in my Crucible game, at least by the numbers. Heck even Nightfall is still doable because I'm a dirty cheating whore of a Sunsinger.

I think the problem is that in all those cases the challenge is either
A) Not hard enough
B) Not incrementally measurable enough
C) Too long of an activity.

Basically, I want something similar to Firefight. And while I'm making wishes, I want the option to select which race I face (or multiples) and whether I have unlimited ammo :)

Firefight, similar to Tetris, is a game you are expected to "lose". The goal then is to see how high of a "score" you can get. I don't care about competing against others in this way, I just want to see my own performance change over time, or that of my teams.

It could even be a little more goal oriented than kill stuff. As an example, I love the lamp section of the new raid. Imagine a "game type" that involves seeing how far down a path you can make it while being mobbed by the enemies. Stick a bunch of blocking Shriekers in the way so people can't simply run it. It doesn't need to be complex, or story driven. Heck, claim that it's a "simulation" to prepare you for the coming wars :)

I will acknowledge that some of these problems come down to my current skill level. Some of you actually are failing at bounties, others are trying to figure out how to shave 30 seconds off of hard mode raids. But I have to figure that a good pit of the community is where I'm at, facing a difficult pass/fail raid, and more or less breezing through most everything else.

Does anyone else feel similarly about the current stock of Destiny challenges? Is there some other way you can see tweaking the existing game to provide smaller more incremental degrees of success? Or do you all feel like the current game satisfies that for you?