AFK and Crucible Marks (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Thursday, August 14, 2014, 10:19 (3562 days ago) @ Cody Miller

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.

Actually, this doesn't pad time played at all; it simply stretches it out. Rather than playing 20 hours in a week, you might play 20 hours over the course of 4 weeks. At least, of certain activities; you can spend the rest of that time in other activities.

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.

You're making some pretty sweeping statements about something inherently very complex: the emergent behaviours of gaming populations of varying skill levels. Experience has taught me that this is rarely as simple, and black and white as it might seem. Keeping people of various skill levels all engaged and participating in the game is still important.

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.

House of Cards is a television program. The difference in medium is massive: you can watch them all at whatever pace you want and the only person it affects is yourself (unless your SO is insisting you watch the series together, in which case you have a total watching population of two. Hardly massively-multiplayer territory).

But let's play along here and try and make an analogy. As a product, House of Cards is only one of many shows you can watch as a Netflix subscriber. What are the consequences for Netflix if their viewers watch the entirety of House of Cards in quick succession? Is there any likelihood that their subscribers will unsubscribe immediately after? Possibly a little, but it's probably true that for most subscribers, House of Cards was only one of the reasons they subscribed. And so, finishing the series doesn't mean they'll unsubscribe completely. But what if House of Cards was only one of a small number of shows on Netflix? What if you literally could exhaust all the available content in the space of a couple of months? Would you continue to subscribe? Or would you think: eh, I'll unsub until House of Cards Season 3 rolls along, and maybe they'll have some other good stuff by then?

The comparison between Destiny and other MMOs bears some consideration here, because although the revenue models are different, they're still fundamentally similar. It's just that instead of paying $10/month to subscribe, you're buying a game and then premium-rate DLC periodically, with expansions and sequels further down the road. Ultimately, it's a game franchise that is designed from the outset to extract recurring revenue from its customers over a long period of time. In this respect, Destiny is just like an MMO like World of Warcraft, and also, to Netflix.

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.

I'm confused how you feel like the game is wasting time; it's limiting how much time you can spend on a given activity in a given period. That's not wasting time; if anything it's streamlining it.

The only way to do that is to have tons of content. Games should be AS SHORT AS POSSIBLE.

You realise these two are mutually exclusive, right?

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.

I think you may have skipped over the main point I was trying to make in the rush to beat your grinding is boring drum some more. Gating content is not asking people to repeat things until they get boring. Gating content simply means slowing down progression so that people remain engaged with the game over a longer period of time.

Now, nobody is saying you have to enjoy this kind of game. I respect your personal tastes, and they may not fit with this. But I think you're talking about this as if you understand the motivations that drive the design decisions Bungie have made, when I really don't think you do at all.