Same goal, different ways (Destiny)

by marmot 1333 , Monday, November 27, 2017, 13:41 (2632 days ago) @ CyberKN

It's interesting to me that they used this XP scaling mechanism as opposed to other ways to achieve the same result. Public Events could have awarded less experience, and strikes could have granted more.

Based on what happened, I imagine that they set experience rewards earlier in development, and later wanted to scale/limit the rewards due to exploitability. Public events are quick and easy to find and repeat, whereas strikes take much longer.

Someone earlier in this thread mentioned some expectation regarding average activity length. I wonder why Bungie didn't figure out an average "experience per minute" and then settle on that amount for each kind of activity.

This is an example of a fascinating problem that game developers are having now since so many games are "shared" and always online. It boils down to the fact that there will be people who play non-stop and players who jump on for an hour a week, and the developer doesn't want the experience to diverge tremendously between those two. Additionally, if there is an exploit or farming technique, people will probably use it even if it is not fun. (See: Loot cave in vanilla D1)

Personally, I think I fall in the middle of usage. I played a lot of D2 in the first month or so, took a break, then started playing on PC but not nearly as much. Lately I play enough to get the easy milestones (Flashpoint, crucible, clan contributions) each week for one character.