*Raises hand (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, April 11, 2019, 06:31 (1839 days ago) @ Ragashingo

There is a difference between cheesing the raids and getting 1000 cores.

The raid is ostensibly fun and challenging to do the 'real' way. Earning 1000 cores is bullshit busy work, and needing cores gets in the way of fun.

It's like Bungie lost sight of why people play Destiny. And yes, everyone likes different things but I think most people play to have fun and do cool things with their friends. Needing items and requiring grind to powerup actively impedes your ability to hop on and play fun activities with your buddies.

Find your game's strengths and play them up, while getting rid of what gets in the way of that.

While there is some amount of fun that can be derived from giving the player limited resources and forcing them to choose to upgrade X or Y... it has gotten almost to the point that more often than not I seem to be almost out of resources and am being asked to split them between A,B,C,D,E,F,G, and H. And while that is happening, I can't play some of the activities I want (without suffering a penalty to damage dealt and taken) until I grind out the resources to upgrade all those letters...

But Destiny players are all too eager to use cheeses even when there's nothing to gain. During Last Wish, for instance, the crew I played with beat the Raid a couple of times without any cheese but we kept encounter people who never beat it without cheesing it. That was very disappointing. Some of that for sure comes from the fact that Riven is a very unforgiving encounter. But I will continue to argue that some of it comes because too many are not willing to ever call out any cheeses or cheats for what they are.

I have never beaten The Last Wish “properly”. I’ve spent a couple hours attempting it with several groups, so I’m familiar with the proper strategy. And in my opinion, that fight is possibly the worst, least fun encounter in all of Destiny. If it weren’t for the cheese, I’d never have gone back to Last Wish. That’s, like, totally just my opinion man. BUT, the raid is not a self-contained activity. It is also one of the best activities for levelling up. Plus it’s the only way to get certain awesome weapons, and one of the few sources of armor with enhanced perks. So when a cheese was discovered that’s us skip the majority of the Riven encounter, I personally was all for it.

That’s the thing with a game like Destiny, where activities are not simply things to do for their own enjoyment, but pathways to other unique content (such as exclusive weapons). If it weren’t for the Riven cheese, I’d never have bothered with trying to beat Last Wish, which means I’d never have gotten 1000 Voices. Without that weapon, my Gambit experience over the past ~6 months would have been significantly different. A bad encounter (IMO) is no big deal on its own, but when it stands as a barrier between the player and other fun, unique content, well that’s a whole different situation.

This is where I have a deep personal disconnect with Bungie’s supposed design goals. They seem to believe that things like hitting level 700 is some kind of inherently meaningful achievement. But it isn’t. Not for me, at least, or anyone I play with. I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment from it. I think “thank god I don’t have to worry about that crap anymore, and I can just focus on doing things purely for the fun of it”. Raids hit a similar point for me. Obviously, there is some inherent satisfaction that comes from completing a raid, at least the first few times. But when it can take 20, 40, or even 60 completions before you get 1000 Voices or Anarchy to drop, we’re well past the point of an activity being intrinsically rewarding. On a side note, I think this specific issue is why so many people have a cynical point of view when it comes to some of Bungie’s design goals. When they talk about power levels or infusion systems as being part of a system that feels rewarding, many of us call “BS” on that because our experience with those systems is literally the exact opposite of what Bungie claims to believe they are.

Back to the main point though, all of this shows very poor judgement on Bungie’s part. The initial “problem” was so not a problem that it never occurred to most of us that it wasn’t by design. You earn a pinnacle weapon by completing a triumph that is shared across 3 characters, and all 3 characters get to claim the drop. It seemed perfectly fair and logical. Yes, you could dismantle 1 or 2 of the duplicates and get a handful of cores out of it, but many players just opted to keep the multiple drops so they could experiment with different mods and/or not worry about transferring guns between characters. It was a nice, fair, player-friendly system. But Bungie is so apparently paranoid about even the most minor bypassing of their player time-throttling system (enchantment cores) that they decided to patch that out. In doing so they created a far more rare but also far more lucrative exploit. And their solution to that problem was to take action in such a way that shows, yet again, that they are more protective of their throttling system than they are of the player’s experience. I don’t throw the Gambit Prime armor glitch in this category, because that was directly impacting players’ experience in a negative way. But cores are not something that anyone wants, likes, or enjoys.

So all in-all, I feel that your stance against “exploiters” is misplaced in this case. Destiny is a wonderful game that also has a long history of putting frustrating and unnecessary barriers between the players and the things that players want to do in the game. Cores are one of the most obvious and flagrant examples of that trend. If bungie fucks up and introduces a bug that allows a tiny handful of players to bypass that bullshit design element, then good for those players as far as I’m concerned. It isn’t impacting any other players in a negative way. I’m just disappointed that Bungie has their priorities so utterly inverted in this particular case.