Regarding reload perks (Destiny)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Friday, May 22, 2020, 15:55 (1433 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

You've been posting alot these last few weeks, and I would like to say, I've been very impressed by your capacity to elucidate. To explain or clarify. Your capacity to do so is a refreshing light, and is honestly something I aspire to. Your posts as of late have been some of the best we have at DBO. SO thank you.

...now to the topic...

It’s true that reload perks are generally more desirable than many other perks. But the problem with taking a dispassionate, birds eye view of the perk pool and saying “let’s just slow down the bonus effects of all reload perks” is that it doesn’t take “feel” into account. Reload perks have one of the most noticeable impacts on the feel of a gun out of all the perks in the game. And for most players, there’s a threshold that a reload speed can hit where it just becomes too long for a player to want to use the gun. That threshold will certainly vary from player to player, gun to gun, but at a certain point it doesn’t matter what other perks a weapon has; if the reload is too slow, in just not going to use that gun. And many guns in D2 are already in that state, unless they have some kind of reload perk.

So the issue is the how the base reload feels without a perk to push it up? If perk feels SO GOOD that it's a MUST, then that is broken. Is the issue than with the base archetype? I'm not sure we can test that.

I concede for the moment. I don't know the answer. I don't know what answer to give.

In other words, reload perks are required to make many D2 weapons viable, because their base reload speeds are too slow. Reduce the effectiveness of those reload perks, and all Bungie has done is shrunk the pool of weapons that I will ever use.

As has become a running theme of mine over the past year or so, this looks like yet another example of Bungie making design choices based on data, rather than feel or fun. Sometimes, a certain perk/weapon/ability being used more than all the others is evidence that they got that perk/weapon/ability RIGHT, not that it is too good and needs to be reigned in.

As mentioned, perks alone should not be making weapons viable. That is broken. For Data Vs Fun though... well, one is arguably universal, and one is... per person, yes? Why the game feels as it does is not something I've heavily looked into, so forgive me as I work to extrapolate.

Say, your job is to balance out all this kit; what are you going to go on? What can you prove to your boss? I guess the question I'M asking is, can fun be codified? Can "feel" be codified? I don't know the answer to that either. I suppose so, I mean look videogames. Something is going right. Are there folks who don't like how, say, Rose feels to use? I don't know, but I guess you'll be able to see by how much in the data. Which, taking that line of thought... would be rather comforting to work with. It might not be the right way to do it, but it's definitely something tactile that can be far more easy measured.

I don't disagree on your read, but I'm not sure what I would give to Bungie as an alternative, provided they listen at all.