Lady Efrideet's "Family"? Also probably a shitpost.

If you've been playing Iron Banner, you may have noticed that High School Sophomore Lady Efrideet (seriously, she could not sound any less tough) has been mentioning her "family" in the outer rim during quest turn-ins. Apparently she spent the last 400 years hanging out with these people, and while it was hard for her to leave, she decided the time was ripe to... I'm not sure why... sell us some stuff?

In addition, there's some other banter in the Iron Tower or whatever it's supposed to be called that makes it seem as if Saladman was aware of what he calls "animal hunters" that went to live in the rim.

Foreshadowing for Des2ny? Or maybe some sort of live event?

Shitposting follows (christ I'm bored today)...

At this point, I'm thinking:

Bungie needs to stop with the stupid expansions and their horrible implementations and just make Destiny a $5/month subscription game. It would be more money for them and everyone would always be able to access everything (as long on they're on a PS4). They could then just push content as it was ready (let's be honest, that's basically what they're already doing now) and they could shift their full design team to the Live game rather than splitting efforts between Des2ny and DesMicroTransUniversetiny. For that matter, I'd really love to hear some accounting of what all of that sweet, sweet microtrans money is buying people. It sure as shit isn't buying them the specific ornament that they wanted, nor has it brought SRL back to us. My guess is it's just buying Jason Jones some sort of gold plated Ferrari, or otherwise paying back Activision for some shady contract language that fucked Bungie six ways from Sunday - both seem equally improbable.

Regardless, Lady Efrideet appears to have more backstory than any other character ever introduced in Destiny, and it amounts to "I used to live somewhere else before I lived here."

I've rated the game today in every metric I can think of:

-Gunplay: 10/10, the only reason anyone is still playing this game.
-Art: 10/10, but no one talks about it, ever, and we all take it for granted.
-Sound: 7/10, this would be a 10 but there's so many things that sound the same that it gets very confusing, and then the music is a bit much, don't you think?
-Netcode: 1/10 just garbage let's all rage quit.
-Raids: 8/10 Vault of Glass was amazing but since then it's really been downhill. The new raid is okay I guess, but after running it three times a week for six months I think I may get bored of it. Raids are the only reason anyone is still playing this game, why aren't they better?
-Level/Mission design: 4/10 this game could do so much more, and deserves so much better.
-Backend: 0/10 fire those people. It shouldn't take you a full day to fix one floating chest on Mars, let alone the entire lifespan of this game. Oh, wait, it's still not fixed. Also it took 2 years to fix a missing art asset on Birth of History. Come on Bungie, these should be pushable within a week of discovery.
-Communication: 3/10, it's like Bungie has never made an MMO before and wasn't adequately prepared for the number of complaints people were going to have. Also Deej annoys me but Cosmo is cool. I'm just kidding, I love you Deej, please tell me something that doesn't sound like a spokeshole ad exec from Activision is using you like a ventriloquist's dummy.
-MicroTransactions: 0/10 worst thing ever, let's all rage quit.
-The Grind: 8/10, it would be okay except that I remember how it used to be and the PTSD makes me rate it 1 point lower. Honestly I enjoy how the RoI grind is more natural feeling and I'm getting constant upgrades. Except -1 point because getting ghosts is RNG. And -1 more point because artifacts are like ghosts without the candy shell. So really this is 5/10.
-In Game Currencies: 2/10 there clearly aren't enough of these, can we please get 17 more?
-Vault Space: 1/10 because I forgot how little we used to have and also because the fact that it used to be worse doesn't make the current state "good."
-Nathan Fillion: 10/10 that man can do no wrong and I would watch a video of him brushing his teeth for the dentally prescribed two solid minutes.
-Josh Gordon: 10/10 never cutting him from my team.
-Something-4: 0/10 why wasn't this just Nathan Fillion? Seriously everything about him says you wanted Fillion and then balked at paying his rate. His character art even looks like a low-rent Cayde-6.
-Weapon Balance: 7/10 it's the best it's been except for how it was at launch. Please do weekly tweaks to the the balance to bring OP weapons down and underperforming weapons up.
-Replayability: 10/10, obviously, because I replay the same boring ass content 10000 fucking times trying to get a goddamn ghost to drop. Please continue to design uninspired and formulaic content that is required for grinding higher light levels and then site the replay numbers of said content as "evidence" that people love your game.
-Fun had during Replays: 2/10 WHERE IS MY GHOST UPGRADE??? Okay, it was pretty sweet to shoot a bunch of stuff, even if all that stuff is basically the same as all the other stuff. 3/10. There is a guy somewhere who got a ghost and relic when he needed them and he gives the fun during replays a rating of 7/10, but he also never replays anything, so fuck that guy.
-The Grimoire: 10/10 I wish this was actually part of the game. In fact, I wish Des2ny was being designed by writing the grimoire for it first, and then making of game out of all the cool shit that happened in the grimoire they wrote. Except no one wants to eat a space worm.

