That's just your opinion man (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Friday, August 22, 2014, 09:14 (3546 days ago) @ Xenos

Just throwing in my two cents here, but most people I know think that adding matchmaking to Firefight in Reach made it significantly worse than Firefight in ODST, both because you were matched with unknown quantities and the changes they made to make it more accessible. Take that how you will applying it to the Raid in Destiny, but I don't think you can "just add" matchmaking to all modes in a game smoothly, especially without compromising some of vision behind the game.

Oh, I 100% agree. I think the decision to support matchmaking has to come first, and then inform the design goals of Raids from then on out. What appears to have happened with Destiny is the reverse, though: the design goals of Raids came first, and they then realised that this wouldn't work with matchmaking.

As ever, here's your WoW analogy: Prior to Raidfinder, raids were a single, lengthy instance with (usually) 10-12 bosses. From Dragon Soul onwards however, they were designed such that they could be split up into chunks of 2-3 bosses, and players could queue for any particular segment of the raid provided they'd completed the prerequisite previous segments. This change in design didn't break the experience for the non-Raidfinder versions of instances (since they continued seamlessly between each segment, usually with doors that didn't open in Raidfinder), but it did mean Blizzard had to approach the design subtly differently.

The net outcome was that you could queue for Raidfinder and run a raid instance of roughly 1/4 the usual length, but guilds could continue to run raids as an organised event on their own schedule (and get better rewards for it, too).