A Truly Social Hub

For me the Tower has been a disappointment as a social hub.

I've kicked the footballs, climbed the tree, jumped on stuff, danced with people, did the fan trampoline, even talked nonsense with team mates in the dropship cargo bay bar. But really there isn't that much to DO in the Tower. And I've sat in all the comfy sofas - and the spiky bits below the contraption.

Why is the Tower so sterile, for me, and could it be any better?

I think that it has 3 major drawbacks:

there isn't much to do
what there is to do are mundane tasks that you want to get finished quickly
it is mute

None of the above make a social space.

Could it be better? How could Bungie address the above issues?

There Isn't Much To Do

People have already found something to do at the Tower that Bungie appears not to have anticipated - they mooch around looking for people to join Raid teams.

They aren't helped much by the difficulty in talking to people. Invites are OK but you have to spam every high level player in the tower and hope somebody is interested. Generally if people aren't interested then they ignore the invite because they don't want to waste time composing a text reply.

Perhaps this could be made better. I will get back to this.

Mundane Tasks That You Want To Finish Quickly

For me the fun in Destiny is the shooting and the best fun is joining mates to do some shooting. These are things done outside of the Tower. The stuff I do at the Tower is housekeeping. It is stuff I put off until I can't any longer.

For efficiency: I try to return and get all my bounties at once. I save up my engrams to decrypt and try to do all at once. I do this because I feel like I am spending my life in loading screens and waiting for matchmaking (going anywhere involves matchmaking: even the Tower). I don't want to spend any more time in loading screens ;-)

I enjoy Strikes. I choose Strike matchmaking to reduce the time spend in loading screens and the effort of choosing and setting destinations. When my slots are full of dechoherent engrams then I am forced to the Tower to decrypt them and then I want to get straight back to the Strikes.

When I'm in the Tower I'm sprinting from post to cryptarch to bounties or I'm in menus deleting decrypted garbage. Then I decide where I'm going next and then I go.

The Tower Is Mute

I have never experience Halo matchmaking but I have heard the horror stories. Little Timmy sounds dreadful - and that's just second hand.

I have this picture in my head that guardians are a band of brothers and that we have a similar vision of what we are doing the game. That would probably change if I could speak to them.

And I've had Raid experiences with the one guy who is too good for the rest of us. He normally plays hard but is slumming with us because he can't get anyone better. And we suck at following his instructions. And he lets us know throughout the entire Raid. (true story)

So I think I know the drawbacks of hearing what others are saying.

That said, if there was some way to easily drop into and out of hearing range, if there were places in the Tower were could walk into and walk out of, places that were well marked...

then you could control how much chat you were exposed to, you could opt in or out without a clumsy UI.

So What Is A Social Space?

One definition is a space where people with common interests can meet to share their interests.

I think that the Tower should be a place that lets us do that.

There needs to be things that we can do with other people and we need to be able to communicate easily with those people. Ideally the things we do should require or encourage communication.

Currently I am thinking of three main themes:

Departure Lounge
Danger Room
Tower Gear

Departure Lounge

People are already doing this so we know there is a demand. Raid matchmaking would meet this need but just chucking together randoms doesn't create a great Raid experience.

I would also like to encourage people to bring mikes to Raids. It is amazing how few people use them in the game. The PS4 comes with a free headset (a glorified wire) and office style USB headsets work well and are cheap.

Have you noticed those large ships that come to the front of the Tower? They have a concertina walkway for people to walk in and out of them. Imagine that there was a departure lounge underneath the courtyard and that people met up, formed fireteams, and departed for battle as a group using those dropships.

Imagine that the departure lounge had gates where ships docked. Imagine that there were rings dotted around the area. Maybe some gates would be labelled hard, easy, crucible, strike. You can assume that if a ring is near a gate then the people inside it probably want the activity associated with the gate. If you want to perform an activity and you want to join others then you step into the ring.

Whilst inside the ring you will be able to chat to anyone else inside the ring. You can ask them what they want to do, which Raid, which map, easy or hard? The icon above each person's head could indicate who has a mike. People without headsets can try to guess what the others are planning (the authentic headset-free Raid experience).

If somebody isn't interested in joining that group then they step out of the ring. Once the team is ready, one of them picks up a flag and everybody in the ring becomes a team and they head to the gate.

The dropships are instanced so only a team can enter. Multiple teams can head for the same gate and the instancing prevents clashes.

In the Destiny world a team arrives as a unit via a dropship that delivers them to the surface. You would see this if you were hanging around the entrance to the VoG, you would see a team arrive and know that they were a team.

