A Truly Social Hub (Destiny)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Sunday, November 16, 2014, 17:33 (3470 days ago) @ scarab

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.