- Joined
- Aug 20, 2022
So I heard the new raid is almost entirely devoid of mechanics of any kind and is simply dps checks. Is this where we're at with raid encounters being strike finales?
Destiny 2 - Place your bets on how many $40 DLC packs we'll get this time.
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- Joined
- Jun 26, 2024
generally enjoyed the new expansion despite the annoying puzzle sections in the campaign, the QoL changes to the general game are also pretty good, the highlights for me weapon wise are probably the new exotic hand cannon and the rocket pulse rifle
I don't really raid that much anymore (the Destiny community is filled with impatient fucks) but I guess I can see why they did knowing the average IQ of a Destiny player is in the single digits, still the thing I fear is it may be too little to late to get those casuals back into the game given the fact how hard they have been trying to appeal to le hardcore streamers ever since Forsaken, also if if the one thing hardcore players are going to get is going to be far too easy mechanically thats going to piss them off too, Bungie has a really difficult time understanding the various sections of their target audience
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2020
I’m surprised Tyson Green seems to be doing such an atrocious job since he is a super OG Bungie guy and not one of the newer mongoloids or diversity hire trannies that now infest bungie. Maybe like 343, the rot and retardation runs so deep it doesn’t even matter who they bring in or promote, they’ll just get assimilated like the fucking borg.
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- Aug 20, 2022
Even casuals don't like being treated like casuals. This was one of the biggest points of contention with D2 at launch.
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- Sep 22, 2019
Duno why being a super OG is some sort of magic charm that prevents people from retardation. For all we know, he was the local tard of the team who had to be wrangled daily to be doing something useful.
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2020
Btw I forgot to mention. The shooting range is also great but feels like something that should've been introduced ages ago, not now when the game is running on fumes.
Maybe, I never really got that impression from him back in the day though. If anything Luke Smith always gave off that vibe a lot more.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
I haven't really watched anything (there's zero point watching live because all the top teams mute their comms and put up black screens so nobody else gets to learn what they do, which sure makes for riveting entertainment for the audience), but some of the posts I've read claim it's quite mechanically intense, presumably because Bungie is still listening to the complaints about RoN being too easy and making every raid ridiculously complex even on normal mode. Contest mode was also ridiculously overtuned, resulting in the lowest amount of clears of any raid except for Last Wish, if the data from Braytech is accurate and I'm reading it right:
Now, there may be some issues since some of the stuff is still obfuscated in the API, but the second one that's classified should be the contest mode emblem. According to their data, 0.01% of the million accounts actively indexed got the contest emblem, which comes out to roughly one hundred players in total, or roughly seventeen teams. At most, maybe twenty to twenty-five. And many of those teams didn't even clear until the 48 hours was almost up. By contrast, Salvation's Edge had almost 3000 players clear; granted, they did do a second contest mode weekend because of the PS server issues, and player population and hype was at an all-time high so there were more people attempting. But even taking those into account, a thirty times drop in clears from the previous toughest raid is crazy.
I can't say it's surprising, considering that not only was the raid drastically harder than previous contests (players determined it was at a -40 delta as opposed to the usual -20 or so, requiring crazy loadout swaps to barely clear DPS requirements), but they also gave players very little time to prepare in an expansion with more systems changes than any in recent memory. It's not really surprising that the streamers Bungie invited to preview the expansion and build hype generally got through it okay since they knew what they were getting into and could help their teams prep better, while everyone else had to call it quits after maybe one encounter if they were lucky.
Ironically, the Rite of the Nine event was pretty positively received because they managed to create content for everyone. The explorer mode for the dungeons helped casual players dip their toes into content they may have been hesitant to engage with before, with big popups that explained dungeon mechanics and waypoints to tell them where to go next so they wouldn't get lost in traversal sections. It even had matchmaking if they wanted help, but their damage would get boosted if they went solo. Normal modes got refreshed with additional mechanics (or in the case of Ghosts of the Deep, quality-of-life changes), and an even tougher mode was included for those who wanted to chase adept weapons. Best of all, none of this required any power grinding at all, although Bungie still was nice enough to drop a free set of pinnacle cap gear so anyone coming back could engage with the rest of the game at their leisure too. It felt like a preview of things to come.
So then what does Bungie do when the expansion drops? Nothing for casuals except a lackluster difficulty that's too easy, crazy grind just to unlock new difficulty settings, jacked up difficulty through gimping the player and never letting them outlevel anything, and the best loot gatekept behind dozens or even hundreds of hours of grinding. Incredibly retarded.
