Jason Schreier interviewed Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Thursday, June 13, 2019, 09:04 (2008 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV
edited by Korny, Thursday, June 13, 2019, 09:10

[*] They want to change the economy of glimmer to make it more valuable. Essentially, they don't want you always sitting on 100,000 glimmer. They want players to perhaps farm for glimmer and find optimal ways of farming, a staple of MMOs.

Resource starvation is terrible. "Finding optimal ways of farming" is a result of poor game design, it shouldn't be their goal.

What they should do is make Glimmer more readily available in certain events, that way people funnel to them more if they're chasing that one item. Say "Doing Patrol activities in the Flashpoint rewards double Glimmer. Consecutive activities without returning to Orbit increase Glimmer gains."
So now you're funneling players into the Patrol Spaces, and encouraging them to stay there.
From there, you can give them Boosters. "Complete three Heroic Events in the Flashpoint, and total Glimmer gains will double for two hours".
Now they can go off and play their activities of choice, knowing that their work has yielded more reward.
You can even extend this to stuff like Guided Games: "Successfully complete a Guided Games run (Host or Guest) and all Enhancement Core drops have a chance to count as double".

I like those ideas! But I'm somewhat confused by your argument. Yes, resource starvation is terrible, but it happens naturally in waves when content comes out. Then you mention that finding optimal ways of farming is a result of poor game design but immediately follow that up by giving examples of ways to improve the system by giving people optimal ways to farm glimmer. How is this not exactly what you are saying is poor game design? In my mind, you either need to make it so glimmer is never really a problem by just playing the game, or as you have given examples, find a way that people can double down on farming a particular resource. They have implemented that for almost all resources in the game except glimmer.

So the difference is that it sounds like they want you to always be short on Glimmer, because more things are going to require it, or require larger amounts of it. This will, in their eyes, lead people to find the most "effective" way to farm it, i.e. the most repetitive method that will require the least amount of work. The problem is that doing stuff like that no longer lets people engage with the broader game, because they're trying to push that one specific lever that will give them a treat.

My examples simply make the entire game more rewarding if the players engage with certain aspects for a bit. Areas of the game that Bungie should want players to funnel to in the first place. People wanting to increase their glimmer gains doing a few Heroic events has a number of benefits:
-Public areas become way more populated, so the game feels more alive.
-Heroic Public Events have a purpose again, so cheapLEY doesn't need to burn through the regular one.
-Casual players who aren't in a huge need for glimmer no longer feel starved anyway, they see more people helping with stuff that would be hard for them to solo, and they will likely stay with the game longer if all activities have healthy engagement.
-People will be free to play any part of the game that they want after doing an optional ritual that makes everything naturally more rewarding.

And it doesn't just have to be tied to glimmer, or heroic events. The idea is that you can play the game at the pace you are now, but if you want to "catch up" to friends, or you simply want better drops, just do X to get more of resource Y.
The Menagerie is an example of that. You can get imperials by doing the bounties, OR you can buy the boosters from Benedict and improve the drops on a successful chest-opening, or you can simply pop the booster and play Crucible or Strikes, and sooner or later imperials will there.

It's something I've talked to Cheap about, and something that DE learned very early on:
If you give players a rare resource, give the less hardcore players the option to improve their resource acquisition, to respect their time. So any casual player can naturally gather a rare resource over time, but they won't have to be falling behind their hardcore friends if they don't want to. This is key to preventing the punishment that comes with stepping away from the game for long periods of time.