On Changing items in Investment Games (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 12:05 (3930 days ago)

First, a bit of background for this post:

The more complicated games become, the more likely that design decisions will have unintended consequences when released into the wild. Most of those consequences are things people call "exploits." Being able to make Aetheon walk off the edge of the map is an exploit of his AI - the players have recognized a behavior in his programming that makes him move to avoid grenade AoE damage as a higher priority than staying on his platform.

Likewise, players had noticed that Autorifles did the highest DPS in PvP matches, leading to their widespread use. You may not think of this as an exploit, per se, but it was clearly not the intended design of the PvP team.

Bungie has responded to this unintended player behavior use by making the weapons less accurate, hoping that it will encourage more variety in PvP weapon choices.

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There is, however, a flaw in how this change to the weapons was implemented, which is the main point of my post today: Destiny is an Investment Game.

Using as general terminology as possible, this means that players spend hours of personal time, plus limited resources which took additional hours to gather, and invested both into their items, which were just changed. In some cases, players spent many hours and different resources simply to acquire the items which were changed, before spending the time and resources to upgrade those items. Not all of those players would have made the same investment decisions if the current state of the items had been in place from the beginning. In those cases, Bungie has, through their implementation of the change, wiped out the hours of investment which those players made. The result is an effective "we don't care about the affected players' time and resources" message that I don't think Bungie intended, and - of course - the many complaints about the nerfs which I'm seeing on the general forums.

So how could Bungie have handled this differently? There are several ways, and I hope that Bungie follows one (or more) of these steps in the future:

1) The Hearthstone method. Whenever you change *any* item, whether it be a nerf or a buff, you refund all invested resources to the affected players and un-invest them from the item. In Hearthstone, if they change a card, you can temporarily disenchant the card for the exact amount that it would cost to create the card anew, instead of the usual 25% of the cost.

2) The Kingdom of Loathing method. The developers of this game never nerf their investment items (which they basically sell for $10 each). Instead, if one is too powerful or exploitable, they change the game to work around that, or they buff other items to bring them in line with the overstrong one. They will sometimes buff underperforming items, but only sometimes.

3) The Diablo 2 method. In Diablo 2, only *new* drops of the items would include the changes. Existing items would not be modified.

4) The EVE Online method. When EVE issues a nerf, they usually make a corresponding buff so that the exploit goes away but the items still feel the same.

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Let's discuss these methods as they would or could relate to Destiny.

First, I think the Kingdom of Loathing method isn't feasable. Because that game is designed in a certain way, its world is *much* easier to manipulate than any 3D FPS game ever would be. I list it here because it's important to note that it is possible for Investment Game developers to create a world that adapts to the mistakes in item design, rather than punishing the players for noticing and taking advantage of those mistakes. The items remain powerful, and the player feels like the world got better, rather than like the items got worse.

Personally, I think the Hearthstone method is the most applicable here, and would have been the best option for Bungie to use. If you invested glimmer and resources (helium, spinmetal, etc.) into upgrading your now nerfed autorifle, those investments are refunded to you and removed from the item. The time you spent and experience earned with the weapon could be refunded, too, by calculating how much experience was on the weapon, removing it from the weapon, and then mailing each player a special, personal bounty to turn in which just rewarded that much experience (to weapons only, if possible, but if not - hey - players who are affected by this nerf get bonus exp by way of apology. That's a good thing, actually). Then it would be up to the players to decide if they want to re-invest in their item or to transfer that investment into a different item that they now prefer. Bungie could also have made the weapons salvageable for the full value of invested materials and glimmer, plus - in the case of legendaries or exotics - the original purchase cost of the weapon in marks or strange coins.

The Diablo method would also be acceptable, but probably only in the long term. In the short term, this method solves nothing. It would create two tiers of players: The "haves" who got the pre-nerf items, and the "have-nots" who didn't get a pre-nerf item and now only have access to post-nerf items. Once new tiers of items were released, those players would be back on equal footing and the pre-nerf items would be relegated to novelty bank stashes. The effectiveness of this method depends wholly on how quickly new tiers of content are going to be released.

Lastly, the EVE Online method. I imagine this would look like nerfing the accuracy of autorifles but simultaneously increasing the reload speed of them, such that the short-term PvP dps of the guns is nerfed, but the long term overall dps remains the same (due to less time spent reloading). It could also be taken in much more of a meta-game direction, where rather than nerfing any weapons, a new tier of vendor weapons is released that includes the accuracy changes but is attack power 315 max, making it overall more desirable than the old weapons and generally leading to the phasing out of the old autorifles.

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I hope that Bungie tackles these sorts of investment item changes in the future with a more thoughtful approach, hopefully one which recognizes the time and effort that players put into making these weapons "their own." Bungie is asking us to "become Legend" but with nerfs around the corner for any gun that seems too good to be true, players are going to grow ever more loathe to invest their resources into leveling up those items out of sheer fear of it all being lost someday. I have faith that Bungie is just learning the ropes of running an effective investment game, but the fact of the matter is that Activision-Blizzard has been handling exactly these sorts of questions for over a decade and really should know better than to just out and out nerf items.

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Please post your thoughts and suggestions here; I'd love to hear what other solutions people would like to see in the future for the inevitable design changes that come with a game of this scope.