Legally there’s no ground. There’s a large list of online games that came out, failed, and they are gone for good. There are even games that don’t survive more than weeks before the servers shut down.
I had fun writing this on reddit, where it will quickly disappear. I sometime have these relapses of the “ranting” days.
The news is that the last patch added what seems to be a good piece of content. But they, of course, made it pretty inaccessible since it doesn’t have matchmaking, it’s level gated so you need to grind the season to access it, and it will also be removed in September. I mean… wow again.
A proletarian Revolution: Luke Smith and the worship of the Ivory Tower. Catering only raiders, while ignoring and opposing the majority of players.
(The obvious irony in this post doesn’t obscure the problems I want to emphasize. The hyperbole is there, but I do believe these are real and important issues the game has. And so it is a suggestion to steer the game in a better direction.)
Luke Smith worships the Ivory Tower of the pampered aristocrats. This much is plain evident.
The new dungeon is the perfect emblem and proof. Like a carrot being dangled in front of players to tell them they aren’t good enough and that this game is made for elitists, high-end gamers, streamers and big youtubers who gratify their work through flattery, spewing back their marketing points like well-trained monkeys.
The dungeon symbolic choices:
- No matchmaking
- Level gated
- Going away in less than 3 months
This proves a deliberate attempt to block many of their players to access a good, and because it’s good it’s also very rare, piece of content. Because a good piece of content, in their philosophy, is not for everyone. It needs exclusivity, like a luxury car or expensive jewelry.
If it’s good then it’s meant to be a privilege, and a privilege isn’t for everyone.
All the design “progression”, in the way it’s tiered between powerful and pinnacle rewards is a way to separate players as if they belong to social classes.
Destiny 2 is the PERFECT metaphor of society where wealth is hoarded by a pampered high-end elite, while the great majority suffers. All quality content has arbitrary blocks slapped on to prevent the access to a majority of those players, matchmaking being the most obvious example.
Even the idea of cutting content, this September, to slice in half the strike playlist is a slap in the face for those players that now will have to grind a playlist with half the variety. So that you will feel, greater than before, the deep rift between the most soulless and monotonous grind, and the quality content only reserved for raiders.
Destiny 2 is built on player’s envy. You are the low wage, abused worker who grinds all his life only for the illusory, cynical hope to eventually join the higher ranks. Envying those rich celebrities who have access to all privileges.
With every piece of content, they reinforce the idea:
- The content is a souless, pointless, repetitive, unfun grind? Then it’s for everyone, easily accessible, and if it requires a group it has matchmaking.
- The content has handcrafted quality, inventiveness, novelty? Then it is made for the elite, it won’t have matchmaking, and it will have all sort of requirements to weed out the unworthy who think they deserve something.
The Menagerie, that as a mix of the two was an anomaly, will be erased this September. Like an heresy that contaminated the law of privilege and that now needs to be disown.
This determines even its future. Either D2 will have its revolution, or it will rot. Same as decadent elites always rot. Slowly.
A revolution in 3 steps (I know it won’t happen, reason never wins against rhetoric, and positive changes are always sabotaged):
-
Make all acquired loot permanently stored in the collections, storing for each item acquired also one random roll that can be manually updated in case the players finds a better roll. This allows ALL discovered items to be reacquired whenever needed. Solving inventory hell with a simple change, and already making the game 50% better with a single change.
-
Enable matchmaking for ALL activities requiring groups. Make ALL matchmaking optional instead of mandatory. (this will allow players to play strikes solo, if they want)
-
Stop the removal of content, and replace this ill-advised idea by allocating good engineers to rewrite Destiny 2 bloated and archaic filesystem, so that it can be streamed, delivering on-demand ALL the content, only taking space on the drive when you’re actively playing that content. (many players don’t know, but for example World of Warcraft can be fully played with a client as small as 10Gb)
A couple of reader suggestion, if you made this far:
Never change, HRose! :)
Spot on there imo. The footprint on the disk is probably just really badly optimized (like their tools and pipeline, apparently, due to them always complaining about how hard it is to add new stuff).
