Nifty, I'd love to talk more about the internal workings of your largeish company. I'm so curious about the actual process of making the games, I wish I could be a fly on the wall during the meetings some of those companies have.

The journalist in me is ever curious.

I don't know man, anyone who's played video games before should have been able to see most of the problems coming a mile away [...]

I don't disagree with the complaints, but there is a huge difference between seeing a problem coming, and...
1: knowing what to do about it,
2: Having the resources and time to do it.

Bungie has all the resources they need. They have hundreds of millions of dollars. The solutions come from games with a fraction of Destiny's budget.

Time is probably the resource they didn't have, but even then they chose to have Activision a part of their process by signing with them.

Lack of content. They needed a time sink to keep people playing. I think whatever redesign hit in the year before release really fucked up their plans, and this was their way of giving people something to do in the meantime.

Speculative of course, but that's my best guess. Maybe there were people there who really thought that was the way to go.

But that's the thing. It all stems from being an MMO. There's no way to keep producing new content at the rate people play it in a financially viable way. It takes way longer to make stuff than it takes people to play it. That means having people log in everyday and playing your game is a terrible goal, since they will necessarily be playing stretched, repeated, or grindy content. This is why on their face at the very core, MMO games are terrible, unless perhaps there is a large way for players to themselves create content.

FPS content is hard to make. Bungie would have been wise to recognize this, and instead make Destiny an FPS with strong co-op elements. And when you beat it? You beat it and move on instead of having your time wasted. You know, like a certain other classic game they made that influenced every console FPS game out today.

But they could easily have made the game feel like it had scads more content by changing the order in which missions unlocked, driving the player through the main story (which would be finished level 12-ish) before unlocking the side missions and strikes. Suddenly the gamespace doubles, and the missions would have felt like revisiting old friends rather than literally exploring the same space two missions in a row.

And the strikes could have random enemy factions, or sometimes different bosses, or even events that are chosen from a list rather than always being the exact same thing.

There could have been single player and 3-player experiences with the same level of challenge as the VoG.

The content gates could have been what we expected after playing beta: That the level 20 monsters were the gateways to whole new areas rather than guardians of tiny little caves. Barring a door with a "your gear must be X level to enter" is lame and boring. Barring it with a badass monster is fun. When you can finally kill that monster, you feel awesome.

So much of this game design feels like amateur hour. Bungie claims to make games they want to play. Is Door-Guarding-Simulator their favorite game of all time?

Frankly I think Bungie is caving too easily, especially on the issue of upgrading exotics. What's the solution there-- here's an update for your gun, now it does more damage to keep pace with the game.

Thanks, I guess? If the game is going to reward people for not playing it then I suppose that's what they'll do, but heck, at least they won't have to complain about it, I guess.

No. The solution is to ADD DAMAGE UPGRADE NODES ONTO EXISTING EXOTICS. That way, you upgrade your three new nodes and have it maxed, without ruining the work you did previously. New exotics found look the way they do now. If anything, it would be a talking point when 10 years down the line, your Hawkmoon has a bazillion upgrade orbs, proving you had it since day 1. You know, the plan they originally had for showing off with your weapons.

So simple even a caveman could do it.

Would you prefer Luke rend his clothing and scream at the sky in sorrow? ;)

I would. It'd be a lot funnier. ;p

That's the spirit.

A suggestion was made that the shards business was intentional.

I pointed out that this wasn't true and I provided evidence to show that it wasn't.

Why are you trying to make out that I was being overly dramatic?

Or did I just miss a joke?

Yeah, a bit lost in translation. My bad!

Angry that sucky decisions were made and angry because it was obvious that the decisions were bad, even before they were implemented.

We are left wondering: can anybody be that incompetent? Or are they just pretending that those decisions were accidents. "We honestly didn't know that people would be pissed off by more grinding."

But time will tell. We shall see what they do next and,also, what happens in the first six months of destiny two.

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.

I found some people elsewhere complaining about the Heavy Ammo bug, now that they've announced an intent to fix it, because obviously they only need to change two lines to fix it and just didn't do so because they don't care.

