You must have completely missed what they meant (Destiny)

by unoudid , Somewhere over the rainbow, Wednesday, June 24, 2015, 21:12 (3676 days ago) @ scarab

The two meanings of the phrase "wasting time" are independent of the existence of the game called Destiny and are, therefore, independent of your expectations for that game.

Completely understood

You can waste time with your friends at the mall and you can waste time trying to keep a failing business from going under.

Again, completely understood.

One is fun and one is not.

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Let me go back and try to show my perspective on this.

This is basically the confusing fact of Destiny for me. I definitely got enough playtime out of the game to justify an $80 purchase. Hours and hours and hours and hours of playtime. WAY more playtime than I expected, to be honest.

BUT, not all of that playtime was actually fun. A huge amount of it was repetitive, uninspired, and sometimes downright felt like work instead of play. It still does. The progression systems and ranking systems and unbalancing of top tier pvp systems mean that I have to do lots of work in order get my gear in order for the small amount of play that I want to eventually participate in.

I wholeheartedly agree that Destiny can be repetitive, uninspired, and feels like work at times.

All that work makes me feel like I should be getting some sort of compensation for it, and the RNG based loot system makes me feel like, nope, I'm not getting squat. It feels like wasted time, wasted effort, and why should I bother.

I hate the RNG system just as much as everyone else. You get stuff, just not what you want. I do wish there was a clear cut path to acquire the various items in the game.

So I'm left with this confused feeling about the game. I like moving around the game. I like the setting of the game. I like most of the people who make the game (and don't really know much about the other people involved). But when I paid $80 for a game, what I got was really 1/4 game and 3/4 chore. I didn't buy a chore, I didn't want a chore, and I'm mad that the chore feels like the only portal back to game land.

This is you letting it become a chore. I mean this in the nicest possible way. I've been there at times and when it happens I just take sometime off if I let it get to the point where I am no longer having fun.

I never found the HM Crota raid to be enjoyable due to all of the glitches and artificial difficulty. So I simply chose not to do it most of the time. It was simply not fun. Once I had all of the gear I wanted I simply stopped doing that raid.

The daily bounties can feel like a chore list because they are the best way to level up that newly acquired gear and such. You don't have to do those items, they just speed things up.

In fact, the whole experience of Destiny is an exercise in disappointment. Marketing showed me all kinds of stuff that simply isn't in the actual game at all. Gating the fun of using a new gun through the time sink of leveling it up. Gating the fun of top tier PvP through the necessity of being level 34, which means playing PvE activities. Gating upgrading your gear through RNG based loot systems that rarely give you what you need and or want and turn into seemingly endless time sinks.

The gating of weapons and gear does suck. Personally I am so gun part poor right now that I have many weapons I either can't upgrade or can't reroll because I don't have the parts.

The whole top tier PvP thing doesn't require you to be at max level even though it helps. you can easily play as a 33 and probably a 32 if you are talented.

Even the fun stuff, like the raids, are designed so that you have to run them so many times if you want the loot that they become un-fun. It's like the game is designed to suck all of the fun out of itself.

Again, agreed that the RNG system sucks a lot of joy from the game.

But, of course, if you've burned out on the game then you've played easily a hundred hours of it, which means you got your money's worth, right?

Personally, I'd rather have an incredibly satisfying 8 hour game than a deeply disappointing 100+ hour game. I don't want my fun time to be dependent on hours of not fun time, and I like thinking back to the shorter but wholly satisfying games I've played with joy than the way I think about my time spent in Destiny with regret. /sadface.

If you are looking at your time in Destiny as being regretful then maybe you just shouldn't play? I've put a crap ton of time into the game and for the most part I really enjoy it still, even with all of its flaws. The main reason I have played so long is because I look at it as a form of social entertainment. I get on and make progress doing lots of repetitive stuff while still having a blast playing with friends. If I was playing solo then I probably would have stopped well over 1000 hours ago. Despite all of the shortcomings and endless grind, I still look forward to playing this game with my friends. There have been some great games I've played that I can finish in 8-10 hours but all in all I have a much higher level of enjoyment from Destiny.

Sure, Destiny isn't what I was expecting it to be and it may never be that way. But I am hopeful.

Next time you are on your chore list of killing a 100 enemies with headshots, why not just change things up a bit and run dual shotguns, or shotgun + sidearm, or any other weird combo that's different from normal. doing stupid stuff like that keeps the chores feeling fresh and fun.