Last season I made it to the required light level to do a Grandmaster Nightfall – the same week they were removing it (i.e. the achievements for doing it)…
Now I have 3 months to do Menagerie (with the very low player population on PC - because why have crossplay in PVE content…) to complete all the achievements… rats.
Prophecy disappearing at the end of this season has not been confirmed AFAIK.
It is official (or not, the most recent wording is now: “may have to take a season off”), but they said it’s a “technical reason” and the plan is to bring it back three months later. So it will going away in September, to maybe return in December.
…That is also really, REALLY weird. They have three months before a big overhaul and yet for some reason they can’t carry over along with the rest a dungeon that is available right now. You might think there’s a massive overhaul, but nope, they said it’s a technical change that is not going to be noticeable on the players’ end. So it’s a mystery. Something that makes specifically this dungeon impossible to exist in the upcoming version of D2, due to something technical in the backhand that for some reason affects only this piece of content and nothing else.
It really sounds like D2’s engine is the ultimate boss.
You know what’s cool in Destiny these days? Something that again explains how broken and poorly thought the game is.
People are “grinding AFK”, because now it’s a thing. Something connected to the season activity that helps leveling up fast. By queuing the “forge” activity, and being AFK, the activity fails within a minute because you’re not playing, but there are drops at the end and you aren’t flagged afk because the cycle is faster than the built-in afk check.
Everyone is exploiting this, many of them ruin the experience of players who are actually trying to play the game, and those who points this out on reddit are downvoted. Like a kind of party crasher.
63% of all activities in the game are players farming afk.
I wonder if Luke Smith sticks to his principles and will remove the whole game, leaving just a Cookie Clicker, considering now most of the playtime goes in not playing. Guess what? The game itself is superfluous!
And the journey continues. Because the unintended consequence of this is that it drew the attention back to try to block matchmaking via scripts. And someone found the magical number of ports that work.
If you look at the history of this thread you’ll see that from October to December I spent COUNTLESS hours to achieve just this, but never got to work reliably, because the only option was to make the router into some kind of protected mode that still matched you with those on similar settings. So it hampered the matchmaking, but still a long shot from my hopeless desire: play all the strikes solo.
Well, now the script seems to do its job. For the very first time I loaded into the Tower without a single player in sight. It’s empty! Destiny 2 alone, everywhere! Including strikes!
Script here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/fgjzo0/destiny_2_changed_ports_for_solo_mode_on_pc/fnte3u0/
I still have something to do in this game, at least until September when they’ll remove 7 of those strikes (including one of the two most recent, and one of the best).
How exactly does the AFK experience ruin it for other players. The only way to efficiently power-afk is to go below 750 power, which means no “normal” player will be matchmade with these players, as anyone who is serious about attempting this will have their best gear on, meaning probably 950 or higher.
And it is a great way to get these engrams so it is possible to attempt the portal.
That said, I played normal up to 1040. Now I’m 1045.
I managed to get blocking working during some shitty event they had last year… but this script seems nice. Lets see if I have a match.
Players were doing it above 750, I was trying to do a forge legitimately for a black armory weapon and could not get a forge without AFKers and I was at about 1025. They’ve apparently fixed the exploit now anyway.
It wasn’t an exploit.
Game lets you join an activity with gear equipped.
You fail the activity.
There’s a 25% chance you get a failure reward.
You automatically requeue.
The ‘fix’ from Bungie was immediately implemented after the streamers who get paid to play the game 24/7 (and thus able to do the dungeon activity at the necessary light level) complained that they didn’t have exclusive access to the endgame activity (thanks to having 24/7 to play) so the circlejerk fanclub decided to change it by requiring you to requeue between each activity (which actually fixed andnother issue when you’d get matched too quickly to another forge and then stuck pressing esc esc esc to get back into orbit).
Funnily enough, this forge thing has been possible for ages, it is just now when they introduced 1 new piece of content, and a rebadged grind that let people gear up for it without doing the same activity over and over.
That said: The new dungeon wasn’t anything special. It has some bullshit mechanism. The older dungeons were much better in my opinion.