I put in effort beating the original Halo on Legendary but it wasn't a chore. I didn't think of it as, "putting in effort". I thought of it as a difficult thing that I wanted to get better at.

Halo was my first console game, my first fps, and my first game with a game pad. I managed to beat the game on legendary whilst still being bad at aiming. I learnt: advanced cowering techniques, fight avoidance, AI manipulation, and how to carry a sniper rifle to the end of the level to kill those two red elites in the long corridor without cover. And it got easier as my skills improved and I could actually do some ballsy fighting.

The things we should be doing to progress in Destiny should be:

• learning the strengths of our weapons and gear
  
• using them to our advantage
  
• good use of environment
  
• using strats that tilt the combat in our favour
  
• coordinating well with other Guardians

We shouldn't be collecting shit or putting in hours to progress.

If Bungie needs to time gate then let them time gate at the server. If the game is two weeks into a season then your characters get the drops commensurate with that stage of the season. If you spent that two weeks enjoying the game then great. If you spent it doing something else then that is fine, you wont be punished for it (your drops will be waiting in your inventory). Your loss was in missing out on two weeks of fun in Destiny with your mates.

The game gets time gated but you don't have to pay the price.

I hate the idea that we have to earn our progress. Because at first glance it doesn't seem unreasonable. Who wants to be a "welfare check freeloader"? But then I remember that I already have a full time job, and family, and commitments. The amount of hours that I once put into the game were coming close to a full time job. And I wasn't being paid to do those hours! If Bungie wants me to put in those hours and if they don't want to pay me in fun then they had better pay me in money. And I mean more than minimal wage. Given that I already have a job, I think that Bungie would have to offer at least £60 per hour to even tempt me now. (And I'd still have to clear it with my current employer. :-)

Of course that's not going to happen and there was a time when I worked those hours for free. But I looked in a mirror and saw MUG stamped on my forehead so those days are gone forever.

That's where I stand when people talk of earning progress. It puts me in the world of money and work and in that world my work costs money.

Think about it: if you have put hours or weeks into "earning" those raid boot then you have sold your time cheap. Maybe your current employer should ask you if you'll work for him for a pair of pretend boots. Boots that will make it easier for you to earn a better pair of pretend boots. ;-)

Anyway, moving on...

even if Bungie did just time gate at the server, how could you ensure that you get the specific gear that you want?

I think that this could tie into another problem, a problem with raids and randoms, a problem with players without mics.

I'm generally averse to social engineering attempts but something needs to be done about the lack of mic usage in the Destiny population. This needs to be tackled on a broad front but one possible thing that might help would be the creation of tasks that require guardian cooperation and specifically the cooperation of guardians who can talk to each other in real time.

This goes back to my idea of tower gear.

Tower Gear

• you perform activities in the Tower or that launch from the Tower
  
• those activities require guardians who talk in real time to each other
  
• you earn credits that let you buy specific gear with specific perks
  
• you get one piece of Tower Gear per season and per DLC

You can buy (any?) piece of gear and specify (any?) perks or damage type. Each piece of gear/perk has its price.

Asking people to buy stuff feels as hypocritical as Sideshow Bob using a TV to decry the evils of TV. In my defence I would say that:

• there is no RNG so no unlimited sink of time
  
• you need good teams to enjoy raids and anything that encourages mic use in a cooperative environment could help create a climate where good teams could form. I think this would tilt the balance from work to fun and I don't feel bad about asking people to invest time in fun.

I still feel dirty for suggesting that people earn their stuff. Destiny infects your thinking. You always come back to thinking of making people pay for playing the game.

To get back on thread topic...

maybe the mistake of requiring shards was caused by infected thinking. Bungie wanted progression to be easy but their thinking had been infected by the idea that the player must pay in blood to progress. Even when they didn't want to - they still injected grind because the game wont let go of your thinking. It infects everybody. Try suggesting a new gameplay feature that doesn't have some form of grind or cost built into it :-)