Okay, I'm done. Thanks for reading. I told you, it's been a boring day at the office.

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1995 views

Everyone subscribes for one month after an expansion. "Does" the content and then cancels to wait for the next one.
Pays $5 instead of $30.
Bungie closes.
(hill valley 1985 alternate timeline:to retain subscribers Bungie feels forced to make the game more addicting with more time gating and micropayment hooks.)

locked

1885 views

Everyone subscribes for one month after an expansion. "Does" the content and then cancels to wait for the next one.
Pays $5 instead of $30.
Bungie closes.
(hill valley 1985 alternate timeline:to retain subscribers Bungie feels forced to make the game more addicting with more time gating and micropayment hooks.)

I really doubt that would happen. Bungie would just have to shift content rollouts to be more trickle-y, so like instead of RoI all dropping at once, maybe just the first mission shows up, and then the social space at the same time. When the next IB rolls around, Lady Efrideet is there, too. Then we all get some messages about the fallen, WHAT ARE THEY DOING? And then the rest of the RoI missions appear (it's now been 2 months). Then the raid two weeks after that. And so forth. Knowing something new could appear at any time, people will not want to cancel their subs, but rather would be more likely to keep it active and sign in every day looking to see if anything new was happening.

locked

1872 views

Everyone subscribes for one month after an expansion. "Does" the content and then cancels to wait for the next one.
Pays $5 instead of $30.
Bungie closes.
(hill valley 1985 alternate timeline:to retain subscribers Bungie feels forced to make the game more addicting with more time gating and micropayment hooks.)

I really doubt that would happen. Bungie would just have to shift content rollouts to be more trickle-y, so like instead of RoI all dropping at once, maybe just the first mission shows up, and then the social space at the same time. When the next IB rolls around, Lady Efrideet is there, too. Then we all get some messages about the fallen, WHAT ARE THEY DOING? And then the rest of the RoI missions appear (it's now been 2 months). Then the raid two weeks after that. And so forth. Knowing something new could appear at any time, people will not want to cancel their subs, but rather would be more likely to keep it active and sign in every day looking to see if anything new was happening.

That would be awful, and I'd hate it. (I guess it doesn't actually matter what I think, though, because if they went to a subscription model, I'd stop playing, so my opinion on rollout speed is irrelevant.)

locked

1896 views

Everyone subscribes for one month after an expansion. "Does" the content and then cancels to wait for the next one.
Pays $5 instead of $30.
Bungie closes.
(hill valley 1985 alternate timeline:to retain subscribers Bungie feels forced to make the game more addicting with more time gating and micropayment hooks.)

I really doubt that would happen. Bungie would just have to shift content rollouts to be more trickle-y, so like instead of RoI all dropping at once, maybe just the first mission shows up, and then the social space at the same time. When the next IB rolls around, Lady Efrideet is there, too. Then we all get some messages about the fallen, WHAT ARE THEY DOING? And then the rest of the RoI missions appear (it's now been 2 months). Then the raid two weeks after that. And so forth. Knowing something new could appear at any time, people will not want to cancel their subs, but rather would be more likely to keep it active and sign in every day looking to see if anything new was happening.

That would be awful, and I'd hate it. (I guess it doesn't actually matter what I think, though, because if they went to a subscription model, I'd stop playing, so my opinion on rollout speed is irrelevant.)

Really? The only games I can think of that really did this well were WoW and Kingdom of Loathing (KoL is the gold standard of F2P MMO games IMO), but it worked brilliantly for both of them. WoW is slightly different in that they also have large expansions on top of their trickle of updates, but for what Destiny is presently charging for xpacs compared to the actual amount of content in them, I feel like they'd be making a lot more money giving them away as part of a subscription, and - hopefully - we would get a lot more content with less obvious time-leech gated forced replayability married to it.

locked

1901 views

Everyone subscribes for one month after an expansion. "Does" the content and then cancels to wait for the next one.
Pays $5 instead of $30.
Bungie closes.
(hill valley 1985 alternate timeline:to retain subscribers Bungie feels forced to make the game more addicting with more time gating and micropayment hooks.)

I really doubt that would happen. Bungie would just have to shift content rollouts to be more trickle-y, so like instead of RoI all dropping at once, maybe just the first mission shows up, and then the social space at the same time. When the next IB rolls around, Lady Efrideet is there, too. Then we all get some messages about the fallen, WHAT ARE THEY DOING? And then the rest of the RoI missions appear (it's now been 2 months). Then the raid two weeks after that. And so forth. Knowing something new could appear at any time, people will not want to cancel their subs, but rather would be more likely to keep it active and sign in every day looking to see if anything new was happening.

