"A bit of reason to [the Bungie] madness..." (Destiny)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Thursday, July 11, 2019, 21:10 (1743 days ago)

So this evening, dmg04 was feeling particularly generous on da redditz and gave some full explanations on certain aspects that exist on Bungies side of the equation that are so good, I just had to share it just to make sure it wasn't missed by the lot of us. So here they are, with links if you want to see the OP thread posted in. Cheers.

On QOL requests and choices in development:

Hey all,

Thanks for the continued feedback on QOL requests from previous seasons and expansions. It helps us to prioritize what players want most, and gives teams an idea of what to schedule for future patches/hotfixes.

To give some context on why QOL is sometimes delayed or not acted upon, I want to call out the Mercury Sparrow bullet in particular. This was something that players were asking about many, many moons ago. It's something that the team actually tried to implement, but it ended up causing some bugs that would crash the game, or impact various activities on Mercury. This jammed up our development timeline, as we essentially lost resources that could have been allocated to testing other content that was being cooked up.

Ultimately, it was decided that the Mercury Sparrow QOL request needed to be reverted and looked at again in the future, as we didn't have enough time to hammer away at the issues brought on by the change. To put another way, each QOL request has a trade off. Do we go back and add sparrows to mercury, or do we spend the same amount of test time on things like the Dreaming City curse cycle? What if a simple QOL request ends up bringing deep rooted bugs that require more time to hammer out? Keep working on that, or hit other items that are easier to implement?

Another example that we worked on during Season of the Drifter - do we add bad luck protection to sleeper nodes, or do we focus on bad luck protection for Raids and Wayfarer objectives first? We'd been getting a lot of feedback on RNG requirements for Seal acquisition, so we needed to figure out which objectives would make players happiest, knowing that we couldn't hit all of them in one fell swoop. Sometimes we have to make these calls knowing that we won't have time to address the items we couldn't hit, so we have to prioritize what to tackle ASAP based not only on community feedback, but our release timelines and people we have available to work on the content.

All that said, we're going to continue collecting feedback from threads like this to ensure community priority is understood. Hope this gave a bit of insight as to how we approach these feedback items!

Cheers!

On percentages Vs Raw numbers:

A bit of reason to this madness:

When we do exact numbers, there’s extra work if we have to update them. Lets say you have to get 300 grenade kills, and we decide to lower it to 100. Every localized version of Destiny 2 has to make, test, and verify the change works. Sure, changing a 3 to a 1 doesn’t seem to hard, but when you’re doing dialogue tor the entire game, typos can slip through, and lead to confusion.

With percentages, the change can be made on the backend, communicated via TWAB/tweet, and done. No risk to game text that could have a minor bug introduced, then require a future hotfix to address.

We put exact numbers where we can as often as we can, but sometimes opt for percentages to give room for updates if needed, without having to test in every language.