An interesting design philosphy (Destiny)

by Durandal, Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 13:41 (3606 days ago) @ CyberKN

It is interesting in that:

Current level 20 gear and weapons will no longer be offered under the old model where you could get 1-2 a week just by playing dailies and the weekly.

Current gear will no longer be offered.

Now you need to perform bounties to level up faction rep in order to get access to gear.

I wonder if Bungie was concerned that without the carrot of gathering materials people wouldn't feel the need to visit the PVE portions of the game? They understood people didn't like the material farming, and so made them easier to get, but removed the materials to rep/marks and now are making bounties more important in order to keep people visiting PVE content.

With the new bounties offering materials, if they left in the mat/marks exchange then you could double dip off the bounties. If they left the current gear in, and the new legendary gear was added on top, then you have essentialy demoted the current gear to a "blue+" level.

I would have preferred them to offer an upgrade path for current legendary gear to the 20+ level. I spent lots of time and effort to get those IB weapons upgraded and randomized to the perks I wanted, and now a few weeks later they are going to be essentially worthless. Same for the only raid weapon that has ever dropped for me, the Vision and my one really good rep drop of a Zombie Apoc with the stability and ammo drop upgrades.

On the plus side it looks like they are addressing some of the loot complaints for the Crota raid. I hope they could retroactively add that to the Vault as well. I really don't want my fourth set of boots the next time I run it.

I did quit playing World of Tanks because the investment into each tank was enormous and the Dev's had an endless cycle of ruin/buff that picked new winners and losers every month. New content inevitably was superior in every way and only those who dropped hours or large amounts of cash ever really could respond.

Bungie hasn't gotten to this level yet, but we are veering that way. If we are going to design a game around players getting gear tailored to how they want to play, Bungie needs to let players get that gear and keep it. If Bungie really wants to go this route they should add IB style perk rerolls for weapons parts/armor materials on blue/legendary equipment to help soak up the those mats and allow players better access to the perks they want and offer an upgrade path for current legendary gear to the 20+ level.