Cool, the story is slightly better, too bad the gameplay is worse.

I don't know if Destiny has ever been a particularly good PvP game. There have been aspects of it in the past that I've absolutely loved. But it does seem to me like there have always been huge glaring flaws with the PvP side of the game, and those flaws have just sort of shuffled and rotated around a bit over time, while the overall experience has never really gotten substantially better.

I don't remember what video this was included in, but I remember a quote from Lars Bakken where he said something along the lines of "the Crucible is a lot more fun if you just don't take it very seriously". I think he's exactly right. You jump in with friends and have a laugh. Try to take it more seriously than that and you're bound to get frustrated, because the PvP game just isn't tight enough to hold up under more competitive or stressful play. You can either laugh and say "oh that's bullshit" with a grin on your face every time something stupid happens, or you squeeze your controller and shout "oh that's BULLSHIT" and spend match after match getting angry at the game.

They did say on the stream that they were trying to encourage people to pick nodes other than Landfall, so this might only be from your skill tree, and not affect it granted as an exotic perk.

Just sayin'... as a playtester, most of my job was going through a checklist of things that could break and seeing if I could break it.

Pro teams can be hired, or contracted to come in and wreck house for balance reasons, so I don't know if Bungie has any on retainer to drag onto the stream.

There are definitely some folks on staff who are obscenely good at PvP.

...was hire a Pro Tram to help with PvP.
Halo 5's multiplayer is fantastic because of it.

That being said, I've never known a truly skilled and trustworthy guitar tech who didn't also play at least passably well, because it informs your work as a technician. Guitar players often struggle to describe the problems they are having with their instruments, but because I can play myself, I can interpret what they are trying to describe and make the necessary adjustments.

I think you're undermining your argument. The really good players can tell you what is wrong, no matter now minute. Like this is off, it should sound / respond this way.

Not true. They can usually get half way there, but are often clueless when it comes to determining what is causing the problem.

I'll give you a common example: Almost every day, I'll have a customer come in the door and say to me "Hey I need to buy a new set of machine heads for my guitar". I'll say "sure... out of curiosity, why do you want new machine heads?" And almost every single time, they'll respond "well my guitar isn't staying in tune very well".

And almost every time, they're dead wrong. Not about the guitar going out of tune faster than it should, but about the cause and solution. 99 times out of 100, it is not the machine heads that cause tuning problems with a guitar. But players make that assumption all the time, because it is the most obvious line to trace for someone who hasn't learned about the technical side of the instrument.

That's a very basic example, but it holds true for more nuanced issues as well. Sometimes even more so. The more subtle the problem, the more convoluted the actual solution can be. It involves the kind of technical knowledge about the instrument that most players never learn.

Some players do learn those skill, though. Just as some technicians are also fantastic players. But that is the exception, not the rule.

If they were a beginner, they would not even know something is wrong. They are the most in tune with the instrument, so when they have a problem it's a real problem. They don't necessarily need to know how to fix it.

So this is something that I mostly agree with. But we're not just talking about "being able to tell that something is wrong". That's not where a game designer's job ends. They need to be able to identify what works and what doesn't, AND know how to fix or create it. While I do think it is beneficial for somebody who works as a PvP designer to be at least decently skilled as a player, they don't need to be top tier or anything like that.

I have customers who run into problems with their guitars while playing certain riffs or using techniques that are way beyond my ability to play... so I just put the guitar in their hands, watch them play it, and spot the problem myself when it happens. In most cases, the problem ends up being something different than what the player thinks it is. They might say "hey I'm getting fret buzz on this one string on this one fret". So I check the frets, but they're all level. So I hand them the guitar and say "show me". I watch them play and discover that there is a rattle, but it's happening because they're moving their pickup selector switch to a different position at a certain point in a solo, and the switch itself is rattling in that position. Or maybe I discover that they are getting fret buzz because they are playing an electric guitar unplugged, so they're hitting the strings way harder than they should be just so they can hear themselves. Those are all the kinds of issues that I can trace and nail down in part because I'm a player and my knowledge as a player informs me, but mostly because I'm trained as a technician.

because seeing what kinds of problems are caused by the changes at that skill level is very different than seeing the problems at lower skill levels.

You almost can't look at low skill levels when determining balance, because at low skill levels essentially everything is overpowered.

So basically, I don't think game designers need to be particularly good at playing their games in order to do a good job making them... but I do think it can help.

I agree with you in that the game designers jobs are to understand the problem from a technical nature and then be able to fix it. However, to stretch your metaphor a bit if the customer doesn't come in and tell you what kind of problem they are having (my instrument keeps going out of tune really fast) then you can't just magically solve their problem. So I think it's important that as Bungie is working on making these changes that they have some highly skilled players available to test them, because seeing what kinds of problems are caused by the changes at that skill level is very different than seeing the problems at lower skill levels. Ultimately it's important for the designers to test a wide range of skill levels.

Well said.

Wins is a good metric. You also want to be wary of statistical artifacts. Back when I played WoT, the player balance in game suppressed the russian tank stats, so they constantly got buffs or had their most OP tanks left alone. The US tanks, with their 5% of the overall population, had major over representation in the stats and were always getting nerfs to their already tough play styles.

