Destiny 2 - I don't have time to explain Bungie's MMO shooter 2.0

I can feel my interest in this game slipping away, but there’s still some stuff I never got around to doing - anyone on Xbox still doing any Nightfall strikes? Never done one of those, not even in the first game. Hate to shelve this puppy without even trying it out.

Yeah, I uninstalled it due to lack of space on the hard drive last week. But I’m willing to re-install it if you want to get together for a weekly nightfall. Hopefully this week’s Nightfall won’t be super hard, and maybe we can coral @Don_Quixote, who makes for an excellent partner.

Who knows, if this goes well, maybe we can conjure up 3 more people for a Raid? Ok, now that’s just a pipe dream.

All right, let’s check out what the strike is this week, I don’t really know which ones are supposed to be harder than others. Then we can decide if it’s worth reinstalling.

Seems like 75% of the time when I jump into a strike it comes up Pyramidion or whatever it’s called. Which is ok, I like that one, but it’s the only one I’m really familiar with. And it seems hard as a vanilla strike so I imagine nightfall would be a bitch.

I started working on my Xbox Titan but I’m probably still a week or so away for being ready to tackle nightfalls.

Managed to get through this weeks nightfall twice on pc. Titan and hunter at around 280 power.

I felt bit carried by the two different sets of randos from a lfg site, but i guess thats first time jitters.

One run no one talked and we finished with with 4:44. Second run we used in game voice and finished with 7:32. Downed it first try both times, no full wipes.

Probably a good map as an intro.

Which strike was last week’s nightfall?

Believe it or not, D2 has a tooltip that pops up after you fuck up your warlock jump enough. I never played Warlocks in D1 because I didn’t like the jump. After dying 3 times on the same jump on Titan in the campaign, the tooltip on the deathscreen told me to double tap the jump button to achieve maximum height. It was an epiphany.

Pyramidion, Taken flavor.

So, last two weeks my clan hasn’t bothered doing the Raid and hardly see anyone online, even for IB most people quit after doing 10 packages.

Which I probably should’ve done as well, 36 packages opened on ONE character, didn’t even get a full armor set.

A lot of them started playing The Division again, awaiting 1.8… I guess I could do that instead of Destiny The Token King.

I don’t believe it! I died to the same sequence of three platforms about 20 times and either never got or never noticed that message :)

I wasn’t sure if I should respond here or in the other thread @telefrog has now since this became a front page story. But I guess I’ll keep it here, since I meant to respond to this a few days ago (before we realized they also raised the XP level requirements).

A lot of Destiny is opaque, and that’s frustrating. See: this entire thread, where the same questions constantly and understandably come up about systems in the game with very little documentation.

Any interplay between rewards you can earn and rewards you can buy needs to be handled very carefully. Even purely cosmetic rewards (and technically, Destiny’s Bright Engram’s aren’t entirely cosmetic, but they’re pretty close) need to carefully balance the effort to earn against the cost to purchase and the significance of the reward itself.

The issue with XP being misrepresented and reduced could be explored entirely within a single one of those contexts and still fuel a pretty reasonable debate and raise questions about Bungie’s decisions.

But neither of those bothers me as much as the fact that this is just the latest in a series of small—sometimes truly trivial missteps that cumulatively add up to paint a picture of a game Bungie’s not equipped to actually deal with, from creation through live support.

The most charitable interpretation of the XP issue is that it was a bug first and foremost, that as a result they initially balanced XP rewards based on the progression with this bug baked in, and so therefore a correction to the XP requirements alongside the bug-fix is in keeping with their original vision for progression. Also, as this largely affects cosmetic rewards and early-game advancement, it’s not an indication of some kind of pay-to-win agenda, or a lazy ploy to drag out end-game content.

Look at all the problems the best case scenario highlights. A bug. Okay, well that happens. Then what? Did QA not catch it? Did they catch it too late? If they were aware of it, who decided not to fix it? Who had the poor judgement to think that the community wouldn’t find it? There’s nothing here they shouldn’t already have learned from the first Destiny at the latest. When it finally bubbled up from Reddit to some major publications, why didn’t they give a complete explanation “yes, we’re fixing it, and you’re not going to like it, but because we didn’t catch this bug, we balanced the XP rewards incorrectly, and we’ll need to raise those requirements too” would’ve gone over better than just quietly doubling the XP requirements. Are they just willfully ignorant and somehow didn’t realize that would almost immediately come out as well? Why are they so bad at communicating?