Danger Room

Bungie cheeses the difficulty of the Raids. They have us learn new stuff under fire and without the ability to practice in a safe environment. The danger room goes against that because it lets you try stuff out where it doesn't really matter so much. The Gorgon's maze would be more fun if people weren't bitching so much because you got seen.

Now I'm not actually suggesting that the danger room has the exact same puzzles as the Raid. I'm suggesting that it should have fun puzzles that let us exercise more than our trigger fingers. They exercise movement and communication. They should foster teamwork and camaraderie.

They should be fun in their own right but would also count toward my final theme.

Tower Gear

Like an exotic: you can only equip one piece of Tower Gear. It has the same light levels as Raid or Exotics.

There is a new currency for Tower Gear and it takes time to acquire it (lots of Danger Room activity).

Unlike other parts of Destiny: there is no RNG. When you have enough currency you get the item you ask for. But this is more than a shop. You get fixed defence upgrades but the tech/buff slots are empty and you buy the pieces to slot in there. The slots use the same currency as the gear itself. You can put buffs into your vault and you can replace buffs.

You also get to choose the appearance of the gear.

Maybe you can equip one Tower Weapon with the same deal as the Tower Gear. But maybe that's a whole other conversation for another time ;-)

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Add in a shooting range for testing weapons and scopes (maybe even letting you try some out before you buy them), and a pop-up target game with daily, weekly, and all-time high scores on display for everyone to see, and this sounds like a place I'd actually want to hang out between missions.

-Disciple

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You know that map in the cargo hold, the one with Hunter knives stuck in it?

RC would like to be able to throw his knife into it.

Yeh, mini-games would be fun.

Anyway, I should be asleep right now. Night all.

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For efficiency: I try to return and get all my bounties at once. I save up my engrams to decrypt and try to do all at once. I do this because I feel like I am spending my life in loading screens and waiting for matchmaking (going anywhere involves matchmaking: even the Tower). I don't want to spend any more time in loading screens ;-)

I enjoy Strikes. I choose Strike matchmaking to reduce the time spend in loading screens and the effort of choosing and setting destinations. When my slots are full of dechoherent engrams then I am forced to the Tower to decrypt them and then I want to get straight back to the Strikes.

When I'm in the Tower I'm sprinting from post to cryptarch to bounties or I'm in menus deleting decrypted garbage. Then I decide where I'm going next and then I go.

For me the pain of going to the Tower is offset by having that cool new item decrypted and leveling it up sooner rather than later. It's also easier because there's less to process cognitively while managing my stuff. The most difficult part of Destiny for me is when I periodically clean out my vault. The difficulty could be eased by improvements, as we've discussed, but I try to focus on one item type at a time, and I invariably want to dismantle when i can only store or take.

About the loading screens, when I'm being social I like them. They are a nice social space on their own, and I like the way they punctuate the game. When I'm on my own I rarely see more than the beginning of either of the two, and that's because as soon as the game lets me, I switch to the character screen, and I'm deleting garbage, and equipping the items that I want updated. I also might be checking the roster to see who has logged on and what they are doing. The point is, I am seldom ready by the time I land in the tower, and usually have to spend at least a few more seconds doing something with my character before I visit any vendors.

We definitely play differently. If I have more than a few encrypted items I feel like I am possibly losing efficiency and I'm not being my best potential guardian. I spend a lot of time completing Vanguard bounties. I often don't complete more than a few each day, and I make sure my slots are full when I quit as that increases opportunities to "coupon stack" the next day. (For instance, right now I've got a Devils' Lair bounty, an exotic bounty that requires deathless strikes, and if Devils' Lair comes up as a daily or weekly, now that will be an efficient activity!) I rarely play more than two strikes or three matchmaking games in a row. I can see why you have storage problems.

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I like your departure lounge idea. I'd go a step further and maybe have a Ready Room, or an area in the hangar with different ships each designated for specific missions. For example, there would be a dropship like a halo pelican with 6 seats for the Raid. When you want to raid you head to the raid dropship and see if anyone is there. Once all the seats are filled the raid launches. Or for strikes there could be elevators labeled for each strike. When full, you'd press x and your ghost would close the doors to launch the strike. There could even be a banner at the main hub showing you how many people were queued up to play each event.

The shooting range idea could be called the armory. If you wanna talk gun stuff, or shoot weapons, maybe even discuss the best armor depending on your needs, this is where you'd hang out.

