I didn’t really play the game much until about a month ago, so I’m grinding out maybe 2 light max a week from the milestones I can accomplish on my own. I’ve never run the raid and don’t really feel like holding a group back so it’s my own fault, though.

I am looking forward to the expansion, however. More shotgun = more better.

The soft cap is ostensibly designed to keep the community leveling together. I’d argue it does the opposite of that. Miss a week, and you fall behind with literally no way to catch up. It sucks.

Why is there no way to catch up?

you can catch up, but catching up is even time gated due to soft caps on drops that require you to wait on weekly resets for milestones.

The soft cap is ostensibly designed to keep the community leveling together. I’d argue it does the opposite of that. Miss a week, and you fall behind with literally no way to catch up. It sucks.

Why is there no way to catch up?

Two reasons - one is the one he gave (that even when you DO start playing regularly again, you're gated, so you're only improving at a slow rate past a certain point), the other is that a lot of endgame activity continues to evolve, and it can be difficult to find a group of friends that are willing to go back and play the stuff they've already moved on from.

(Say you want to play Eater of Worlds, Normal, because you've finished Leviathan but you're not leveled enough for Prestige. But all your friends are currently running either Prestige raids, or have moved to Spire of Stars - I guess you could LFG it, but a lot of those have ridiculous requirements, and finding one that fits your needs might be more trouble than it's worth.)

I missed the early days of EP, when there were groups of 9 interested players in almost every instance - I'm now fully leveled, but finding a group that wants to jump in and play EP takes planning and work; I can't just jump on when I'm free and find a game.

::shrug::

I'm actually fine with that; I figure sooner or later it'll happen organically, and in the meantime there's plenty of other stuff to do... but if I were looking for specific endgame activities, and I had gotten behind on leveling, I might be frustrated.

The soft cap is ostensibly designed to keep the community leveling together. I’d argue it does the opposite of that. Miss a week, and you fall behind with literally no way to catch up. It sucks.

Why is there no way to catch up?

If you fall behind a week, you’ll be behind by a week until everyone hits max level. If you fall behind farther than that, it will take even more time to catch up. I’m at 366 right now. I’ve played enough in terms of sheer time to probably be close to max, but I have t played the exact way Bungie thinks I should, so I’m stuck in a slow progression every week.

It’s not the end of the world, I’ll get there eventually. I spent last night going through part of the Sturm/Drang quest because stabbim convinced me it was worth it. That’s not helpful to my level, but it was fun, but in terms of progressing, it was a complete waste of two hours. That’s bad design, in my opinion. For a game that’s ostensibly about having fun and playing the way you want, the game is awfully restrictive in terms of actually making progress after the soft cap.

I mostly don’t mind too much. As much as it may not seem like it, I’ve truly become content with the way I play Destiny, and doing what I want while slowly making progress where ever I will. I have tons of fun just fucking around in that game while making zero progress towards leveling up. Part of it is Moments of Triumph coming up, and needing to rush to get stuff done. I won’t be heartbroken if I don’t get it, but I want that shirt.

I’ll admit that spending too much time on reddit over the weekend got me riled up about this particular issue. Too many folks arguing that Whisper is special because you have to wait four a random chance to even start the quest, that people like me don’t even deserve it because I haven’t put in my time, and I clearly don’t really care because if I did I’d obviously be at max level already.

Why is it so hard for Bungie to understand that I want to experience the best content in Destiny too, without having to treat it like a second job?

That honestly sounds great. Mix that with Korny’s proposed system of actually upgrading and building weapons.

I would love to see a version of Destiny where most people used a bunch of blues, with a few purples here and there, and exotics being more rare. High base stats with decent perks for blues, and slightly worse stats but slightly more “fun” perks on Legendaries. It would possibly allow fir the return of Fatebringer and The Messenger tier Legendaries.

Perhaps a better solution is to change the infusion system.

It could work like an EXP bar. So the higher light level you infuse, the more your item progresses. But, you could infuse lower level stuff to gradually increase the power of your gear. This way even shitty blue drops you get while playing could be useful. Hmm. Do I use it to level up this gun a little, or dismantle it for materials?

That sounds like a great idea in theory, but in practice (personally) it sounds like a huge chore.

The system could easily be redesigned

As a software engineer, when I hear phrases like this it kindles a white hot fire inside me that makes me want to go out and punch something.

And I'm not ashamed to admit it. :-)

I suspect that the only reason anyone “likes” power levels in Destiny is because we get a dopamine hit every time we see our numbers go up. It stimulates our most base-level motivational instincts. Which isn’t inherently good or bad, I suppose. My personal issue comes down to the fact that it is so blatantly layed overtop of a gameplay experience that works perfectly well without it. I’d go even further; I think Destiny’s net gameplay experience would be better without the gating and filtering effects of the power level economy. You can still have a game where players gain health and do more damage as they progress. That can be achieved through other mechanics and systems that are divorced from any sort of RNG-based level climb.

