It all sounds good! (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, April 06, 2018, 10:13 (2212 days ago) @ Funkmon

By the way, I'm calling it now. If they return to primary special heavy, within a month the subreddit will complain and say they liked it better before.

Now that's a bet you'll likely win, if only because any change causes somebody who was quiet before to speak up in displeasure.

I wonder about the community summit. Will it all be twitch streamers? Will they be the well known ones who quit playing? Will they be the ones who still play?

They need advertising, so of course it'll be all Twitch streamers.

Even if they find the ones who actually do know what they really want, what's the game?

Are the streamers wanting something that will attract more viewers? That could be bad.

Of course. Remember that these days, streamers and viewers are very much a huge focus for publishers. They want ALL of the money, and all of the attention, so they ravenously cling to whatever it is, and so developers react to that before people move on to the next thing. Otherwise they're left behind. Right now is a tough time for many developers, so fewer and fewer are making choices for the sake of the game itself. Look at Paragon, or Gigantic. Solid games with a dedicated playerbase, but without the huge Twitch numbers or exponential growth... The publisher decided to kill them off, rather than polishing or tweaking them.

Before the era of Twitch, you had a game like FF XIV, which had a full year to completely overhaul its systems for the sake of making a better game. Would that have happened these days?

Then again, you have modern games made almost exclusively around the idea of having viewers. Games like Cliffy B's Lawbreakers, which aren't very appealing to many players (especially with the barebones content), but are entertaining to watch... for a while. A huge chunk of the game's marketing was through sponsored streamers, but during the game's Betas, the streamers were pointing out that the game didn't have much content to keep them interested for long, and the game was pretty much completely Dead on Arrival without the Streamers' support.
Even Cliffy B was salty towards one of the streamers paid to play his game, but who wasn't into it...

Are streamers who quit playing so much the best people to ask? Every game release, big fans leave and new big fans are created, and that's the nature of the game. Should Bingle have built in warthig jumping to keep Dark Helmet in their games? Probably not.

Warthog jumping was definitely a fun feature that I was sad to see go in favor of more predictable design. That said, the streamers and the ultra-competitive are definitely NOT the audience that should be catered to when it comes to weapon balance or sandbox changes. Just look at how the so-called"Pro-Team" ruined Halo for the majority of Halo fans. Sure, they have new fans that like the direction that the games went, but Halo isn't a console seller like it once was (If it wasn't for the dolts who got an Xbone for the MCC, I feel like 343 would have been disbanded already, and the Halo series put on Hiatus like the Gears franchise was).

Are streamers who are STILL playing the best people to ask? Maybe not. If they think a lot of the Destiny community is upset with the game, the gripes of those who play 6 hours a day probably aren't the same as normal peoples', and may even be worse.

Definitely. Remember when these same people were the ones affected by the XP throttling, and the people who don't play as much were permanently punished by the normalized XP changes? Who was it that totally called it well before it happened?

Should they listen to Cody Miller? No.

That's a good mantra.

I hope they can navigate this minefield!