There's a third, sadder option, and that's that bungie is using a metrics-bases approach to game balance. This seems to be the case, since they LOVE to trot out the metrics and show us charts about which classes have the higher K/Ds etc.. The problem with a fully metrics-based approach is that if your metrics are off at all, you screw up the balance. For example, Bungie is showing us that Defenders have the lowest K/D and says "so they need a buff." No. No they don't. Your metrics aren't looking at how having a defender on the team improves the K/D of the surrounding players. K/D is not everything. If you pretend it is, then your balance will suck.

Why not look at WINS then? Especially in certain gametypes, K/D is less meaningful. They should see which subclasses can't win games. Ultimately, that's what matters in the end when it comes to balance.

Wins is a pretty good metric, but the fact of the matter is that no single metric is useful enough on its own to justify a sandbox change, unless the margin is massive. Like, for example, if Defenders had a 0 K/D across the board, they'd obviously need changes. I don't really want to say "a buff" because maybe their teammates never die or something, but it's a clear sign that something is broken (again, unless the design intent is for them to never be able to kill anything). In team gametypes, it's also tricky because unless wins increase with the number of, say, gunslingers on a team, all the way to 6 gunslingers having the highest win percentage, there's usually some break-even point where adding more of a single class and/or spec actually hurts the team rather than helps it. Positive reinforcement for same-class-ness is good, but you also want to counter it with an opportunity cost for combo play between classes and specs. In short, you want your players to feel like they can bring pretty much whatever class and spec they want into a game and be successful. At the highest tier of play, you want teams to be able to plan class and spec composition for ideal synergy, but you don't want that to be more important than basic game skill.

For balance testing, you want to eliminate variables, so a test plan for, say, class balance (and I'm just pulling this out of my ass, but this is basically how I'd go about setting it up), would be to start with one class and make my guys all play that one class, with identical specs, for several games of rumble. This gives us a baseline for "player X is better than player Y in this scenario." Then we take a player who landed in the middle of the pack and have him change his spec to our designed "ideal" spec, and then run the same number of matches again. Did that change affect his standing in a meaningful way? Now let's have everyone go to an ideal spec. Are we back to the original numbers or did we find a magnifying or minimizing result in the variations? This is where the internet is hugely useful, because you can quickly determine what specs people view as the most powerful, regardless of the intent of the design (and you can compare the two if they don't match). We'd want to do that with an intentionally stupid spec as well, and then with some random specs and some "try this and see if it works" specs, too. After running, say, gunslingers, we'd then run this whole test with all bladedancers, and then all nightstalkers (identical weapons for all at every step of this process). Then we'd do the same for titans and warlocks. Only after all of this would we take our testers into class vs class/spec vs. spec games. Again, the internet is helpful for metrics here, but you have to normalize for popularity of classes, whether or not the guns have ideal rolls, etc.. So now you can tweak the classes around to get them all behaving about how you want them to relative to one another.

Next you have to tweak guns. Start with designed perfect rolls on everything and balance the entire weapon class assuming such a roll (because players *want* ideal rolls, and don't want crap rolls, it's safer to start from a place of perfection than to start from a place of mediocrity or crap - in a long enough timeline, everyone will end up with a perfect roll eventually, so that's where balance should be done). For weapons testing you would want to make sure everyone has identical classes, so you can, again, eliminate variables.

Then you need to balance the weapons with the class abilities... This takes a very long time.

Throughout this whole process, I'd probably be reassigning the very best testers (not necessarily the best players) to separate playtest teams, letting them get creative in their builds to see if they could find class and weapons combos that would break balance. And of course we need to stay in constant communication with the pvp sandbox designer to ensure that our sense of balance is meeting the design goals and vice versa.

So there's at least a month of testing for initial balance. BUT... once you attain that, you can make small tweaks on a weekly basis to reduce anomalies. Maybe ARs are getting way more kills than you expected. Adjust the range 1 yard closer. Or very slightly increase the recoil spread. If it's not enough, you can make further tweaks next week, and so forth, until the gun is performing where you want it to.

Generally speaking, I find Bungie's MO to be giant massive huge sandbox changes every few months, which results in essentially a reset of the entire testing process and the meta shifting largely to favor (or not) certain weapons. This would not be my desired approach. Testing for PvP is never good enough to match the real world, which is why I don't like large changes to the meta in any patch nearly as much as small, incremental changes.

No but seriously, thanks for the insight. Do you think the noobs at Bingle might have had too much say at the beginning, and when they realized how quickly the playerbase got good, they stopped listening to them, and that's why the game is getting harder and harder with worse weapons?

Yes, you probably could. I'm serious when I say that finding someone who is great at having "new player eyes" at a game is very, very hard to do. The few guys with that talent usually rotate between projects so as to keep them even fresher, and because there aren't enough of them to go around (when I was at activision we had about 300 testers and maybe 3 guys who were good at new player experience testing).