You can be a skilled developer and still make the wrong decisions because your ideas are dumb. Hell, he basically brought back the Nightfall card system that he initially spearheaded back in year 1, and there's a reason why it got removed: players quickly find the optimized combination of perks that minimizes hindrances and maximizes rewards, then they never run anything else. Just because he's been there a long time doesn't mean he's the best for the job.
Maybe it's unfair to put this all at his feet, maybe it was someone even higher up who demanded that engagement metrics must be pumped at all costs, I dunno. But still, it's clear that there was an immediate shift in priorities as soon as he took over as game director, when the quality-of-life improvements under Joe Blackburn's leadership started to be rolled back in Revenant, like no more seasonal crafted weapons or the return of raising the pinnacle cap (it was small, but it was still pointless). As the guy in charge, he has the responsibility to deliver something that people want to play, and he's clearly not doing that.
Like I said, if Bungie is going to have any chance of salvaging this trainwreck, they're going to have to make big changes, and fast. No "we're listening" blog posts, no waiting for the midseason update or the next expansion, they need to fix things right now before even the hardcore players burn out and quit for good. And if Tyson doesn't understand this, then he needs to be removed from his post and replaced with someone who does.
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2024
Definitely agree to some extent, I think removing crafting was a good thing because it made running shit pointless once you got the rolls on everything, The Portal was a step in the right direction but its definitely valid to feel that it may be too little too late as far as getting butthurt players back, and the casuals don't even know if something is good because Bungie doesn't bother to market outside of the small internet sphere, and thats arguably their greatest issue right now
yeah, im somewhat in the middle between a casual and hardcore player but the game really appeases neither extreme, Casuals will get filtered easily and the new player onboarding experience is objectively terrible, a random spic picking up the game isn't going to know the how the game fundamentally works, and on the hardcore side of things the only thing they are getting is 1 raid and 1 dungeon every year which is going to upset them, especially the streamers who are eager to jump on the ragebait train, I am enjoying the game right now, but if they continue to just do nothing until the mid-season update it will probably cause me and many others to take a break and that looks bad for Bungie Higher-ups
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2020
I don't think anyone there is capable of salvaging it TBH, and I think they're just coasting and putting things in maintenance until the whole thing collapses. You can sort of see it with how much less content is present now compared to before. It peaked this weekend at about 100K, which is 1/3 of the numbers Lightfall got... and Lightfall allegedly did so bad it almost killed the entire studio. Marathon is probably DOA unless a miracle happens. Their reputation is also completely in the gutter and they are known as "that studio that plagiarizes and deletes the content you paid for". The hole they've dug themselves into is just too deep.
A big problem is and has always been that Bungie legitimately thinks they're hot shit and can do no wrong. The livestreams really highlight how incredibly arrogant and out of touch they are. They think it's still 2007 where they're rockstars who are beloved by everyone. It's not until the community throws things back in their face that they walk it back, and usually it's only a half measure at most.... or they just ignore it completely like the crafting situation.
Another problem is they're suffering from post-Endgame syndrome. Things now feel directionless and meaningless. Who cares about these shit villains like the lesbian Vex bitch when we just killed the Witness, basically the most powerful being in the entire universe? Even fighting Xivu Arath would feel small now.
I'm not sure how you overcome all this without just moving to an actual D3. D2 is completely outdated and is barely holding itself together as it is - if they added anything dramatic like space flight for example, the whole game would probably just implode. But again, their team has been pruned dramatically (entire QA shitcanned lol lmao) so I'm not sure if they're even capable of it, or if Sony would think it's worth it.
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2022
Locking in my prediction now, Sony will outsource D3 to the slants who are making that mobile destiny hero shooter game.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
See, I have a different take on crafting: all content has a shelf life. Eventually, there comes a point where you stop wanting to engage with a particular activity because you've done it so many times that it's become boring. This point is different for every person (I fear the madmen who have hundreds of Garden of Salvation clears), but I would wager that most players stop wanting to play something after anywhere from a few to a few dozen clears. In that time, the odds of getting a god roll of any weapon that could drop in that activity is slim, let alone all of the weapons. Hell, even getting just a good roll isn't a guarantee.
I'll give an example. At the end of last season, I was working through triumphs I'd put off, and one of those was the one to do fifty Onslaught: Salvation clears. As much as I found the activity boring already (I had single digit clears when I started), I decided to finish it up before the season ended, which meant a lot of grinding. While I was doing it, I decided that I'd try to get a roll of Vantage Point with Eddy Current and Jolting Feedback, so I used the tonic to guarantee that nearly all my loot drops would be that gun, not just from clearing sets but also random drops throughout a completion. In total, I could usually get about a dozen drops per clear.