That would be awful, and I'd hate it. (I guess it doesn't actually matter what I think, though, because if they went to a subscription model, I'd stop playing, so my opinion on rollout speed is irrelevant.)

Really? The only games I can think of that really did this well were WoW and Kingdom of Loathing (KoL is the gold standard of F2P MMO games IMO), but it worked brilliantly for both of them. WoW is slightly different in that they also have large expansions on top of their trickle of updates, but for what Destiny is presently charging for xpacs compared to the actual amount of content in them, I feel like they'd be making a lot more money giving them away as part of a subscription, and - hopefully - we would get a lot more content with less obvious time-leech gated forced replayability married to it.

Never played either of those. Never even heard of KoL, but never picked up WoW SPECIFICALLY because it's a subscription-based game. Just not interested.

locked

1874 views

Everyone subscribes for one month after an expansion. "Does" the content and then cancels to wait for the next one.
Pays $5 instead of $30.
Bungie closes.
(hill valley 1985 alternate timeline:to retain subscribers Bungie feels forced to make the game more addicting with more time gating and micropayment hooks.)

I really doubt that would happen. Bungie would just have to shift content rollouts to be more trickle-y, so like instead of RoI all dropping at once, maybe just the first mission shows up, and then the social space at the same time. When the next IB rolls around, Lady Efrideet is there, too. Then we all get some messages about the fallen, WHAT ARE THEY DOING? And then the rest of the RoI missions appear (it's now been 2 months). Then the raid two weeks after that. And so forth. Knowing something new could appear at any time, people will not want to cancel their subs, but rather would be more likely to keep it active and sign in every day looking to see if anything new was happening.

That would be awful, and I'd hate it. (I guess it doesn't actually matter what I think, though, because if they went to a subscription model, I'd stop playing, so my opinion on rollout speed is irrelevant.)

Really? The only games I can think of that really did this well were WoW and Kingdom of Loathing (KoL is the gold standard of F2P MMO games IMO), but it worked brilliantly for both of them. WoW is slightly different in that they also have large expansions on top of their trickle of updates, but for what Destiny is presently charging for xpacs compared to the actual amount of content in them, I feel like they'd be making a lot more money giving them away as part of a subscription, and - hopefully - we would get a lot more content with less obvious time-leech gated forced replayability married to it.

Never played either of those. Never even heard of KoL, but never picked up WoW SPECIFICALLY because it's a subscription-based game. Just not interested.

KoL is worth checking out. It's different from pretty much everything else out there, plus it's web-based, free, and hilarious.

www.KingdomofLoathing.com

edit: So you're opposed to the concept of a subscription-based game, period? Even a hypothetical one with daily updates and massive amounts of content?

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1881 views

edit: So you're opposed to the concept of a subscription-based game, period? Even a hypothetical one with daily updates and massive amounts of content?

Yes.

It has to do with my own shortcomings; if I'm paying for something over time, I don't feel good about it when I have other things going on in my life. It's irrelevant that the yearly cost is the same as a one-time-purchase, because once I've spent the money, I'm okay not playing. But if I'm paying over time, I HAVE to play, or I'm unhappy. I understand that's me, but it keeps me from playing ANY subscription-based games, and I'm okay with that.

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1849 views

edit: So you're opposed to the concept of a subscription-based game, period? Even a hypothetical one with daily updates and massive amounts of content?

Yes.

It has to do with my own shortcomings; if I'm paying for something over time, I don't feel good about it when I have other things going on in my life. It's irrelevant that the yearly cost is the same as a one-time-purchase, because once I've spent the money, I'm okay not playing. But if I'm paying over time, I HAVE to play, or I'm unhappy. I understand that's me, but it keeps me from playing ANY subscription-based games, and I'm okay with that.

That's not a shortcoming, that's human nature.

A subscription like that incentivizes the audience to think that any minute spent not playing is a minute you're paying for something you're not getting.

If it was a subscription, it'd have to be yearly, like XBL itself. If you did it monthly, you'd have people wanting to go on vacation when they can't play so they could save five bucks, and then get back on the plan when they can play. Nightmare.

The only subscription game I ever played, briefly, was Eve Online. And they're adding a F2P tier.

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1834 views

Since I could pay the sub with in-game money, every second I didn't spend earning money in it felt like real money lost. It was basically a job and a rental at the same time.

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1835 views

Bungie needs to stop with the stupid expansions and their horrible implementations and just make Destiny a $5/month subscription game. It would be more money for them and everyone would always be able to access everything (as long on they're on a PS4). They could then just push content as it was ready (let's be honest, that's basically what they're already doing now) and they could shift their full design team to the Live game rather than splitting efforts between Des2ny and DesMicroTransUniversetiny.