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I like your departure lounge idea. I'd go a step further and maybe have a Ready Room, or an area in the hangar with different ships each designated for specific missions. For example, there would be a dropship like a halo pelican with 6 seats for the Raid. When you want to raid you head to the raid dropship and see if anyone is there. Once all the seats are filled the raid launches. Or for strikes there could be elevators labeled for each strike. When full, you'd press x and your ghost would close the doors to launch the strike. There could even be a banner at the main hub showing you how many people were queued up to play each event.

The shooting range idea could be called the armory. If you wanna talk gun stuff, or shoot weapons, maybe even discuss the best armor depending on your needs, this is where you'd hang out.

I love ALL of these ideas! That would definitely be a place I'd want to hang out at, as opposed to pass through.

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Now I'm not actually suggesting that the danger room has the exact same puzzles as the Raid. I'm suggesting that it should have fun puzzles that let us exercise more than our trigger fingers. They exercise movement and communication. They should foster teamwork and camaraderie.

Something like the Obstacle course that you can build in your clan's dojo in Warframe:

The ability to have a clan leaderboard accessible in the tower would not only give some extra value to clans, but would give you another reason to WANT to be in the tower; running against your friends to see who's the best.

Modern Warfare 2 had the Spec Ops missions that had leaderboards, and a number of them had the player running through a firing range. How awesome would it be if Destiny had some of these, with access elevators in the tower? Odd that we get a giant building, but only ever see the roof of it. and there are already elevator doors in the tower (left of the Bounty Bot)...

CoD: Advanced Warfare has a firing range that you can access at any point while creating a loadout (even while waiting for a match!). It has a series of different tests that you can put your loadout through, which is great, so maybe you could test out the weapons at any shop before you buy...

They should be fun in their own right but would also count toward my final theme.

Tower Gear

Like an exotic: you can only equip one piece of Tower Gear. It has the same light levels as Raid or Exotics.

There is a new currency for Tower Gear and it takes time to acquire it (lots of Danger Room activity).

Unlike other parts of Destiny: there is no RNG. When you have enough currency you get the item you ask for. But this is more than a shop. You get fixed defence upgrades but the tech/buff slots are empty and you buy the pieces to slot in there. The slots use the same currency as the gear itself. You can put buffs into your vault and you can replace buffs.

The problem with custom gear is that it ruins the value of existing gear in the game, unless it is extremely difficult to obtain. Another problem is that certain perks will become vital, while others will vanish completely, narrowing down variety. Who would wear gear that causes orbs to replenish health if it didn't also give you extra Heavy ammo, or grenade-replenishing melee strikes?

Picking and choosing slots in your gear is a whole different beast than applying a set of perks to a piece of gear, which would be the ideal way to add aesthetic variety to the game. I can't tell you how many Warlocks I've seen wearing chatterwhite raid gear with the Light Beyond Nemesis helmet... What if there was a place in the tower where you could tweak the appearance of your armor by transferring the stats to another piece of gear? Like some sort of Outfitter...

You also get to choose the appearance of the gear.

Leveling up the awesome Firebreak armor to Legendary status if we work hard enough? That makes too much sense...

Maybe you can equip one Tower Weapon with the same deal as the Tower Gear. But maybe that's a whole other conversation for another time ;-)

No weapons. You do that, and you can kiss the sandbox goodbye. Not to mention you should be able to more or less tell what an enemy's weapon can do at a glance. Last thing you need is people running around with a Doctor Nope that has the Suros Regime perk...

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It could be a bit boring hanging around a circle waiting for the 6th team member to arrive.

So in the next iteration of the game...

make recruitment areas bigger
have physical scoreboard
optional games to play whilst waiting

suggested games (not an exhaustive list)

wackAdregg - Dregs spawn randomly in area and try to escape - melee them!
shooting range
checker board tiles - occasionally one glows for a second then disappears - don't be on it! (bottemless drop but fast auto-respawn and can still talk from the grave)
loot cave - dark to show off glowy loot - short duration - long cooldown tied to player (not character) - smaller than usual RNG chance of a purple

All games scored. Scoreboard shows kill rate so that new joiners are on a level playing field. All weapons and supers allowed.

-PS

Maybe the chat circles are movable. Circles are centred on a flag. You can pick up the flag and move it to an entertainment. When playing wackAdregg or checkers the circle expands to become the play area. in other game types it is where you shoot from.

Maybe it's not a flag. maybe it's a shoe or a gourd.

Follow the leader could be another game - keep within talking radius - times are shown (somehow). It is understood that newcomers will not have a high score (mark proportion of their playing time in radius?)

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A Truly Social Hub (Destiny)