I do not think that the noobs at Bungie had too much say. If anything, I think they had not enough. The new player experience of this game is pretty confusing and rocky. Imagine a world where you're brand new and know nothing of the grimoire. The game doesn't make a lick of sense. The player control is also incredibly well refined, which requires a degree of skill in the game to even recognize, let alone properly test. Bungie has shown that they pay attention the game control down to the frame (as they should), and that means there are most certainly expert players giving feedback every day.

The difficulties of having an all-expert team, however, are that - especially in a game this old - everyone gets a favorite class and spec and gun and playstyle and they will say and do anything to keep their build on top. You start having to force people to test, say, high RoF shotguns or medium damage fusions rifles, and they resent you for it expressly because they aren't as good with those guns (or those guns aren't as good and they know it), and then they give misleading feedback (not intentionally, but as a result).

Hopefully you have a team that is constantly changing their builds, gear, specs, control schemes, etc.. to keep things new and fresh, but I can't say if they are or not. It does really feel like the balance changes are done in a fairly tone deaf way that is less interested in actual gameplay outcomes and more interested in metrics-based adjustments. Pure speculation on my part, however.

Keep in mind that the designers may very well feel like the best pvp game is one without fusion rifles, and so they intentionally nerf those all the time. I can't say. I happen to like a game where every weapon can be top tier, but I also know that's a pipe dream in any game. Still, I hope every FPS designer thinks to himself "Every weapon in my game should justify its own existence there, and not simply to illustrate how much better some other gun is."

There's a third, sadder option, and that's that bungie is using a metrics-bases approach to game balance. This seems to be the case, since they LOVE to trot out the metrics and show us charts about which classes have the higher K/Ds etc.. The problem with a fully metrics-based approach is that if your metrics are off at all, you screw up the balance. For example, Bungie is showing us that Defenders have the lowest K/D and says "so they need a buff." No. No they don't. Your metrics aren't looking at how having a defender on the team improves the K/D of the surrounding players. K/D is not everything. If you pretend it is, then your balance will suck. This is, imo, the most likely scenario. Everyone means well, but the methodology they put in place to determine balance is fundamentally flawed and no one is going to bother to fix it at this stage in the game's life. Des2ny *might* go differently, but I have zero hope that D1 will. It's just too much work to fix with too little return.

We at least have an idea that Bungie looks at more than just the stats. Your (hypothetical?) example of the Defender, for instance, is exactly 100% opposite of what actually did happen. Bungie acknowledged that the Defender was getting a lower k/d in their subclass chart but then noted that teams with Defenders tended to fare better in terms of wins. That's why the only buffs the Defender got was an instant restock of grenades and melee when using Ward of Dawn instead of something more significant.

Another example was a refusal to do much to change the MIDA Multi-tool. They said that yes, it was pretty good and (at least at one point in time) was being widely used, but even though the chart showed it to be a gun that was getting used a lot they also recognized that it was actually a pretty well balanced gun that didn't need a nerf.

Totally agree though that they should update more frequently. This whole thing with the Clever Dragon being superior at any range for months really got on my nerves. But I don't think your sad third option is the way things actually work at Bungie. At all.

It's totally fair to think that, and I see your points. I have a differing guess as to what's going on, but they're all guesses. I'm an expert at testing methodology, but am also not a mind-reader or soothsayer and I have no idea what is truly going on behind closed doors. I strongly doubt it's the sort of machiavellian conspiracy that reddit sometimes postulates. I also doubt that Bungie is following what I would consider to be best practices when it comes to design, testing, and implementation of an FPS PvP test plan. For what it's worth, I'm certain that my idea of best practices is not the same as anyone else's idea; this is all just opinion and conjecture with no real evidence to back up any of it.

That being said, I think your MIDA example is an interesting test case. You're using it to illustrate that a metrics-based approach showed MIDA is fine. I accept that. I do, however, believe that the fact that MIDA is fine is being used to ignore the fact that, in all cases, MIDA is a superior scout rifle to every other scout rifle in the same damage archetype. That, I believe, is not at all fine. Why have any legendary low damage scouts if they are just completely outclassed by this one gun? Why balance the entire archetype around an exotic, locking out players who wish to use a low damage scout from using an exotic special or heavy weapon if they want to be as powerful the metrics indicate they should be in pvp?

Of course, I'm assuming Bungie would want legendary scouts in the low-damage archetype to be viable because I would want legendary scouts in the low-damage archetype to be viable. This appears to not be the case.

Occam's razor tells me that either Bungie's design goals for pvp are for the number of viable weapons to be a tiny fraction of the number of available weapons (in which case they're pretty much nailing it), or that Bungie's play balancing practices leave much to be desired.

Since the communication out of Bungie has really told us nothing about their pvp sandbox philosophy, we don't know if they want pvp to be "bring your favorite guns" or "bring the guns we've decided should be viable" or even "there should only be one viable spec per class, gun per slot, and style of play, period." We don't know. I think the first option is the most fun and the most inclusive, thus encouraging the most players to play the pvp game, and so that's the one I am constantly rooting for, but - as you say - I may very well be in error where the truth is involved.

especially since some of the subclasses have perks to reduce super cool down (defender, night stalker) to feed this.

But the most complaining I've seen has been in conjunction with the Sunsinger glitch, which is in active use in Trials.