Month: August 2021

It’s been a huge week in Destiny with the Witch Queen reveal and start of Season of the Lost.  There’s lots of new things coming in Witch Queen that I expect will bring a new wave of interest in the game.  And in the meantime, for the next six months, we have Season of the Lost.  Here are my initial impressions:

Seasonal Activity:  Astral Alignment

The seasonal six person activity follows the model of seasonal activities before:  a couple of tasks/stages to get to the boss, and then a boss fight.  This first week it takes place in the Dreaming City.  Bungie has spiced it up a bit by adding some mechanics to learn to make the encounters go smoother (i.e., you can clear without them, but it’s easier if you know them) which will add a bit of interest particularly early in the season.  In general this activity meets my expectations for a seasonal activity. I expect to enjoy it for the first few weeks but be more than happy to stop playing it once all of the new seasonal challenges are done.

Quest:  Shattered Realm: Forest of Echoes

A really nice surprise is getting a new soloable activity like the expunges right from the beginning, and this one has mysteries!  This is easily my favorite part of the new season so far, and I’ve really enjoyed exploring the arena and trying to figure out how everything works.  There are definitely a few kinks — it does seem possible to put yourself in a spot that is very difficult and maybe impossible to get out of and multiple deaths don’t seem to reset your respawn point.  (I was lucky enough to find myself on a titan when I got into one and managed to get out with creative use of thundercrash.)  But overall this activity is just absolutely fantastic.

Part of the quest is finding Ascendant Anchors and unlike prior hidden things we had to find these are scattered and sometimes hidden but pretty much all not too hard to find if you are actually looking for them.   I really appreciate that because I’ve been able to actually explore and look for them myself rather than getting frustrated and just looking up locations on Youtube.

I thought expunge was great last season but this is even better and I’m just thrilled with it.

Vendor rank-up changes

Vendor rank-ups for Gambit, Crucible and Nightfalls/Strikes are now all on a similar scale with bonus progress being given for activity streaks — that is, playing the same activity over and over — rather than win streaks:

For me, this is a mixed bag.  I like that the systems are the same and that progress is similar for each.  I don’t like that the most efficient way to gain progress is to play the same activity over and over again.  I like to vary my play more than that and will get restless after about an hour of doing any activity.  Moreover, though Bungie said that breaks to go to the tower would not interrupt a streak, there does seem to be some kind of timer on it because I have lost a streak even without doing anything other than going to the tower and then taking a break.

EDIT (08/31/2021): I’ve now seen that streaks persist even overnight, so I think what happened is that I was time out to orbit for inactivity at the Tower and that reset my streak.

I would feel much better if the activity streak concept were expanded to count all daily activity rather than having to start over if you need to take a break or want to do something else for a bit.

Trials of Osiris

Bungie announced lots of trials changes, but trials will not return until September 10 so I won’t give my thoughts until I’ve had a chance to play.

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All in all, a great start to the season.  I’m looking forward to it.

In my last feedback post, I discussed how a lot of Crucible-related posting online is marked by hostility towards and belittling of common gamers.  Yet a lot of Crucible mains bemoan the fact that common gamers aren’t as interested in the Crucible as they used to be.  These were on Twitter just this week (click the post to see the full thread on twitter):

It’s really interesting seeing the poor response to PvP improvement content in D2 right now (coming from myself and other creators).

It seems like players generally don’t care much about improving, which makes sense given the lack of incentive to actually get better

— Pattycakes (@pattycakesGG) August 12, 2021

In this post, I want to talk about my own on-again, off-again love affair with Crucible, and why I think that a lot of the suggestions made by good PvP players miss the mark.

Falling in Love With Crucible

The human element in Crucible changes all of that.  Human players are unpredictable and have nearly infinite variety in skill and weapons.  Crucible matches are not predictable in the same way PvE activities are and mastering PvP is much more difficult and involves learning a lot more than mastering PvE.

That variety — and that challenge — is what makes crucible great.  When Destiny 2 launched I was a regular but poor crucible player.  Three or four months in I sported a 0.67 k/d, and felt like I would always be bad at it — basically, I believed that crucible was just “not for me.”  An extremely kind clanmate though, urged me to reconsider, and insisted that she was sure that I could get better.  And with that encouragement, I started to try.  Moreover, since Destiny 2’s year one content was the release/DLC model, where players could get through it all quickly (which I did), playing crucible became one of my go-to Destiny activities.

