You assume... (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Sunday, June 21, 2015, 19:06 (3682 days ago) @ Korny

Are you suggesting that Bungie should add microtransactions that let you prevent a team wipe? They totally could (Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare lets you do this). But the Skolas fight lets you skip the first hour or so simply by restarting you at his fight.

Whoa whoa. Is anybody here suggesting that the Round 5 Skolas fight itself needs checkpoints? If so, I'd disagree with that. The only checkpoints I'd want are per-round checkpoints or really just a single checkpoint at the beginning of the Skolas fight so if my team beats Rounds 1-4 we can come back later in the day and tackle Skolas.

A different example; The Last of Us's "Grounded" difficulty is extremely unforgiving, and death sends you back two checkpoints. And yet, the game doesn't get any shorter or hold your hand if you wasted ammo before you really needed it. In fact, I spent hours repeatedly playing a segment over and over just to get it right. Similarly, the Skolas fight is difficult in that you have to start it over sometimes just because of one mistake (such as when the infected Guardian is the last man standing, or when you simply don't make it to the mines in time). Of course you start from the beginning with nothing to show for it (Cyber, Destroyo, and I got Skolas down to 10% health at one point, but after dismantling the second mines, Cyber and Destroyo died, leaving me with the Infection and nobody to hand it to).

Again, I'd like to see the others in this thread chime in. When I hear talk of checkpoints I think of either one per round or simply one to section off the first four rounds from the fifth. Maybe I've completely misunderstood what everyone else is asking for and it isn't actually what I want!

But here's the thing with the Skolas fight. If you do everything flawlessly, the entire thing is around an hour, maybe less. The only reason it's longer is because of lack of skill, communication, or the occasional disconnect (which I've never encountered, but you can rejoin). The disconnect is an issue that has been acknowledged and addressed already, so if you are still running the PoE, you should be ready for this apparent eventuality. It's not by design, so checkpoints wouldn't change the fact that you'll still get kicked out mid-game, especially since you can already rejoin (although that too might not be by design).

Ok... this is where I have to stop you, for a number of reasons:

1. The disconnect issue has not been addressed yet to the best of my knowledge. Unless you're posting from the issues of disconnects in the Prison of Elders is still very real. You can't just dismiss disconnects because some of them (as the reconnect feature is not meant to solve every disconnect problem) might be recoverable at some point in the future.

2. "Just do it flawlessly" is an absurd suggestion. Is it technically possible? Sure! Is being flawless going to be realistic for most people, especially people like me and my team who had never even gotten to the Tainted Light section of the Crota battle before, much less figured out how to deal with it and then the mines on top of it? Absolutely not!

I get that you apparently like really hard challenges. But most people aren't you, I don't think. Most people are not going to want to play a intense game for four hours at a time. I think most of us like the Skolas battle and the strategies needed to beat it but we simply don't have the time. And accounting for a lack of time is something Bungie already solved pretty well in the two Raids with checkpoints after key progress is made.