Destiny General Discussion Thread

Destiny 2 will be offline on Thursday for 6 hours from 5pm to 11pm for server maintenance.

Will be very interesting to see what Bungie say today.

Personally I don't see how they can win back a large portion of the people who have gone against them.

For a lot of people the incentive game isn't actually the problem imo, at least not in terms of loot. Sure people were hoping for a god roll eyasluna in Destiny 1, but i don't think it was the driving force behind the PVP community that kept Destiny going through much of Year 2 and Year 3. People played PvP because, for the most part, it was fun.

In order to get back to Destiny 1 'fun' can they do so without changing the weapon economy? Without moving Snipers, Fusions, shotguns to secondary again - people still won't have their one shot capability at all times in a match, and that is what has brought the team shotting meta we have now. Personally I like the weapon meta we have now, and I don't want to see them change it to the D1 loadout - i'm glad we don't have people shotgunning or sniping 100% of the match. I don't see how they could change the loadout given the game was built around this loadout.

Bringing 6vs6 back won't change things too much, imo. It will mean we can have more people and more 'bants' in the fireteam, but would we not just end up with 6 people team shotting instead for 4?

I think speeding up the Super/Grenade recharge would make a fairly big difference (If they did this I would probably tone down Pulse grenades a bit). Maybe bump damage from weapons a bit as well, so that TTK speeds up a bit, and speed up recovery - which would mean if you get the jump on a 1vs2 or position yourself well enough you can do more when outnumbered.

Two big changes for PVP i think would make a big difference and they need to bring in ASAP are Ranked and Private matches.

Ranked is a no brainer. Its already there in the background cause of Skill Based Match Making - just bring it to the frontend and give players a number to chase. An emblem for each major rank. Two easy changes and would absolutely increase people's grind in PvP.

Private matches are used by a small percentage - but the Comp scene (Farcog etc) need them, the 'sweats' teams need them - without Private matches there is no comp scene. If you bring them in you will see more comps, you will see more people competing in them on Twitch (creating some hype) and practising for them. It would increase the popularity of Destiny 2 from a spectator perspective. If they added the ability to change attributes of the match via a more customs environment it could also act as an unofficial test chamber for Destiny 2 changes - if they see a huge spike in popularity of a particular rule set they could use that as a discussion point internally.

In terms of incentive loot game, there is so much they could do. We have 8 different types of handcannons, for example - lean into that for end game activities. Why don't we have both kinetic and energy variants of the Raid weapons for example - give us more weapons. They need to make more unique armor - why are there so many reskins of the same armor set, already, in D2? They need to make the armor more visually distinct and they also need to make intrinsic perks on them that give us a reason to grind for them. The mod economy is also so very basic - to the point I don't understand it. Its such a good idea, and executed so badly. We should have mods that change weapons by more than just an increase in power. We should have mods that provide perk sets to the armor. we should have exotic mods to grind for that do special things. I think there is so much they can do but unless they were working on these things since at least D2 launched (and they should have been cause they ARE F**KING OBVIOUS things that should have been in the base game to begin with) I don't see us getting them in the proper short term.

Some things like being able to buy specific things off vendors, especially from the timed event vendors feels like an easy thing they could, and likely are (given their previous comments on Iron Banner changes) giving us - but I don't think that is one of the bigger problems/solutions to the game.

Mitch Connor wrote: »

Bright engrams is pure speculation. As of right now they are not gambling as far as I know, but a lot of regulatory bodies are taking a real look at it now.

What bungie are doing right now is legal and if there was change in the law they would be given time to make the necessary changes before anyone would come after them legally.

Curse of Osiris is out next week, along with season 2 changes - would be perfectly in keeping with past actions that bungie is doing extensive server/game prep for that.

They are considered gambling in China, but can be circumvented by having them be purc6by a premium currency as opposed to directly with real money as Destiny 2 does with silver.

Dcully wrote: »

Your missing the point, its the deceiving and lies, the manipulating of the system by fixing xp and actively nerfing xp designed to encourage people to buy engrams which are loot boxes effectively.
How can you defend that?

They have some neck bringing out DLC so soon after game release too.


I do agree however its a tad unfair to see Blizzard tarnished where it is bungie effectively doing this.

I don't understand how you can criticise bungie for bringing out DLC with a fair amount of content so soon, then in the next sentence defend blizzard, whose most popular game you have to pay just for the privilidge of playing AND has paid expansions. I don't have an issue with sub based games, I just can't see how paid DLC is worse.

There's plenty to criticise bungie for, but that looks like double standards to me.

Dcully wrote: »

DLC so soon after release is a piss take, the game is out 6 weeks or so on PC.
It could easily have shipped with this content but no they put it in DLC.

If your referring to WOW expansions ? lol they are years apart from eachother.

That content coming in the Destiny DLC was already there before the game released, dont be fooled into thinking otherwise.
I have a far bigger issue with their recent antics.

It'll be out slightly more than 3 months on Console when the DLC drops. Destiny had a similar model where DLC was dropped every few months.

Just because this is new to the PC does not mean it's new to the franchise.

Dcully wrote: »

DLC so soon after release is a piss take, the game is out 6 weeks or so on PC.
It could easily have shipped with this content but no they put it in DLC.

If your referring to WOW expansions ? lol they are years apart from eachother.

That content coming in the Destiny DLC was already there before the game released, dont be fooled into thinking otherwise.

Its been out 3 months on console, Destiny 1 had dlc drop at the same time. The content, while probably in a playable state, was not complete when Destiny 2 launched on consoles and as such is dlc content.

Dcully wrote: »

You cannot compare destiny to WOW, you just cant.
Or its expansions for that matter, wow expansions literally last years [thats why they are years apart], have practically infinite amount of content.
Its why pretty much every MMO that tried to knock wow off its throne has failed.
Have you played wow by the way? Just wondering because if you did you would see where im coming from.