And I fell in love with it.  I was usually matched with players around my level — there certainly were exceptions where I was much worse or much better than my opponents but for the most part it was pretty even.  I loved the challenge of trying to get better.  I watched YouTube videos, I watched Twitch, and more importantly I played — a lot.  I created a simple spreadsheet to track my k/d progress, since my first goal was to get to a 1.0.  And what that spreadsheet shows is that I played crucible almost every day from January to the start of Forsaken in September. And I absolutely did get better, not just as shown by my k/d improvement but also because I recognized and understood situations better the more I played.

Why I Play a Lot Less Crucible Now

I still play a lot of Crucible — far more than the average player — but certainly not every day.  Here’s why:

Matchmaking

Bungie removed skill as a matchmaking consideration from all modes except Survival/Glory.  That decision, and the communication around it, had a profound effect on how I think about PvP in Destiny.  What it said to me is that Bungie is prioritizing the experiences of veteran, good PvP players over the experiences of common gamers like me.  

The result of this is that it is now a very common experience to be in a match against players much better than me, that I have little chance against.  And I am about average.  Bad players have it even worse.  So match-for-match, Crucible is just less fun than it used to be.  

Moreover, now every time I feel like I’m in an imbalanced match I am reminded of this decision and feel resentful about it.  And if I am in a few imbalanced matches in a row, I wonder whether the population has gotten to the point that I just won’t have fun anymore.

PvE Seasonal Model

The Destiny model used to be that big releases or DLCs would drop and then there would be months in between new content.  For players that play a lot and got through everything quickly, then, PvP could be the only fresh Destiny experience available for months.  Indeed, PvP mains routinely argued then and some still argue now that Bungie should pay attention to PvP out of proportion to the number of player hours played in it because it is what gets the game through so-called “content droughts.”

We just don’t have the same content droughts anymore, and as a result there has never been more to do in PvE in Destiny.  Under the seasonal model, the story evolves throughout the season and new content is revealed throughout the season.  In season fourteen, for example, we started out with overrides, got Vault of Glass, then got expunge missions, the master Vault of Glass and Grandmaster Nightfalls.  And this on top of seasonal events like Solstice of Heroes, weekly challenges that were revealed week-by-week, and new triumphs and a seal to chase.  I don’t need PvP to keep Destiny fresh, there is PvE stuff for me to do all the time.  And even if there isn’t, by the time I run out I have played so much Destiny that I may just try another game rather than play PvP if the PvP isn’t fun.

Survival Isn’t Fun Enough

Since Survival does consider skill in matchmaking, I find those matches more fun than most other forms of crucible.  But Survival in its current form isn’t enough.  First, it is a single game mode with no objective other than to kill the other team.  A little variety would go a long way.  Second, Glory is not a meaningful ranking system.  Instead, it is just a progression system like Valor that measures longevity and playtime.  If either of these issues were addressed I’d be more inclined to play Survival, but in its current form it’s not a playlist that is fun enough to play very often.

The PvP Community is Unwelcoming

PvP veterans seem to like nothing more than talking down to common gamers.  They love to talk about how “trash” we are, how we’re “bots,” how we’re using “dad rifles” or “low skill” weapons, and to otherwise insult us.  Moreover they don’t at all hide that as far as they are concerned, only the quality of their experiences matter, and the quality of our experiences is irrelevant except to the extent that they need opponents to stomp.

Just the day after posting about the poor reception videos about improvement in PvP get, Pattycakes tweeted out this:

This mode is so incredibly fun, we need instant spawns in regular PvP pic.twitter.com/ahPtillKI6

— Pattycakes (@pattycakesGG) August 14, 2021

As his video shows, when good players ask for instant respawns in regular PvP, what they are really asking for is more opportunities to spawnkill their opponents over and over so as to get montage-worthy clips for their videos.  And it’s not as if they don’t know what that means for the experience of the other player — anyone who plays PvP a lot has had the experience of getting a bad spawn and getting spawn killed, and we all know how frustrating it is.  It is pure selfishness.

I could write pages and pages of examples, but anyone who follows Destiny online has seen what I’m talking about.  Common gamers are not stupid and it is not particularly appealing to play in a “community” where people value you only as cannon fodder.

What Would Get Me To Play More Crucible

There is one thing that would get me to play more crucible: fun.  If the activity is fun, I will play.  If it is not, I may play if I really want loot associated with the activity, but then as soon as I get that loot I will stop.