Out of the literal hundreds of Vantage Points I got to drop while farming that activity, do you want to know how many dropped with that perk combo?
Zero.
That's right, not a single one dropped with those perks. Hell, I didn't even care about the barrel/magazine/masterwork, I would have been satisfied with just a 2/5 roll! But nope, I never got it.
Thing is, I wouldn't even have been engaging with the activity to that extent if I hadn't been doing it anyway for triumph completionism. I'd only done a few clears during the season itself because I found it pretty dull, which is why I'd put off finishing it up for so long. It was only thanks to the ridiculous Geomag+Delicate Tomb build that actually made it entertaining enough to knock out those clears.
If those weapons had been craftable, I would have long ago had my perfectly rolled Vantage Point, and I would have stuck with the activity longer to ensure I got all the patterns unlocked. No crafting does not entice me to keep grinding, it just means that there's less of a chance I got the roll I wanted by the time I get bored with the activity.
Someone posted a thread on the subreddit saying that Bungie was losing its middle class, and I think that's an accurate way to describe people like you and me. The current systems are not designed for casual players, but they're also not designed for the somewhat more serious players who do engage fairly regularly and know their way around the game, but don't devote their lives to it. The only people that it seems like it's supposed to appeal to are the no-life grinders who have no issue optimizing all the fun out of the game, but like you said, a severe lack of endgame content is going to hurt them too. Bungie apparently doesn't want players to have any other game but Destiny in their lives, and they're in for a rude awakening when they realize how few people that applies to.
Worse when it took them ages to actually give any sort of indication of what their planned direction was. We were coming up on just a couple months to go with barely any sort of communication of what they were going to do next, outside of a couple blog posts from months prior that described plans in very vague terms that nobody could really wrap their heads around, things that kind of sort of sounded good but were difficult to understand without getting your hands on it first. They were seriously coming down to the wire with nothing substantial, such that when it finally dropped, there was no time to really build any hype at all.
Which leads into...
If there was any direction they could have taken with existing characters, the Nine was probably the best option. They'd been basically gone from the plot since, what, season 11 (I'm not counting the anniversary update)? And even then they'd only had a small role in a single dungeon off to the side that wasn't part of the main story of that season. As one of the bigger mysteries still remaining in the game, it was certainly an opportunity to delve into uncharted territory and build a foundation to work with.
The issue, of course, is that they're kind of too alien in how they're not even part of our dimension and experience time completely differently. Because of that, it's still hard to get a feel for what their goals are. Broadly, the Inner Nine want to support humanity for self-preservation, while the Outer Nine want to evolve and sever their dependence on organic life. The raid Ghost's lore tab hints that the Outer Nine conspired to allow Maya to kill III for their own plans, but there's no indication of what they're up to. Contrast that with the Witness, who had a clearly defined goal (unite the Traveler with the Veil to freeze the entire universe in its "perfect" form for eternity). Even though we're given a direction at the end of the campaign ("bind the Nine"), we have no idea what that means. Plus there's the implication that they've been behind everything in the Destiny universe up to this point (even the Traveler showing up in the first place and choosing to make its stand with humanity instead of fleeing when the Witness found it), which feels like quite the asspull.
Unless Bungie is going to start dropping more story beats over the next few weeks, it could be months or even years before this storyline makes any progress, though. The old seasonal model was getting a bit repetitive, for sure, but at least there was a consistent cadence of story updates that gradually unfolded over time. The new model only mentions major updates every three months, and expansion campaigns seem to be entirely self-contained, with Renegades involving the Dredgens and not seeming to have any link to the Nine at all. I'm not saying they have to go and spoil everything, but some indication of how things are supposed to progress would be nice.
But fix the systems issues first. I like Destiny's story, but I want something actually worth playing to experience it.