I dont these days but have done on and off since its release 14 or so years ago.

No, you can't compare the games but you can compare the payment models they use. One uses a subscription model, the other uses frequent DLC. I'm not comparing WoW expansions to destiny DLC, I'm comparing paid DLC to subscription fees, because as far as I can see they're effectively the same thing.

I've played a bit of WoW, never got massively into it to be fair but I played FFXIV for years and as far as I understand it, that follows a very similar structure to WoW.

AdamD wrote: »

Nothing to do can be solved. Why there aren't strikes with modifiers, daily missions, weekly heroic missions, daily crucible modes, weekly bounties etc. is beyond me. You can't even load up say the tank mission for the craic? Bizarre.

Heroic Strikes and Heroic Adventures are on the way. no idea about any of the rest of the stuff

Blog is up.

https://www.bungie.net/en/Explore/Detail/News/46504

I can't find much to be disheartened by in it tbh.. maybe using 'going forward' twice in the opener

If they follow through with it all I'd be happy

PetKing wrote: »

Is it as simple as flicking a switch to enable 6v6 though in a game that never had it?

The only reason they would have forced an across-the board a downgrade of an already low team limit for all modes would be technical issues. I guarantee you it was not a gameplay decision, so yup it's not something they can change easily.

AdamD wrote: »

Don't agree with this.

I'd agree with this.

The 6 hour maintenance due later today has been postponed until tomorrow at 5pm.

finished listening to the Bungie podcast. Was a good listen. No new information beyond the blog post yesterday but provided some context behind what they said and what they are and were thinking. Commitments to talking more often, regardless of who is giving the message, and whether that message is good or not. Of course we have heard similar before so it will be a case of actions speaking louder than words (1. which they said in the podcast itself and 2. the actions would actually be words in this respect).

Its worth a listen.

Bullet points (taken from Reddit - user chilidoggo).

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/7ght8f/the_bungie_podcast_november_2017/

Luke Smith, Mark Nosebury, and Eric Osborne are the 3 talking. The live team guy is out of town but he will be on future podcasts
How they balance the game for different players

They first talk about how they think of players - dividing into tourists, hobbyists, and the hardcore. Really interesting, and they talk about this for a long time. They acknowledge that non-tourists are hitting a wall and are running out of stuff to do and say they need to focus on the more hardcore (opposite of D1 for them).
They want Destiny to be a "Place where friendships are made" and they explicitly recognize a lot of the disappointment comes from people who's friends or clans are moving on to other games. They're not happy with this at all.
They acknowledge that communication is a weak point for them. They want to be very careful not to make promises. "The fact that communication is hard is not an excuse". Some things are just too far out to be sure,
They give the blog post as an example, where everything that's happening soon is within the next few weeks. They want to talk about the things going on, but need to be responsible with how they do it.
Game development is hard

Game development is complex and hard, but they recognize that's not an excuse they can hide behind. They are appreciative that we (the audience) are "more sophisticated" than most.
Masterworks specifically, they weren't sure it would be ready in time for Dec 12. They were very conflicted on whether to include it in their "Live Team" update from a month ago.
They reference the two recent streams and the difference in reception to them. That's why they cancelled the third is because they could tell that's not we needed to see.
Updates from minor to major are very subjective with how long they take to implement. QA, testing, and development vary like crazy. The XP issue was one number they could change instantly, but host migration during Calus is much much harder. (Server side switch is easy, changing a gun number requires a patch to the xbox/PC/whatever)
Whenever they touch code anything can happen. Can take 1 minute to fix and 3 weeks to test and deploy. They mention the silly walk emote. Severity: very high (it could be used in Trials to get free kills); Fixing: easy-medium (they're pretty sure they knew what was wrong right away), testing: medium (could take time to test everywhere), but implementation would be impossible since PC launch was ~1 week out, and they basically cannot patch during that time period. The only solution to them was to pull Trials for a few weeks until they could patch (no easy way to pull the emote).
Of course they also mention the heavy ammo Crota bug, but they say they should have communicated with the community and acknowledged that it was near-impossible to fix.
Luke Smith mentions that he intentionally hasn't tweeted for a few months, and was a little surprised at the positive response to his two tweets earlier this week. He wants to do better as developers to communicate, both with and separate from DeeJ/Cosmo.
XP conversation

Says this is a sensitive subject and they acknowledge that they would be stoking the forge here, but they need to address it head on because...
"In the absence of information, I think people will - and rightly so - move themselves to believe that we created or initiated this system to **** them, to be ****ty, greedy jerks."
They say it made sense from a design perspective to make some activities more or less rewarding. Unfortunately, they didn't realize the API didn't reflect that.
The bad part of turning it off so quickly was the imbalance it made. They're focused on rebalancing it now and will be extremely transparent on it. They were really impressed by the graphs and charts Reddit made, and debated talking to that Redditor about a job. It convinced them to make the call
"A lot of players are going to say, you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar" and they want their actions to speak louder than their words.
They don't want a situation where people are doing something for XP systems rather than their own entertainment. They don't want another Loot Cave. Looking at the data, loot cave was not even close to the optimal way to get legendaries, but it highlighted how unrewarding Destiny was at the time.
They don't mind our negative feedback, they accept it's part of the job of being game makers. They compartmentalize it and extract useful info.
In conclusion...

They might not always be the ones talking, but they recognize the importance of continuing the conversation. It'll be a process
Luke Smith is very excited about the myriad of changes coming in December, and the future stuff coming down the line. Masterworks is a foundational system, and they want to build on these things and improve them.
They talk a bit about the changes coming soon... nothing not mentioned in the blog post.
"The cake is good, we just need to improve the icing"