That’s a good way to kill most of the player base. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, April 03, 2018, 12:35 (2370 days ago) @ cheapLEY

If you have fun until you stop playing… what's the problem?

How many concurrent players are there on Until Dawn right now? Does that make it a bad game?

Until Dawn doesn’t suffer if you’re literally the only person playing it. Low player counts would actively make Destiny less fun.

Even with high player counts Destiny took 2-6 minutes to matchmake one premade 4 man team against another. With low player counts I can only imagine that number will go WAY up.

The core problems of Destiny 2 are the fundamental pillars of design: There's no nimble backend, so changes take forever. There's no dedicated (pvp) servers, so matchmaking is a p2p and vastly flawed as a result. There's no strong leader with a true vision for destiny's design, and everything feels like it's designed by a committee of 100 as a result.

There's a really basic philosophical issue at the core of all of this, which is what to do about imbalance in your game.

The GOOD way to handle imbalance is to take the lesser performing design and buff it until it's just as desirable as the better performing design. Your benchmark should be the best performing thing in the game that is also the most fun to use. Occasionally you will take something down a peg because it's blatantly broken, but by and large "make it better" should be the driving mantra. This is, of course, scary as fuck to control freak game designers because it often leads to emergent and incredibly powerful gameplay that needs to be reigned in quickly due to its brokenness, and it also means the game will start spiraling out of the constraints of your neat and tidy design spreadsheets very very quickly. We can call this approach "the squeaky wheel gets the grease."

The BUNGIE way to handle imbalance seems to be to nerf the heck out of whatever is currently fun to use in order to bring it back down to a rigidly constrained pre-determined spreadsheet level of game effectiveness. They're also combining that with a really habitual problem of misinterpreting data in the worst possible way. If you told them your car window wouldn't roll down, they'd take the door off the car to "solve" the issue. People seemed to play until endgame, and rather than making endgame more fun, they made the grind to reach endgame more frustrating so it would take longer. They seem to have a very hard time separating knee jerk internet reactions from well considered design theory, don't seem to understand the core of why D1 was fun in the first place, and are completely married to overcorrecting any and all changes in rare and massive updates rather than performing weekly balance tweaks or feature adds. We can call this approach "the nail that stands up gets hammered down."

I really strongly feel that game design benefits most from applying grease to poorly performing elements, rather than by hammering down the more exceptional parts of your product. The first method leads to many varied and complicated systems that are at first confusing, but ultimately very fun and interesting, while the second leads to homogeneity and boring, simplistic interactions.

Ultimately, I stopped playing because the whole game became far too predictable and boring without any opportunity for emergent play, clutch play, skill plays, etc etc. Sadly, I don't see Bungie changing that any time soon, especially given their published road maps, because - ultimately - the same people are in charge over there making the same flawed decisions to hammer down nails rather than risk letting the game grow into something other than their spreadsheet's perfect angel.

And now a shameless plug here: Fortnite has the squeaky wheel philosophy on full display and it's HELLA fun.