The suggestions most PvP mains make for crucible miss the mark because they don’t sufficiently take into account that “fun” is a bigger driver of playtime than “loot.”  Some suggestions, like “instant respawns,” are just pure selfishness that would actually make the game less fun for common gamers and would lead to less of us playing.  Also in this category are many PVP mains’ suggestions about weapon and ability tuning, which mostly amount to “buff what I like to use and nerf everything else.”  Others that might have some potential benefit for common gamers, such as just “more loot” or purely random matchmaking in trials rather than card-based matchmaking, have a much greater benefit for the good PvP players than for common gamers.  Those types of changes are not going to get players like me to play crucible more.  

Until crucible is more fun — not more rewarding, more fun — common gamers like me will continue to stay away and even those of us that generally like and enjoy PvP will play less than we otherwise would because we just can’t get our friends to play with us anymore.

Today, Bungie’s Joe Blackburn put out a twitter thread about Bungie’s development plan for crucible, including plans for new maps, reprised maps, reprised game modes, and new game modes.  In response, I’d like to offer some feedback on how Bungie communicates crucible changes to the playerbase.

Anyone who pays attention to online posts about Destiny knows that PvP mains — including many prominent content creators — post a lot about the Crucible.  Unfortunately, a lot of PvP mains pepper their posts with comments belittling and bullying common gamers.  This primarily takes two forms:  First, there are comments suggesting that our experiences don’t matter — this is primarily seen in discussions about matchmaking in which PvP mains assert that their need to ‘relax’ should trump the common gamer’s desire to have a fighting chance in a match.  Second, there are comments suggesting that our opinions don’t matter — basically, arguments that Bungie should cater to the desires of good players and ignore the desires of the rest of us because the good players play more Crucible matches than the average Destiny player.  And all of this is delivered with an elitist sneer, with anything different than the good player’s preferred subclass and loadout derided as ‘low skill’.

The internet is the internet, and it’s easy to ignore (or block) obnoxious people.  That’s true of even prominent creators, because as we’ve all learned while some are great people, some are most decidedly not.  It is another thing entirely when people at Bungie, who have created and are creating this game that we have come to love and make a part of our lives, say things that suggest that Bungie itself agrees with the posters described above.  When Bungie does that, it really hurts.

Because I believe that Bungie does care about the common gamers’ crucible experiences, I think that when these issues have come up in the past it has been inadvertent.  So I’d like to highlight a couple of instances, explain how they made me feel, and respectfully suggest how it might have been done differently.

First, in the June 11, 2020 TWAB announcing the removal of skill-based matchmaking from most crucible modes, the first of the listed reasons for the change was to “Respond to Community Feedback.”  But “community feedback” on that issue was never one way.  Indeed, many, many players preferred skill based matchmaking and the community discourse overall — as opposed to just PvP mains — was much more evenly split on this issue than on many, many other issues.  A reference to “Community Feedback” without acknowledging the views of those of us that preferred SBMM strongly suggested that Bungie just didn’t care about the common gamer’s opinion.  It suggested to me that Bungie didn’t care about my opinion, despite my having played thousands of matches in the Crucible.  It hurt.  Some greater explanation as to why Bungie was choosing to increase the number of unfair matches in spite of the impact of that on the common gamer’s experience, or explanation of how the change wouldn’t hurt that experience, would have gone a long way.

Second, in the May 27, 2021 TWAB about the mid-season stasis changes, Kevin said “we agree with many in the PvP community who say that Stasis is too dominant in the Crucible for too little effort or skill required.”  In a subsequent twitter conversation, he clarified that what this meant was that many stasis abilities provided too much benefit for the effort involved — which is fair enough.  But in putting a point like this in terms of “skill,” Bungie is — consciously or not — adopting the same use of the word “skill” that the posters described above use to belittle common gamers and their choices about subclasses and loadouts.  That felt to me — and others I know — like Bungie was joining the chorus belittling us.  That also hurt.  All the more because it felt gratuitous.  Some stasis abilities were too strong, and therefore extremely frustrating.  That was all that needed to be said.  As anyone who has read Sirlin’s Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion knows, there’s an excellent argument that in those circumstances using stasis is evidence of skill, not of its absence.

To anyone at Bungie that has taken the time:  thanks for reading this, and thanks for all of your hard work and for creating these fantastic experiences.  I hope this provides some understanding about how the way things are communicated may hit in a way you don’t mean or intend. I can’t wait to see what you bring us in the future.