Category: Uncategorized

It is two days before the new season and the Witch Queen preview stream and apparently the internet is awash with leaks.  I don’t want to be spoiled and so I am staying away from social media and reddit until Tuesday.  So no substantive post this week.  See you next season!

Review

This past week in Destiny was another Iron Banner week. Once again, I played each character until all four of the weekly bounties were done, and tracked the games in a Google Docs spreadsheet.  The four bounties this week were Defeat Opponents, Defeats with Zone Advantage, Capture Zones, and Assisted Defeats.  All of my matches were solo queue and on the Xbox Series X.  The assisted defeat bounties took the longest.

It took 45 matches to complete all of the bounties, as compared to 78 matches last IB.  I played 17 on Hunter, 12 on Warlock, and 16 on Titan.  One third of the matches ended in mercies, similar to last IB.  My team won 23 and lost 22 games overall, and won 9 and lost 6 of the mercies.  

I actively dodged stacks, either abandoning the queue before it filled if I saw one or leaving the game immediately if I didn’t until I flew in.  Even with three stacks if they were on the other team I would check destinytracker.com and leave if it was basically three good players.  

Once again I enjoyed my IB experience this week.  I tried to learn Duality and felt like I improved over the course of the week.  Certainly I had some tough games, but I also had some good ones.  Avoiding stacks helped make it a better experience.

Raid Team Fabulous did the Templar challenge without cheesing it and without major trouble.  It was excellent.  We then did a regular run and were flawless until we messed up at Gorgons.  I think if we tried we could get a flawless run done.

I also joined pStabs’ Thursday raid team for their first try at master VoG.  Their team did great for their first try–we got all the way to Gatekeeper, completing the Templar challenge with no cheese.  We went back in on Sunday and completed Gatekeeper too.  It was really fun and I’m glad I was invited to join.

I’ve stopped doing the seasonal event because I think I have enough of the currency to focus the engrams I want to in the remaining two weeks.

Preview

This week the season’s story wraps up (or at least begins to wrap up) with Epilogue.  I am looking forward to it and to seeing what the next season has in store.  It is also the return of the Gatekeeper challenge in master VoG, and completing that will complete the Fatebreaker challenge for me.  Beyond those two things I am just hoping to continue having fun and trying to improve in the crucible and reading This Week at Bungie which is going to tell us about armor and mod changes for season 15.

A lot of players give feedback about Destiny 2 online.  Much of that feedback is awful and not constructive.  Constructive feedback has to start with a recognition of some basic truths:  

1. Bungie knows a lot more about what is going on in the game than any individual player, no matter how much that player plays.  
2. Bungie also knows how the game is constructed and how its various parts fit together, and the technological and practical limitations on changes far better than any player.
3. Bungie’s incentives are to make as much money as possible consistent with its ethical vision (e.g., even if it would be more lucrative — which it wouldn’t — Bungie isn’t going to promote racism or sexism in Destiny).
4. What an individual player can offer that is new is their experience and feelings about features in the game.

When I am giving feedback, I try to focus on communicating information that Bungie could not get by simply analyzing my game play.  The folks at Bungie know how much time I’ve spent in any activity, for all time.  They know how many times I’ve abandoned an activity.  They know what weapons I use and how often I change them.  And much more.  They know these things about all of us.

What Bungie does not know is *why* I make the choices I do — in other words, how I feel when playing and how those feelings drive the actions they know I’ve taken.

When I’m giving feedback, I try to keep that in mind and be focused on what Bungie doesn’t know rather than my own (relatively uninformed) opinions about things they do know.

How does this affect what I say?  One example is my views on PvP matchmaking.  I believe that matchmaking affects the PvP population, and in general I prefer skill-based matchmaking.  But you will not see me tell Bungie:  “Put in SBMM because SBMM will increase population,”  even though I personally believe that all things being equal SBMM is better for a playerbase than random matchmaking.  Why?  Because it is quite obvious to me that all things are not equal.  Bungie has chosen to have connection-based matchmaking in its casual playlists and so Bungie has obviously concluded that for Destiny 2, at this point in time, CBMM is better for population (see truth 3, above).  And Bungie has far, far more information than I do about that.

A related but separate issue is how to get feedback heard by Bungie.  Bungie very publicly listens to and takes feedback from content creators, and gives very little indication that they take feedback from ordinary players.  But people who know the company better than I do assure me that they do, through various mechanisms.  Part of the reason I started this blog is to scratch my itch to give feedback and have it heard, and while I can’t control the latter at least now I have an outlet for the former.  Expect a feedback post on Crucible soon.

Welcome to Destiny Common Gamer!  I plan on a twice-a-week posting schedule, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, with an occasional bonus post as the mood strikes.  Tuesday’s posts will be a review of the past week and preview of the upcoming week of my own Destiny 2 gameplay.  Saturday’s posts will be on a variety of topics about the game.