Competitive play and Meaning (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, June 20, 2017, 00:40 (2804 days ago) @ Harmanimus

In a PvP context this has never been my experience with Destiny. My best rewards were often in losing matches. And the capability difference in Trials Gear, like all the Meta-Rolled gear, requires the end player to be able to use it. Smart play still beats out the numeric advantages of their gear.

Not that I like the functional Gear hidden in the Lighthouse. Just that the I have never seen a reward stream influnce subsequent wins in any major form.

For Destiny PvP, this only applies to Trials, because that's the only pvp mode where you could get higher than otherwise available in pvp light level gear (and, to a lesser extent, because adept weapons are very slightly overstatted). You would only notice any difference in Trials and Iron Banner because those modes are the only ones where light level matters.

I'm using a theoretical example to illustrate a point about potentially rewarding players for doing well on a ranked ladder system, which is rumored - it's not a real thing you could actually see and play right now, just a theory.

With that in mind, just as I mentioned that Destiny goes long stretches between updates, so too did trials gear top out at 400 and allow us plebs to get equal footing after a while. But those first weeks, if you didn't take 3 hunters to the lighthouse for gear, or luck into the right drops, you were at a disadvantage. There were definitely games I played where my 390 guy had to land 4 shots to kill a 400 player with the same gun who only needed to land 3 to kill me. It was noticeable. If there were grades of increasingly better rewards, as is typical in a ladder system, you end up giving the best players better gear, making them even better, while giving the worst players nothing, keeping them the worst. The result is that the game becomes harder for bad players and easier for good ones, and that's the opposite of what you want in pvp. You want everyone to feel like it's a challenge, rather than wanting to de facto segregate the good and bad players into a 1% and 99% situation.