Natural progression (Destiny)

by RaichuKFM , Northeastern Ohio, Saturday, September 02, 2017, 13:12 (2437 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Wait, wait. So, by this logic, should it matter if the actions are restructured, or reordered, if they are at their core repeated? This is where we get to the disconnect between your emphasis on mastering skills vs. most everyone else's emphasis on fun. And I'm not knocking your priorities!

But sometimes you want to repeat actions to gain mastery, and sometimes you want to repeat actions to have fun.

There is a difference between the game encouraging you to repeatedly play a segment of the game, and to repeatedly play a different segment of the game.

Which differ in many ways, but the two relevant things here are accessibility, and fun. Strike playlists and farming one area of Patrol are both pretty accessible, so we can put this one aside.

The difference here is which people find which fun. The difference is calculated to be better for that number of players who like Strikes more than farming, which is probably a substantial amount of the playerbase.

It doesn't seem any different to you because you don't like either, and you're opposing the investment system in its entirety. But you can still recognize that they are different, and one could be better than the other, even if you think they are both bad.

You don't need to equivocate them, which is at worst just wrong and at best something that will be opposed instead of your actual intent, to make your point. You think being incentivized to repeat something is bad, right? Because you should only repeat it if you want to do the thing again for its own sake?

Just say that. It will be a lot less inflammatory, although what am I saying arguments will inevitably happen.

For my two cents, I'm okay with investment systems. They aren't perfect, and Destiny definitely isn't, but what is?

If you could magically make every piece of gear with every perk available for someone to take and customize as they see fit, would you have a better game? I'm not sure.

I play Magic: the Gathering, a competitive trading card game. I'm a filthy casual, and so I build ridiculous decks that are all about fun, more than efficiency. (You may have noticed a pattern.) They tend to be good at doing what they want to do, and some are easier or more difficult to stop, but there tend to be few dedicated tools to stop people from stopping me. Sometimes, I want to play in an environment where everyone can access all the cards. (Maybe not all of MtG's cards, that's too many cards, but that's beside the point.) That would work great for me, and my More Fun style shenanigans.

Only, I would run into no end of decks that win immediately. You can start culling and tweaking cards to mitigate that, but blah blah metagames. Now, you obviously still have to deal with that without unlimited card access, but- as shallow as it is- rarity is a balancing mechanism. It's one of the worst ones, in my opinion, but it makes things easier for the casual player to find a fair match nonetheless.

Not a solution, but at least a mitigation of the problem. Back when the Vex Mythoclast was broken, how many people used it? Imagine if everyone had had one?

Now, had everyone in development had one, it probably wouldn't have shipped so broken. Which is more my point than false balance.

Without the investment system, would they have pushed such a lovely amount of customization and a system where gear is personal, or cut down to archetypes and made something more like Halo, or I don't know Call of Duty? Do you have to unlock guns and mods in that? I only know local co-op Black Ops II, which I don't really like.

Anyways,

I guess my actual point is I like Destiny the way it is, and some of the worse parts of investment systems are part and parcel with that, as are the good parts, like the feeling of progression and whatnot.

And you're free to disagree, but I'm going to disagree right back, and it's not because I haven't had the enlightenment moment where I recognize the evils of investment systems that were there all along. Because I have recognized their faults, and decided, you know what? I'm okay with that.

(I did later play a CCG where you buy a box and that has all the cards and you can build several decks out of it to play against each other. It wasn't as fun for me, because the tempo and style of play was different, and it lacked depth and room for shenanigans. The devil you know, I guess.)