Oh yea; There is still no DUPE protection or the game trying to give you an upgrade for your lowest light slot. Because why should you get an usefull upgrade when you can get 3 x the same slot.
Expecting them to nerf more “fun” todays patch, and soon all our favourite weapons will be replaced with other stuff, with no room left in the inventory to keep them — or you can look at them in the “catalogue” where you can only remove 10% of the gear… (i.e. another half assed thing from bungie…).
Anyway; Yea - after the streamers whined about it and the knowledge was spread to more players, a lot tried to do the afk thing using the ‘wrong’ gear setup for it. Those who did the farm the proper way knew to downgrade their gear to such a level they would never be grouped with “proper” light players.
I’m sure soon the streamers will show off some new ‘cheeze’ that they can use to trivialize some encounter - after they’ve farmed the place dry, and bungie can “fix” it after “listening” to the “community”.
tl;dr; the people doing it above 750 were doing it wrong, so blame them if the forge encounter that has been available for 4-5 seasons(?) sometimes ended in failure (like it did with nearly every encounter at launch), not those of “us” who did it at 600 or below :-)
Buy now!
Comparison: Warframe ‘Vaults’ some rare loot from destinations when they introduce new, usually stuff that has been out for a long time (yet those who have the items can still trade and use them) - and they sometimes return for a short while again for those who would like these ‘prime’ pieces. Meanwhile, the galaxy and quests keep growing.
That’s misleading bullshit.
Titan, Io, Mars, Mercury & Leviathan is content that you either bought or available as F2P.
Europa requires $40. (edit: my mistake? I read that Europa will be open to everyone, only quests and campaigns won’t be…)
The only thing added is Cosmodrome, that isn’t new and isn’t the full destination either. For most players this is losing 5 to get 0.5.
Beside the fact that using “vaulting” for content is also going to confuse a lot of players who don’t know what it means.
By the way, I just checked and they massively increases the prices.
Shadowkeep was $35 and included the 3-months season.
Beyond Light will be $40 and it DOESN’T include even the first season. To get the same package of Shadowkeep it asks $50, and if you want expansion + season pass it is $60.
Just did the dungeon again.
First 3 loot I get are the same cloak, over and over and over.
Then I get a powerfull upgrade, which ofcourse drops for the ONE slot I have that is over 1050, which was also one I already gotten another drop for (so two missed light upgrade chances).
End result - no progress what so ever.
And they wonder why people did the forge.
One of the people I did the dungeon with said they also got 3 x same item this reset.
Haven’t played this since it was first released on PS4. Thinking of giving it a shot on Steam since its F2P. Any way to easily play with community people?
Its bungie, so no.
Well, there might be a QT3 clan in the US if you’re looking for that, but haven’t seen much activity on this thread so doubtfull.
If you’re thinking the reddit community there’s a Destiny IRC and a Destiny Discord, there’s also the Destiny 2 LFG Discord in addition to Bungies Destiny 2 APP with its “sort of” LFG feature.
Basically, a lot of 3rd party tools to facilitate the lack of matchmaking in the fucking game :\
The Destiny 2 Discord is very active on PC at least.
For PS4 I would think the best bet is to use the Destiny 2 mobile phone app.
I believe XBOX has some sort of pseudo-matchmaking on XLIVE, not sure if PS4 has that now, didn’t have it when I played D2 at launch on PS4.
I’m really frustrated with Bungie after major confusion ordering the Destiny 2 expansion for my son.
Now that all the expansions are available through Game Pass, I decided I’d jump back in and I have no idea how to pick up where I left off! Actually that’s not totally true, I think what I probably should do is pick up stuff from the ‘Legacy Quests’ tab, looks like that’s where the older expansions reside now. So, Curse of Osiris, then Warmind, then Forsaken should catch me up to when Shadowgate releases I think? Anyway, Mercury looks pretty cool, having fun popping robots there.
I also installed it. I want to keep going with Wasteland 3 because if I get distracted, I hardly ever go back to finish games. But hopefully soon. It sounds like I’ll need a guide of some kind on how to find content beyond base Destiny 2.
You better hurry with the old content, since they are removing most of it in 45 days or so.