Question about this point (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Friday, April 01, 2016, 15:56 (3252 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

Second, there are many of us who don't mind a bit of extra motivation to do things we thought were fun, but may have forgot about, or perhaps missed the first time.

So this is clearly an important point for some people here. I also enjoy having motivation to try different activities, but for me the motivation has nothing to do with ranking up or light levels. For me, the motivation is new gear: new toys to play with. Is that not the case for others? Sometimes acquiring new gear comes along side an increase in light level, but that isn't where the enjoyment comes from for me. I sometimes feel the need to increase my light level (because the activities I enjoy require it) but the process of raising my level only ever feels like a chore to me; a process I must go through in order to enjoy my favorite activities later. The gear is the draw for me.

My question is: would you still feel motivated to try these different activities if light level was out of the equation? If new gear was still given out within the frame of a weekly reset, but without the aspect of levelling up?

Just to be clear, I don't mean any of this to be argumentative in any way. Just genuinely curious to hear people's perspective on it :)

My light levels haven't changed in months. I'm not sure why you think that's a drive for most of us who play as much as you do.

Perhaps I misunderstood SquidNH3's point, and your support of it. I'm not saying that light level is what drives most of us to play... but it sounded to me like that's what Squid was saying, and what others were agreeing with. I thought Squid was making the point that increasing levels is a carrot on a stick that encourages players "do things we thought were fun, but may have forgot about, or perhaps missed the first time.". Apologies if I misunderstood the context :)

Weird - I was pretty sure I answered this last night, but apparently I dreamed it. (Or maybe the next IB game started, and I got distracted. Totally possible. ;) )

Can't speak for anyone but me. Some of the extra motivation, for me, is gear. RNG enables me to get the same gun over and over and over again... but many of them won't be enjoyable to use. I play, I get new stuff, I try it out. Sometimes it's a disappointment. Sometimes it's my new favorite thing. Sometimes it makes me go back and re-evaluate something I got a month ago, but wasn't sure about. (I didn't like it enough to use it, but I wasn't sure I was ready to dismantle it.)

LIght levels are pretty irrelevant; a bunch of weeks doing challenge mode got all 3 characters to the 315+ range, and there is enough infusion fodder left that I can bring up a 280 weapon that makes me happy to a reasonable level.

Which sounds a lot like how it works for you... which is why I'm surprised that you misunderstood squid's post. Then I went back and read YOUR original post, and his response - and I realized the misunderstanding might come from the fact that you asked some general stuff and some specific stuff, and his answer wasn't actually tied to any of that. (At least, for me it wasn't.) squid's answer seemed to answer the vaguer, not-specifically-asked question "why is the current system still fun?" (When I read your post, that was the 'boiled-down' thrust I got from it. You were asking specifically about light levels, and gear progression, and RNG... but mostly you were asking "why do these played-out hooks still keep you playing?" And when I read squid's response, it answered that question for me. Which is where MY response came from. ;) )

So it's totally possible that you didn't mean to ask that more-general question; that you were looking for specific answers about light levels and gear progression and RNG. And it's totally possible that squid wasn't answering that more-general question, but that I just misinterpreted him. But neither of those things is relevant when you ask ME why I answered the way I did, because that's how I filtered the existing info. :)

I loved doing the Refer-a-Friend stuff with InsaneDRIVE a couple of weeks ago. It got me gear that wasn't available anywhere else, which is cool - but none of what it got me is better than what I already had, so in reality, it was meaningless. Except... it wasn't. I got to do stuff I've done before - with someone who'd never done it. Which meant seeing it through new eyes, vicariously, again. I really enjoyed it.

Last night, nico said "I need to kill Thalnok for my last calcified fragment - would you help?" I've killed him a million times. (Well, that's an exaggeration. Maybe half a million.) But I haven't killed him in a while, because I really don't think about going back to the Court of Oryx very often, and the last few times I've gone, he hasn't been the Tier 3 boss. So we beat him a couple of times. And it was pretty fun! And I got a blue engram that decrypted to an Antipodal Hindsight with Rodeo and Hidden Hand, which I'm looking forward to trying out. Bonus!

Overall, I think if I weren't playing with people who were doing this, or that, I'd have a pretty fixed Destiny schedule; a little bit of raiding, a lot of PvP. Occasional daily missions for easier PvE and marks. Because other people need other stuff, I get to go back and do stuff I'd simply not do again - and almost always, it's fun.

I can't remember the last time something felt like a grind.