If I am an expert noob, can I have a job? (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Saturday, February 11, 2017, 06:09 (2888 days ago) @ Funkmon

No but seriously, thanks for the insight. Do you think the noobs at Bingle might have had too much say at the beginning, and when they realized how quickly the playerbase got good, they stopped listening to them, and that's why the game is getting harder and harder with worse weapons?

Yes, you probably could. I'm serious when I say that finding someone who is great at having "new player eyes" at a game is very, very hard to do. The few guys with that talent usually rotate between projects so as to keep them even fresher, and because there aren't enough of them to go around (when I was at activision we had about 300 testers and maybe 3 guys who were good at new player experience testing).

I do not think that the noobs at Bungie had too much say. If anything, I think they had not enough. The new player experience of this game is pretty confusing and rocky. Imagine a world where you're brand new and know nothing of the grimoire. The game doesn't make a lick of sense. The player control is also incredibly well refined, which requires a degree of skill in the game to even recognize, let alone properly test. Bungie has shown that they pay attention the game control down to the frame (as they should), and that means there are most certainly expert players giving feedback every day.

The difficulties of having an all-expert team, however, are that - especially in a game this old - everyone gets a favorite class and spec and gun and playstyle and they will say and do anything to keep their build on top. You start having to force people to test, say, high RoF shotguns or medium damage fusions rifles, and they resent you for it expressly because they aren't as good with those guns (or those guns aren't as good and they know it), and then they give misleading feedback (not intentionally, but as a result).

Hopefully you have a team that is constantly changing their builds, gear, specs, control schemes, etc.. to keep things new and fresh, but I can't say if they are or not. It does really feel like the balance changes are done in a fairly tone deaf way that is less interested in actual gameplay outcomes and more interested in metrics-based adjustments. Pure speculation on my part, however.

Keep in mind that the designers may very well feel like the best pvp game is one without fusion rifles, and so they intentionally nerf those all the time. I can't say. I happen to like a game where every weapon can be top tier, but I also know that's a pipe dream in any game. Still, I hope every FPS designer thinks to himself "Every weapon in my game should justify its own existence there, and not simply to illustrate how much better some other gun is."