Loot Cave (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Friday, September 04, 2015, 06:42 (3466 days ago) @ CyberKN

Look at the loot cave. The loot cave was actually NOT a better way of getting loot than just about any activity in the game. A lot of the glorious screenshots of loot on the ground consisted mostly of ammo drops-- drops you needed to collect in order to keep shooting the loot cave. Bungie's problem was not so much that it had inadvertently created a mechanic that allowed players to shortcircuit the game's reward system as much as it created a situation that allowed players to believe that they had shortcircuited it-- and that was enough.

Actually, it was technically better, for two reasons:

A) Bungie capped the number of marks/drops you could receive from doing activities per week, meaning you could only buy so many pieces of gear per week (if it was a helmet or weapon, just 1). There is no such cap on engrams, thus once you were capped on marks, you were relying on engrams for advancement.

B) The loot cave provided a constant stream of enemies, each of which had the same chance of dropping engrams as every other enemy in the game. Bungie knew this, and that's why they started adding additional rewards to activities like dragon strikes and the daily heroic mission. As opposed to the loot cave, these activities featured intermittent sections where you weren't killing anything, thus decreasing your engram drop efficiency.

And that's why the loot cave was so much more attractive: when you make your end-game about the accumulation of gear, people will work out and gravitate towards the most efficient means possible of achieving that goal.

I honestly don't think you can blame this on Bungie. You seem to be suggesting that if Bungie just added coins or points to Halo (which they actually did) everyone would stop playing Halo the way they used to, and just maximize their collection of coins. That might be so, but that's on them.

At any rate, it was not my point whether the loot cave was or was not actually more efficient at generating engrams per hour. I saw some exhaustive posts (unfortunately I cannot find them again) that suggested that if there was any such advantage, it was very slight. The point was that the perceived advantage was enough to skew the play of a not insignificant portion of the population in that direction.

Those who were looking for Bungie's response to be the removal of loot or the removal of RNG I think are really barking up the wrong tree, because I think that is just too integral to the game's central concept.