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2024
I can definitely see that, I think my problem with crafting is that the weapons were tied to a particular activity so there wasn't much incentive to run content, with that not being a thing anymore I can see the argument for some weapons being craftable, and I do think the Raid weapons should have been craftable given how complex some encounters are, and being able to craft say an Ancient Gospel with Explosive Payload and Destabilizing Rounds for example, should be a reward mastery of content of that caliber, not everyone even runs raids so it can be difficult to get groups together, but after a certain point you should just be able to get that 5/5 weapon
yeah, id consider myself to be roughly in the middle 25% of players, my criticism of game prior to EoF was that after a certain point late into the season you eventually feel satisfied with everything that you got so you are just waiting weeks on end for new content to roll out, I am enjoying the game quite a lot right now, but I can definitely see myself getting bored around late August, especially without a storyline for this season, It's not the worst thing for me personally as I can just play other shit in my steam library for 2-3 weeks but its going to look bad for Bungie when the player counts begin to dip until Ash and Iron releases
yeah I was actually kind of like "wtf are they doing" when they revealed Renegades even as a big Star Wars fan not all sci-fi meshes well together and Crossover Fatigue in Gaming is very high in general right now, a lot of people were pissed thinking it might take place within the Star Wars galaxy and make no sense in the process, obviously they clarified that they were just using the aesthetic of SW but they should have communicated that in the stream, people don't want to fight Darth Vader in the new Dungeon and get his Lightsaber as an Exotic Weapon, its just not Destiny, and even using the aesthetic of Star Wars within the Destiny Universe id argue is pushing it. I feel there were some women in lead rolls that decided it was a good idea because they are both Sci-Fi therefore Destiny fans must be Star Wars fans also be Destiny fans when that is not always the case
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2024
I have Vex Fatigue. In over a decade they still haven't figured out how to make them anything other than The Borg but gay. They're always the secondary villain in whatever story they're introduced in because they're fucking boring. Even the Vex Network wore out its welcome once it became a regular destination in Lightfall. They're Destiny's equivalent of Avatars of Khaine, where they're super strong in offscreen lore but they get roflstomped by every single faction they fight against. Even worse, with Maya and the implication that she was giving the Choir Vex free will and autonomy, Bungie had the opportunity to turn the Vex into true and honest characters, and they threw that away for yet another "Oh no! The Vex are trying to terraform [Location]!" plot.
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2024
IT'S FUCKING HAPPENING. GET IN HERE
Paul Tassi: "70% Of Destiny 2’s Top Contest Mode Clearing Raid Teams Cheated" 🄰
Bungie: "We're seeing reports of enemies being at a higher delta than what the activity advertises - ex: enemies have a skull icon next to them instead of a sword. We will investigate." 🄰
UPDATE: Bungie: "We are investigating reports of cheating with fireteams who cleared The Desert Perpetual Contest mode." 🄰
>fire QA team
>fire anticheat team
>launch raid bugged, everything has way more health than it's supposed to
>becomes third longest World's First race because of that
>turns out that SEVENTY PERCENT of the top 100 finishers very likely cheated
Brilliant moves, Bungie. You have truly overdelivered. Only thing that could make this funnier is if Saltgroido gets caught up in this
Paul Tassi: "70% Of Destiny 2’s Top Contest Mode Clearing Raid Teams Cheated" 🄰
List of suspicious clears 🄰 mentioned in the article:
Bungie: "We're seeing reports of enemies being at a higher delta than what the activity advertises - ex: enemies have a skull icon next to them instead of a sword. We will investigate." 🄰
UPDATE: Bungie: "We are investigating reports of cheating with fireteams who cleared The Desert Perpetual Contest mode." 🄰
>fire QA team
>fire anticheat team
>launch raid bugged, everything has way more health than it's supposed to
>becomes third longest World's First race because of that
>turns out that SEVENTY PERCENT of the top 100 finishers very likely cheated
Brilliant moves, Bungie. You have truly overdelivered. Only thing that could make this funnier is if Saltgroido gets caught up in this
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
don't forget "no linux version because we don't want cheaters!"
I doubt they were running full-on hacks. more likely they just figure out exploits due to bunghole's shoddy code and abused them hard.
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2022
wouldn't hurt to rule out both since kernel anticheats are useless and bungo's coding being a dumpster fire of spaghetti, like people turning on the hacks after they figured out the exploits to make the clear faster.
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2024
I've dropped like $400 on this game but haven't played since Lightfall released. Glad I didn't have to live through this shitshow lmao.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Kind of glad I didn't post an update to my look at the raid clear numbers now that this info has come to light. Braytech now lists just under 2000 players with the contest emblem, while warmind.io says about 2500, which is definitely better than the hundred I saw before, but still below the number of Salvation's Edge contest clears. If it's true that nearly 70% of those players cheated, then we're looking at actual numbers closer to 600-750 players in total that managed legit clears, which (according to warmind.io) puts it just slightly above both Crown of Sorrow (509) and Garden of Salvation (539) contest clears. Even more important to note is that those raids only had 24 hours for contest; TDP had only sixteen teams (96 players) clear in the first 24 hours, which makes it the third least cleared in the first day behind SE (one team, six players) and LW (two teams, twelve players).
