You assume... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Sunday, June 21, 2015, 19:28 (3682 days ago) @ Ragashingo

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.

People want a checkpoint before the Skolas fight. Problem with this is the same as checkpoints elsewhere. People can completely skip huge chunks of the fight and reap rewards simply by doing the last part. At the same time, they'd complain that there aren't challenging PvE experiences... How many people skipped the Ir Yut fight simply because it didn't have rewards? How many people skip the Confluxes? How many ask for Gorgon chest checkpoints on LFGs?
There are compromises, and many people have echoed the same ones, and some of them would work, and work well. I'm not against those, really.

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.

I'm not dismissing them. I'm saying that Bungie is adding a fix to that issue soon. How hard is that for people to understand?
What do you want to happen when you're disconnected outside of the game reconnecting you like it does in Trials?

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!

Of course it's an absurd suggestion, which is what I was telling Cody "Arcade games are short!" Miller. The 35 PoE would be short of you played flawlessly, but that's a lot to ask of people. What makes the encounter long is the people, not the game itself (especially after the nerfs applied to Skolas).

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.

I'm not saying "I have no problem, so there's no problem". Cody made a dumb, arbitrary statement (shocking!), and I presented examples that counter his argument. I've said that the Skolas fight should be tough, and a commitment. I didn't say that it should be four hours long when played flawlessly.

The main issue that I've had is this:

People want rewards for doing simple things (such as Cody wanting rewards at each round), or they want to be able to join a group at the final fight and skip the first four rounds, afterwards whining about how little they have to do in the game.