AFK and Crucible Marks (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, August 14, 2014, 09:40 (3563 days ago) @ kapowaz
edited by Cody Miller, Thursday, August 14, 2014, 09:50

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.

And? That means we have had our fun. Padding the amount of time we have to spend is bad. Give me 20 hours of fun, not 40 hours of shit and 20 hours of fun for a total of 60 hours.

It's dumb. The hardcore folks could blast through everything and get bored quickly. They would leave. But the casuals still have other casuals to play with who also haven't seen everything yet. There is always going to be someone at your progression to play with.

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.

Bullshit. Not a single person complained about House of Cards, despite the fact that many people binge watched in a day or two. It took a long time to get season 2. But you know what? People PREFERRED being able to choose how fast they view the content instead of waiting every week for a broadcast. If someone sees the ends of Destiny, they can leave and do something else or play another game until the DLC comes out. Asking them to spend more time than needed with your game by stupid time locks is dumb, and not respecting of your player's time.

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.

So what? What does that matter? Don't waste my time, and allow people to experience things at their own pace. If you must for whatever reason, don't put the challenges behind a grind wall: simply activate them at certain times. At least then you aren't asking your players to waste that time.

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).

The only way to do that is to have tons of content. Games should be AS SHORT AS POSSIBLE. They are entertainment. Every second of them should be entertaining. If you ask your player to do something boring in the name of having them play longer you have failed. If you ask players to do something repetitive in the name of having them play longer you have failed. Everything you ask them to do should be new, fun, and novel. By your logic all the boring scenes that slow down a movie should be left in, because then you can watch it longer.

Your game exists to entertain me. I don't exist to entertain your game.