I have never given up on a Bungie game so soon (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 20:15 (3812 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by General Vagueness, Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 20:23

*sigh*
You know very well that's all subjective. You can't credibly call them out on not putting a high priority on making something be fun and worth doing for its own sake unless you can show that they don't think this stuff is fun or worth doing for its own sake.
Their motto ("We make games we want to play") implies they do in fact check those things-- nothing implies that their idea of fun and yours will line up.
I think there's a point to be made somewhere in here, but you're couching it again in this "my views > your views" standpoint that you can't seem to get away from for more than a few months.

Name ONE person who would like to farm materials for an hour to upgrade their gun. Nobody? If it were fun, why'd they change it and let you buy materials now?

That depends on your definition of farming. I've run around old Russia, and even just The Steppes, the area you spawn in, for an hour, two hours, more even, just shooting, stabbing grenading, and super-ing enemies and picking up spinmetal and chests and upgrading anything that unlocks, and enjoyed it a lot, more than I would've expected a few months ago.

Because it wasn't fun, people complained and they fixed it. They are caving on a ton of their decisions to make the game more fun. You cannot with a straight face say that you would routinely do patrol missions if you got no reward or there were no bounties for them.

I can tell you that because I do them without thought of reward all the time. Bigger motivators include the flashing and beeping getting a little annoying after a while, my natural inclination to have every widget and flip every switch, getting me to move around the world (because, again, I have nothing better to do, and I'm not great at making decisions), and possibly telling me something new. (The example I like to bring up for that last one is "go scan [x]", where x is a previously unidentified object. It fits scenery, gameplay, and canon together, if only on a surface level, and that makes the world feel more real. It tells me: this is an object with a name or designation; it has some kind of significance; the City wants to know about it, so they care about what it signifies; and they're sending me to find out about it, which sounds like a reasonable task to have me do since I'm in the area and I can handle whatever danger there might be.)

As for them changing the currency exchange, since ascendant materials aren't required to upgrade exotic items now, and since it sounds like Vanguard and Crucible marks will soon matter much less to whether or not you can buy a given legendary item (the amount of time and effort it takes to go up a rank is more than enough to max out your marks), environmental materials are a bigger bottleneck on item progression than before and will become even more of one, so it makes sense to make them easier to get, and since marks will seemingly be less useful it makes sense to provide a new way to use them.

Well, that, and the scenario I described above for old Russia gets materials relatively quickly but it's also a scenario I admit most people probably wouldn't find that fun (which is a shame, to me, because those people are missing out on a very simple, continuous kind of fun), and while I'm swimming in spinmetal and have tons of helium and spirit bloom and a good deal of relic iron, I've seen a lot of people complaining about not having enough, which probably has to do with them finding gathering it to not be fun (and because relic iron is perplexingly hard to spot and spirit bloom kind of blends into foliage). If it's not fun for the majority of players it makes sense to reduce the need for it-- but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have any fun inherent to it, and it doesn't mean Bungie didn't think it was fun. It might mean they should've thought about it and playtested it more, but then you get into grey areas and weighing opinions and it gets messy fast, and eventually someone has to make a decision. I think they made, if not the right decision, at least a reasonable and respectable decision-- and I respect that they may have changed their minds, or that they might be putting the players' enjoyment ahead of some their original goals and decisions, since player enjoyment should be the primary goal.