You make valid points on the game design, but... (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 20:51 (3470 days ago) @ Kermit

It's probably 100% of my posts about RNG based loot systems, honestly. I'm not a generally negative person, but I am a passionate one, and that passion gets the better of me in my posts most of the time.

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I agree that I'm an outlier in terms of how bad the RNG loot drops hate me, but any time you have RNG-based anything, you'll have outliers like me. Flip a coin X times, and out of any group of 2^X people, you'll statistically have someone who got heads 100% of the time and someone who got tails 100% of the time. There are millions of people who play Destiny, so it is likely that there are players who have never received an exotic after a nightfall, ever.

I'm of the opinion that loot systems need to account for outliers and include a raid loot counter that guarantees rewards every X raids in order to correct for the possibility of RNG-screwage. I also support 2-for-1 trade item X for item Y that could also drop from that boss vendor systems. The armor and weapon tokens in PoE are actually a good step in the right direction since you can see the item you're going to be getting ahead of time and decide if the prison is worth running or not, but their marriage to the RNG loot factory in the form of the Key and Key Chest sort of undermines any sense that the RNG based loot system is actually changing for the better in the game.

I do have some fun playing Destiny, but it gets frustrating very quickly. I think it all stems from how the game's positive feedback loop works: The "reward" in the game is almost always loot. Initially, it's loot and character progression, but all character progression ends at level 20. Sometimes it's compelling gameplay (and when it is, the loot reward forces repetition of that gameplay to the point that it eventually becomes stale). It's not story (though the expansions have been getting progressively more coherent and engaging). It's never backstory (there isn't any). It's never world development or evolution (while there have been small changes to the overall game world, they are not "rewards" for player actions). So you're looking at systems that reinforce the value of loot. When loot doesn't drop, the player feels like time and effort was wasted, even if the player had fun during that time. An RNG-based loot system actively subtracts from a player's enjoyment of the game when the reward loop is centered around loot because the odds that a player received new or better loot decrease over time as they acquire more and more loot. Additionally, the player has "done everything" in the game well before they have lucked into all of the loot, so the endgame activity becomes "find the missing loot" as opposed to "surpass this challenge." Your endgame is then, quite literally, a crap shoot.

The PvP in Destiny is actually a game where winning could be its own reward, but without a visible ladder or tiered system, you fall back into the "I was The Best... Around... Why didn't I get any loot while that guy with the 0.13 K/D ratio got a SUROS" RNG based loot reward trap. ToO goes further in what I feel is the right direction: The winners get a cool prestige reward in the form of access to the Lighthouse, and they get progressively better rewards at the end of a successful run. But there's still an RNG-based loot element to it at the end of each match. I wish we could get away from that.