I thought the raw numbers seemed a bit fishy as I saw the stats update over the past week. With how much people were complaining of how brutal the damage checks were, as well as the massive drop in players from TFS, it definitely felt odd to me that there was only a thousand player difference between the last two raid contest clears. Now that it's become clear that a huge chunk of those were cheating, it's making a lot more sense now. Honestly, this whole raid has been one debacle after another, and if they'd had any sense, they would have delayed it a week or two so that some of these bugs could have been ironed out and players could have gotten used to the new systems. Then again, considering they had a SE playtester giving them feedback and it was tested with weapons they later banned for being too good, it seems like it was never going to be anything but a slog.
Much like the rest of this expansion, I don't know who contest mode is supposed to be aimed at anymore. Getting a world's first clear is certainly something to aim for, but realistically that's a tiny group of people. Meanwhile, there are a lot of players out there who are really good at the game that don't care about topping the leaderboard and just want to finish a difficult challenge before time runs out. But with the last couple contest modes being so brutal, fewer and fewer are able to get anywhere close to completion. Granted, SE being exceptionally hard makes sense as the final chapter in a saga, but why did they immediately turn around and make the intro raid to the next storyline be this ridiculous? Hell, part of the reason they extended contest to 48 hours in the first place was to make it more accessible without ruining your health chasing a clear, but now most teams require most of that time (with little to no sleep, mind) to finish.
And as for the audience, they're treated to the most boring streams imaginable as the top teams black out their screens and mute comms so nobody gets to use what they've learned to surpass them. So even if this is supposed to be a big event that helps to advertise the game, nobody can even tell what's going on, so it fails in that regard too.
It just feels to me that they continue to let the complaints about RoN being so easy get to them, so they're obsessed with ensuring that each raid tops the last one in difficulty, chasing away more and more players who could get a clear if they weren't required to sacrifice so much to do so. There's a difference between "challenging but fair" and "brutal and unfun," and they have definitely lost their way in that regard. As Ross Scott has said before, I will take a game that is too easy over too hard any day, because then I actually have a chance of beating it.
I thought the raw numbers seemed a bit fishy as I saw the stats update over the past week. With how much people were complaining of how brutal the damage checks were, as well as the massive drop in players from TFS, it definitely felt odd to me that there was only a thousand player difference between the last two raid contest clears. Now that it's become clear that a huge chunk of those were cheating, it's making a lot more sense now. Honestly, this whole raid has been one debacle after another, and if they'd had any sense, they would have delayed it a week or two so that some of these bugs could have been ironed out and players could have gotten used to the new systems. Then again, considering they had a SE playtester giving them feedback and it was tested with weapons they later banned for being too good, it seems like it was never going to be anything but a slog.
Much like the rest of this expansion, I don't know who contest mode is supposed to be aimed at anymore. Getting a world's first clear is certainly something to aim for, but realistically that's a tiny group of people. Meanwhile, there are a lot of players out there who are really good at the game that don't care about topping the leaderboard and just want to finish a difficult challenge before time runs out. But with the last couple contest modes being so brutal, fewer and fewer are able to get anywhere close to completion. Granted, SE being exceptionally hard makes sense as the final chapter in a saga, but why did they immediately turn around and make the intro raid to the next storyline be this ridiculous? Hell, part of the reason they extended contest to 48 hours in the first place was to make it more accessible without ruining your health chasing a clear, but now most teams require most of that time (with little to no sleep, mind) to finish.
And as for the audience, they're treated to the most boring streams imaginable as the top teams black out their screens and mute comms so nobody gets to use what they've learned to surpass them. So even if this is supposed to be a big event that helps to advertise the game, nobody can even tell what's going on, so it fails in that regard too.
It just feels to me that they continue to let the complaints about RoN being so easy get to them, so they're obsessed with ensuring that each raid tops the last one in difficulty, chasing away more and more players who could get a clear if they weren't required to sacrifice so much to do so. There's a difference between "challenging but fair" and "brutal and unfun," and they have definitely lost their way in that regard. As Ross Scott has said before, I will take a game that is too easy over too hard any day, because then I actually have a chance of beating it.
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2018
This reminds me of that time Massive gave the design documents of a raid in The Division 2 to a group of content creators who then just happened to be the firsts to finish the raid and got their picture framed at the White House (in-game).