Wiping away the past (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Friday, September 11, 2015, 23:01 (3458 days ago) @ Kermit

As other people have mentioned, people run unofficial WoW servers, that may have differences from the current official setup, and I've seen elsewhere that a lot of people play on them.
I also contest the idea that random people are important to how the game feels. I've never once seen anyone call it more than just a little thing, a touch, a nice touch but still just a touch. I'd much rather have bigger, more intricate worlds, the ability to play by myself and off-line, and whatever else they sacrificed so someone can help with a public event I don't need help with and point to a chest I didn't need.

Maybe it's not important to you, but to me it's integral to what Destiny is, which is why this conversation is weird. You want preservation, but you want a different game preserved, or only the parts you care about. You don't want anything taken away--except for what you don't think is important.

That's not true. I'm not suggesting the player base be taken away, or be allowed to be taken away. If you look I said older versions could have more players than you'd expect, if they were available. I contested the idea that that was an important element because, well, I don't think it's that important as it stands, and because I think it could have been a majorly supportive element, but people like you can't handle randoms talking (even though you said recently that people have or should have control over their own emotions, not sure how that works), so we're left with a "social" game that's not social (though they slyly stopped calling it "social" around E3 2014, hopefully because they realized it wasn't), where everything public and open could be done by bots with random names and gear and no one would know the difference, so they might as well have cut out the random people entirely and made the substantive parts of the game better. I brought it up because it's really frustrating that neither of these things happened-- we didn't a truly social game, and we didn't get a bigger, more complex, more stable game that you can play solo and off-line.

I have a confession to make. When they announced the socialness and the random players and the Tower, I thought this was going to be one of my favorite games ever because it would have people-watching, but really, it would be people-listening. That's where people-watching comes into its own and it's basically all you would be able to in Destiny. I love love love being in a crowd and hearing all the conversations and listening to this one or that one. Then I found out there was no automatic voice anywhere in the game, and that took a lot out of it for me. So I guess you can put me in a box with the other people disappointed Destiny wasn't what they expected, even though they based their expectations on something other than direct evidence. I don't think about it any more unless someone brings up how great it is having other players around-- because they're not even background noise to me, they're like the moth in the room that once in a blue moon lands somewhere slightly interesting.

Maybe you can explain it to me-- why is having someone help with a public event and then leave (which is at least 90% of the interaction I get) integral to what Destiny is?