I see problems with this. Good content takes a long time to develop. This means for good content, that hits critical mass, will be released infrequently. If that's the case paying monthly is pointless and you might as well sell them as expansions.

If you do get content every month, it will be small, insubstantial, and not hit that critical mass. Then why would it be worth paying for?

MMOs suck. All of them. Destiny can be a kick ass FPSRPG (or RPGFPS). Anything moving Destiny closer to the MMO model will not help the quality of the game.

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1906 views

Bungie needs to stop with the stupid expansions and their horrible implementations and just make Destiny a $5/month subscription game. It would be more money for them and everyone would always be able to access everything (as long on they're on a PS4). They could then just push content as it was ready (let's be honest, that's basically what they're already doing now) and they could shift their full design team to the Live game rather than splitting efforts between Des2ny and DesMicroTransUniversetiny.

I see problems with this. Good content takes a long time to develop. This means for good content, that hits critical mass, will be released infrequently. If that's the case paying monthly is pointless and you might as well sell them as expansions.

If you do get content every month, it will be small, insubstantial, and not hit that critical mass. Then why would it be worth paying for?

MMOs suck. All of them. Destiny can be a kick ass FPSRPG (or RPGFPS). Anything moving Destiny closer to the MMO model will not help the quality of the game.

I just wholly disagree that good content can't be designed with a steady revenue stream. You build some small events to trickle out and then occasionally drop something huge on your audience and they all freak out.

locked

1870 views

Bungie needs to stop with the stupid expansions and their horrible implementations and just make Destiny a $5/month subscription game. It would be more money for them and everyone would always be able to access everything (as long on they're on a PS4). They could then just push content as it was ready (let's be honest, that's basically what they're already doing now) and they could shift their full design team to the Live game rather than splitting efforts between Des2ny and DesMicroTransUniversetiny.

I see problems with this. Good content takes a long time to develop. This means for good content, that hits critical mass, will be released infrequently. If that's the case paying monthly is pointless and you might as well sell them as expansions.

If you do get content every month, it will be small, insubstantial, and not hit that critical mass. Then why would it be worth paying for?

MMOs suck. All of them. Destiny can be a kick ass FPSRPG (or RPGFPS). Anything moving Destiny closer to the MMO model will not help the quality of the game.

I just wholly disagree that good content can't be designed with a steady revenue stream. You build some small events to trickle out and then occasionally drop something huge on your audience and they all freak out.

It doesn't have to do with the revenue stream. It has to do with the frequency of content release. If you paid 5 bucks a month but only got a Taken King every year and nothing else, I'd sign up.

locked

1854 views

Bungie needs to stop with the stupid expansions and their horrible implementations and just make Destiny a $5/month subscription game. It would be more money for them and everyone would always be able to access everything (as long on they're on a PS4). They could then just push content as it was ready (let's be honest, that's basically what they're already doing now) and they could shift their full design team to the Live game rather than splitting efforts between Des2ny and DesMicroTransUniversetiny.

I see problems with this. Good content takes a long time to develop. This means for good content, that hits critical mass, will be released infrequently. If that's the case paying monthly is pointless and you might as well sell them as expansions.

If you do get content every month, it will be small, insubstantial, and not hit that critical mass. Then why would it be worth paying for?

MMOs suck. All of them. Destiny can be a kick ass FPSRPG (or RPGFPS). Anything moving Destiny closer to the MMO model will not help the quality of the game.

I just wholly disagree that good content can't be designed with a steady revenue stream. You build some small events to trickle out and then occasionally drop something huge on your audience and they all freak out.

It doesn't have to do with the revenue stream. It has to do with the frequency of content release. If you paid 5 bucks a month but only got a Taken King every year and nothing else, I'd sign up.

You do realize that you get more than that for less right now right?

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1794 views

If you've been playing Iron Banner, you may have noticed that High School Sophomore Lady Efrideet (seriously, she could not sound any less tough) has been mentioning her "family" in the outer rim during quest turn-ins. Apparently she spent the last 400 years hanging out with these people, and while it was hard for her to leave, she decided the time was ripe to... I'm not sure why... sell us some stuff?

I appreciate how Lady Efrideet is unconventional to what we've seen from other Iron Lords, well at least Lord Saladin. She has her wits about her and doesn't get down on the terrors of the Darkness. It's so relieving. Cayde can't be the only completely jaded speaking character in the entire Guardian corps and Iron Lords. You don't have to sound tough to be a mofo'ing badass.

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Indeed. She's only a unaging 400 year old superhero who can leap to the top of a three story building and who might be a little annoyed with you if you shoot her with an anti-tank rocket. :)

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