You know what game did Investment systems right? Wa Dying Light. You initially level up as any normal RPG, earning points to put into unlocks such as Parkour abilities, tools, damage, crafting, etc. But once you unlock every skill on any one of your three skill trees, the game unlocks a fourth leveling tier, called "Legend", where you earn points by playing the game like normal, as well as by doing specific actions like turning in resource drops. These points can be used on the Legend system, which helps to improve specific aspects of your character beyond the normal leveling system, without impacting that system at all, as it's stat-based as opposed to affecting your abilities or perks.

So you can have a player who has put 200 hours into the game being rewarded for it, without punishing a player who only has 20 hours in the game, as both have the same exact access to skills, and can do every part of the game. While the legend system only adds ten skills to level up, each one has 25 levels, so you'll be putting points into that tree long, long after you've hit max rank and unlocked everything else.

I believe that is the fundamental point of contention around the RNG-based power levels; it isn’t clear what they add to the game that couldn’t be achieved in other, more player-friendly ways, aside from the obvious and shallow “numbers going up” effect, plus the more manipulative aspects of gating access to activities through an RNG loot system (as a simple example, Halo gave players access to new weapons and equipment over the course of the game that helped the player feel more “powerful”, even if only situationally).

This is why I've always championed the "Everything should be good" style of development, and an easy fix has been there since Day 1 of Destiny. Let the rarity define the number of perks of a piece of gear. Let us improve our common gear up to Rare through use (except for armor, which should be able to be upgraded to Legendary). Make it difficult to earn Legendary weapons, but make them stand on even ground with a player-built Rare (Rares made by players should have better stats than a Legendary, but fewer perks). Let the Legendaries keep the most interesting perks, such as Dragonfly or Cocoon, but let me bring my damaged Traveler's chosen into a Raid if I want to.

They could even reintroduce the +/- system that Destiny 1 had for our personally leveled gear to further differentiate it from the Legendaries.

And Exotics all need to have a specific method to obtain. The Whisper quest shows how to do this at it's absolute greatest, but there can be so many ways to do this. We're getting a record book/stats page, which would be a great way to make Exotics unlockable. Want those now-awesome Doomfang Pauldrons? Sure, you can try for an Engram, OR get 500 Defender Super kills. 1000 Super Kills unlock the Masterwork.

In no way am I against power levels as a concept. I’ve played plenty of games where I felt like they added nicely to the experience. I just feel that Bungie has yet to implement power levels in a way that justifies their existence, outside of the “hours played” metadata.

I think the move to a four day reset will help a lot. That way you can have two opportunities during the week to do things, leading to a more consistent climb (which explains why the new Max Light is so ridiculously high now compared to previous scaling). The downside is that the higher they make the climb, the less meaning it can have, otherwise they're putting a serious disconnect between players who grind for hours a day, and the casual folks. If a person at 360 Light sees that some of the new content requires 600 Light? Why should he bother? That shows a steep time investment required, and so he'll likely just give up and move on to another game that respects his time.

Specifically, I think Warmind used Power Level in the best possible way in two cases:

1. Escalation Protocol. When we first started Warmind, an entire group of us could not kill the first boss. Heck, it was questionable if we could get to the first boss. Over time, as we’ve leveled up, that experience has changed more and more for the better. Now, I can almost solo level 1 if I really try, and I’m certainly a deciding factor in the first 3 or so rounds. That’s pretty cool.

2. Spire of Stars. That final room and especially the boss fight overwhelmed us while being just on the edge of maybe we can do this. (We couldn’t.) But, go a couple of weeks forward where we took Bungie’s encouragement to play other activities as a group (we did previous Raids and Prestige modes and nightfalls together) and pretty soon our team had gained enough Power Level that those final Spire encounters changed. Where they were on the far side of being nearly too difficult, now they were on the near side and several of us noted how much more fun we were having with the encounter.

(I also though the new faction rallies and their Renown system was a pretty good use of limiting players to increase fun. Even around here we had people who had all but ignored Lost Sectors proclaiming how much fun they were having and how interesting each hidden location was.)

So, my thought is: Sometimes holding players back a little is actually a pro-player strategy. If you can encourage players to go back and have more fun with past or unplayed content without making it too much of a chore to level up... then that’s a good thing. Destiny certainly doesn’t achieve pure “good thing” status. My main Titan build is below 380, for instance, because after sharing 1500+ weapon parts and spending another 10,000 glimmer, I didn’t get one single Void Melee Arms upgrade. There’s definitely a point that the RNG and Power Level gets silly and frustrating... but a little bit in the right places can provide tangible benefits to players’ experiences.

(Yes... anyone who says they can’t think of a single way that something can be good or bad is pretty much akin to lighting up the Raga Signal / Horn of Urgency.)