AFK and Crucible Marks (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Thursday, August 14, 2014, 03:21 (3563 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Again, if players playing your game TOO MUCH is somehow undesirable, then the system is flawed.

Can you imagine if a Mario 64 only let you collect 30 stars a week?!

But Destiny is not Mario 64.

It's a game world which depends upon a consistently large player base. That's necessary to keep things like matchmaking queues short, to keep public events populated and to overall sell the impression that as a player you are one of many, bumping into friends and strangers alike as you go about your fun. Sometimes doing things on your own, other times as part of a group, but all the while aware that you're not playing a single player game.

As much as that's the goal, the truth of it is that Destiny is a finite world. There are only so many places to visit, so many enemies to kill, so many strikes or raids to run; eventually you'll have seen them all, have no new goals to strive for and become bored and stop playing. When this happens to a player, that global population shrinks incrementally. If it happens fast enough, the game ceases to sell the fiction of a thriving virtual world and becomes a ghost town. A game which is inherently social without anyone to be social with is a failure.

For their part, Bungie will keep adding to the world with expansions and new content, but they don't want you to start bouncing off the unseen limits of the game — like discovering the edge of The Truman Show's set — too soon. They can't release new expansions every week, so it's absolutely imperative they put in some speed traps to stop you from getting there before they're ready to give you something new. That's one of the main purposes of gated content and other restrictions on how quickly you can zip through the game. Without them, it's likely some players (maybe even most?) would race through the content and get close to burn-out far too soon.

When you play Mario 64 you can just zip through it, but presumably you'll just finish the game and then play something else instead. You don't get burned out playing Mario 64 because it's designed to be played, finished, then put down. Bungie is intrinsically trying to build a game you don't finish and put down. Previously their attempts to do this have been restricted to competitive multiplayer which, popular though it is, isn't everyone's cup of tea. The bigger picture here is to try and create a game that everyone can keep playing and enjoying for as long as possible (and will pay for the privilege for as long as they do).