Doesn't comfort me in the least. (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, September 15, 2016, 14:58 (3130 days ago) @ Xenos

IGN has a short article about PS exclusives and pay to win. Here's the excerpt on pay to win:

"We certainly have a goal of never being pay to win," said Barrett. "That’s part of the goal of Destiny. We’ve set that bar for ourselves. It’s really just a lot of feedback from internally at Bungie, and we’re always thinking, 'Hey, is that going too far into that territory?' Generally, we all go back to not even getting close."
Derek Carroll, PvP Lead for the live team, said that playing the game themselves helps the developers when deciding what to do with the game.
"When we’re proposing these things, the whole studio is like, 'I know how that would affect me,'" he said. "You’re able to really clearly put yourself in the players' shoes, and go, 'I would be really mad if you did that.' We try not to do things that would make us mad. And we assume other people have the same bar."

I should say up front, just for the record, I'm not all worked up about this. I don't think it's a big deal. It's just... gross. On to my point:

I totally believe Barrett when he says that Bungie themselves play this game like crazy, and they're very sensitive how this stuff effects the players because they themselves are players, etc etc. And yet... it's still in the game. Even though many people at Bungie are also Destiny players and fans, we all know for a fact that there are outside pressures at work (Activision, for example).

Let's set aside the "pay to win" argument and just say what this is: players who pay extra money can now get more loot drops than players who don't. Some people may think this is a huge deal, others might think it doesn't matter at all, but the fact remains that players who spend extra money on microtransactions are now getting more game-effecting content than those who don't. A line has been crossed.

At the moment, the line has been crossed in a relatively minor way. But that could change very quickly. All it would take is for Bungie to add a "must have" weapon to the vanguard or crucible reward loot tables. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, the rep packages already contain items that cannot be obtained any other way... imagine if one of those items became the next Gjallarhorn. All of a sudden, the community at large would have much more of an incentive to buy as many boosters as they can and grind rep as quickly as possible.

This is exactly the kind of stuff that has shifted the way I feel about Bungie over the past couple years. I still like them, but I can't say I trust them anymore.