And again, that’s the best case scenario. It’s also possible their entire development is a clusterfuck of systems they either don’t have the manpower or management necessary to implement properly. If any part of this stealth XP system was intentional, at least two other design choices become absurd: the weekly “rest” XP bonus and the fire team medallions (consumables) that double your XP rewards for 4 hours. Again, you could stretch credulity to imagine these were still in service of an XP/reward curve that they were happy with, but it’s condescending and out of touch to present them as bonuses, to misrepresent the impact of these rewards, rather than building out the system to just accurately report what you’re earning.

And now take this and apply this head-scratching to any of a dozen bugs that have plagued every version of Destiny since the launch of the first game.

Right now there’s some kind of hidden “cooldown” on rewards for the random treasure chests that spawn in the patrol areas. They’re a very small part of the game, you could happily play without every finding any. But if you grab too many in a few minutes, they stop having rewards inside them for some unspecified time.

The chests spawn randomly in the first place! If you want to balance how fast players can accumulate the tokens from the chests, spawn less chests randomly you idiots, don’t keep spawning chests and then “oops, some of them are just empty, lol!” Don’t give us equipment perks that help find these chests. And please, please, please, if it’s still part of some ass-backward legacy development tools that somehow makes this impractical to fix, tell us that! Communicate back to us Bungie! Radio silence on stuff like this just adds to the assumption of malice.

tl;dr It’s death by a thousand incompentencies over there. Bungie doesn’t understand how their systems should work, can’t reliably accomplish it when they do, and are incredibly tight-lipped about both.

It doesn’t really matter to me if this is Bungie’s fault or Activision’s; I’m not trying to throw some specific group under the bus. This is an ambitious game, I’m sure there are good people doing very hard work, but at the end of the day Destiny isn’t even being maintained properly, never mind addressing the problem of ongoing content.

My understanding about the chest thing was that it was working as intended. The bug was that it was applying to certain chest types that was unintended, namely Cayde chests.

Anyway, yes there are some bugs and some flaws. No game is perfect. But aside from some disconnects at annoying times it has been a fantastic experience. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, and transparency would have been better, but the “omg they throttled my experience” reactions seem silly to me.

Finished the campaign, good final boss fight for once. Really, none of the sequences were frustrating, except that one period when I couldn’t jump worth crap on Titan. Once I switched to the teleport, it was no real problem.

I confess to having zero understanding of how to group, or when to group, or what the group content is, really, other than the cool public stuff. The fact that apparently a game in 2017 doesn’t have a facility for in-game matchmaking/group or raid finding seems bizarre as hell though.

The chest thing working as intended, yet they have not said anything about it (afaik)?

You can buy a 4 hour booster to loot on a planet, but as soon as you loot a few things, the rest that you loot for a while will be blank… and you’ll not get any indication about it either (outside of not getting the loot from the Cayde chests or w.e.).

I stopped doing Cayde chests entirely because of that, cause they were usually empty.

If you’re to believe some people, not having matchmaking tools in a game creates a “community”; in this case that means going to Reddit and the LFG subforum to beg for a group, or using Discord.

FYI this applies to region chests as well.

I read it on reddit or somewhere, so I don’t have an official source. Dealing with Cayde chests is annoying, but there is a workaround. Simply do another activity like a lost sector or public event in between each. Haven’t had a problem since I started doing that. The whole thing is rather silly (“look at how we reward you! But not too often”), but not game breaking.

Yeah, I find this more of a “we can’t be arsed to develop a LFG system, or even use Blizzard’s slick as owl shit stuff that already exists,” than a conscious desire to create some weird sense of community. Bungie makes kick-ass shooters in the mechanics, and the look and feel. Their world-building and lore is, while not exceptional, pretty good often enough. But the meta wrapper for their games sucks.

Owl shit is slick?

I guess Bungie knows things are going pear-shaped.

Dunno, personally. Just something my father used to say.

Still playing nightly on pc if any needs a body. Hoping to crack 290 with this week with titan and hunter. Baby lock in progress.

Hope to try the raid sometime after 295.