"Unintended Consequences" (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 01:26 (3681 days ago) @ Mid7night

This is like the mantra/bane of every modern, online-supported game out there. It certainly has become of the meta-games of Destiny, at least.

No one is saying it's an easy fix, but to not address it at all feels rather disrespectful.

I don't know if this has been suggested already - there've been a lot of long posts that I haven't read entirely - but what if the check points were summed; only allowing you to join the later rounds if you had already cleared the previous ones? This data is already tracked, and something like it is implemented in every Exotic bounty quest-line; you have to progress through the steps, and you can come back to it at any time. The only difference for PoE would be that you could come back any time before the next weekly reset. If you have a Round-3 checkpoint, you can join any fireteam at Round-3 or earlier, but you can't bring just anyone with you unless they too have at least a Round-3 checkpoint. This way you can still keep all the rewards in Scrooge McDuck's Vault at the end, and you won't have people passing around checkpoints like they do with the raids.

Perhaps they can do this. Perhaps they will do this. I couldn't possibly say.

I can only guess that Bungie has access to voluminous data that we don't. They probably have, for instance, data on how Raid checkpoints get used, that don't have these restrictions. So the question becomes, how long would it take to make this feature, how often would that feature be used (same fireteam coming back at a later date/time during the same week to the same activity, without any intervening play by one or more of the participants in the same activity that would erase the checkpoint) as well as the time needed to troubleshoot that feature and potential exploits. For instance, I can think of one right now.

Dead players in some activities can't go to orbit, but you can always switch characters, which achieves the same result.

You can join PoE activities during a wipe if the fireteam has an empty slot.

So a fireteam advances to the final round of a PoE activity, and saves a checkpoint. Upon resuming play at that point with the same fireteam, two players die and switch characters, sending them to orbit. As I understand it, other players may now join that fireteam-- bang, you've now got a nice side business selling two fireteam slots with Skolas checkpoints to people (like me) who have not yet made it that far by themselves.

Even if the above scenario is not possible, there's a chance some other procedure might yield the same results.

So the question becomes, is the chance of that worth it for the benefit to the people who would be willing and able to resume the same activity with the same exact fireteam within a one week period-- a requirement the raids do not have because all players in a raid get the checkpoint, which can be freely shared with all comers?