“Fix Trials” indeed (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Saturday, April 25, 2020, 18:18 (1461 days ago) @ Claude Errera

Bungie: “We want to make sure we really stick the landing with Trials. It’s important that this doesn’t come out half-baked”

Trials loot table for April 24:

• 3 Wins (Powerful): Chest
• 5 Wins (Powerful): Eye of Sol, Sniper Rifle
• 7 Wins (Pinnacle): Exile's Curse, Fusion
• Flawless (Pinnacle): Chest

That’s right, the reward for going Flawless this week is literally the exact same drop as the reward for 3 wins.

Sorry guys, but if the devs responsible for bringing back Trials have so little understanding of the activity that they allowed it to ship like this in the first place, I don’t trust them to know how to fix it. I hope they do, but I’m not holding my breath.

All three of my characters are at 1009, missing exactly one piece to advance to 1010. (Boots on my Titan and Warlock, Helmet on my Hunter.)

They were all there before I did any pinnacle activities this week.

I've gotten 22 pinnacle drops so far this week (8 on my Warlock, 7 each on my Titan and Hunter), and none of them filled that missing slot on any character.

Chappy is in worse shape than I am - he's at least one full week ahead of me (maybe 2) in terms of being one piece short, and he gets more pinnacle drops than I do (he does the raid 3 times, adding 12 drops/week).

The idea of a guaranteed pinnacle drop in a SPECIFIC SLOT would make me work really hard to get to the lighthouse. (This week there's no point, but if boots or helmet show up before I complete...)

I’d have a huge problem with this entire approach, were Bungie to shift that way. I’m totally with you when it comes to the frustration of reaching the level cap when RNG just wont give you the drop you need, but there are other, better ways to overcome that problem (like some kind of automatic slot prioritization when it comes to pinnacle drops). The problem with this bring THE primary reward for going to the Lighthouse is that 2-3 months later, it’s gone. Meaningless. Heck, it might be even faster than that. You might get the drop in the slot that you needed a few days later.

My Adept Trials weapons in D1 meant something. They were great guns, but they were also trophies, pieces of memorabilia. Every single time I equipped and used any of those weapons, my experience of earning them was brought to the forefront of my mind. And that’s very compelling for me. It’s the same reason I use Not Forgotten all the time, even in high-level PvE activities where it is FAR from the most effective option. It’s because the climb to Legend meant something to me. It’s an experience that I’m happy to hold on to, and having an in-game physical avatar for that experience that I can use while fighting the darkness is, IMO, one of the best things about Destiny. Replacing stuff like that with a slightly more efficient way to climb to the top of an ever resetting and repeating light level climb reduces it to the point of being meaningless, IMO.

Hey, I'm with you on this. I love the idea of adept weapons coming back. (Apparently, so does Bungie - there's discussion of them as Trials rewards in the latest TWAB.) I wasn't saying that a fixed pinnacle roll is the perfect long-term solution - I was saying that it's not even remotely stupid at this particular stage in the season. (I'm ahead of probably 95% of destiny players in terms of maxing light, and I'm not there yet.)

You suggested that it's idiotic that the 3-win reward and the 7-win reward this week were the same, except for light level. I was simply pointing out that a different perspective might see that situation as less than idiotic. I wasn't for a minute suggesting that that should be the way it goes every week. I don't think Bungie is, either.

There are a few big unknowns that make it tough for me to say anything with certainty. So what I'm about to say is based on several educated guesses and partial assumptions :)

In a vacuum, I totally agree that a path towards a specific pinnacle in a specific slot is a fine, perhaps even a great idea. But I don't believe for a moment that this was Bungie's intention. It looks to me like all the Trials loot items are put into a pool, and each week the 3, 5, 7, and Flawless rewards are pulled at random. I don't think that the pinnacle drop being the same item as the 3 win drop is intentional... I think Bungie's loot system for Trials is a trainwreck in part because it makes situations like this week's loot selection possible. It could just have easily been the chest piece at 3 and 7 wins, or 3 and 5, in which case you wouldn't even have the benefit of one of these drops being higher level than the other. So while I could get behind the idea that Bungie knows the current loot setup isn't ideal, but this is something they're trying in the meantime, I see no evidence to support the possibility that this is what's happening. As I already mentioned, it looks to me like the evidence points towards the loot being totally random in its distribution from week to week (for example, the class item has only ever been available once, but the chest piece has been available 4 times now). So I think the whole idea of this being by design is a non-starter.

Even if I'm totally wrong about all that, it still seems kinda crappy to me. What we're basically talking about here is the latest iteration of the whole "forever 29" problem from vanilla D1. It's a problem that absolutely does not need to exist, aside from the fact that Bungie keeps designing it into their progression system. It could be countered any number of ways. Drop slot protection, cross-slot infusion, slot selection when completing pinnacle activities, etc. The only reason this problem exists is because Bungie wants it to exist, because it keeps people logging in more hours to repeat activities more than they otherwise might. So the whole idea of them saying "As a reward for completing one of the greatest challenges in the game, we're going to let you get passed this arbitrary barrier that we've put into our progression system to juice more playtime out of our players" just strikes me as scummy. Stuff like that would make me want to stop playing, not play more. Just my personal thoughts on that, no shade intended on anyone who feels differently <3

On the subject of Adept weapons, this is where my skepticism of Bungie could very easily come across as overly negative, but hear me out :) I'm sure there are plenty of discussions and conflicting opinions within the studio about all of this stuff. When when it comes to the powers that be (the ones who get final say on this stuff), I don't believe for a moment that they "love the idea of adept weapons coming back". I think they thought they'd nailed it. Hence the whole “We want to make sure we really stick the landing with Trials. It’s important that this doesn’t come out half-baked” line from the ViDoc (boy, I bet they regret that one, lol). I think the Trials community's near-unanimous outcry over what a huge blunder this has been is impossible for Bungie to ignore at this point, so they have no choice but to say that they're looking into it, at the very least (I'm also sure there have been more than a few "I TOLD YOU SO!"s going around within Bungie). Again, I could totally be wrong here. But if I am wrong, that would mean Bungie knew that Trials was coming out half-baked. Besides the fact that this would make them bold-faced liars, it also strikes me as unlikely due to the fact that they really need Trials to be a hit. This season is the thinnest chunk of content they've ever released. They needed Trials to carry it. I don't think they would have shipped it unless they thought it was ready. And that right there is the cornerstone of all my concerns around Bungie right now. It worries me that a studio like Bungie, with all their talent and creativity, would look at this iteration of Trials and say to themselves "It's ready. Lets ship it". Because if their collective judgement is in fact that far off the mark, then I can't trust anything they say. If they come out next week and say "we've got it figured out! We've got a whole overhaul ready for Trials, it will go live next season, and it'll be awesome", well, I'll just be waiting for the first day it goes live and the community finds a bunch of equally obvious problems as we have right now.

I do hope I'm 100% wrong about all of this. I know I'm coming down hard on them right now, but that's only because they're one of the great development studios, and they've set their own bar high. The past ~year of D2 has looked like amateur hour in a lot of ways. I know they can do better, and frankly, they need to do better because they're bleeding players.