As a Bungie Dev said to me not too long ago, “if people want to play a game where the better player always wins, then Destiny is NOT for them”. For my taste, that’s awful.

This statement has been true forever, in terms of Bungie games (it was true of Marathon, it was probably true of Myth, it was true of Halo, and it's true of Destiny) It would have been true of Oni, if the multiplayer had ever gotten good enough to be released.

And while I totally get where you're coming from, I wouldn't have played ANY of these games if it hadn't been true.

I'll be sad if you actually quit playing PvP. :(

Do you not find that specific statement is a lot more true now than ever before?

I LOVED BTB in Halo 2-Reach. It had a lot of crazy stuff going on with vehicles and heavy weapons all over the map. Every now and then someone would climb in a tank and go on an absolute tear. But there were far more occasions where an enemy tank would be rolling around and I, without any teamwork or communication, could throw together a plan to take it out. It wouldn’t work every time, but I usually felt like I had a reasonable chance of out-playing my opponent, even if the odds were in their favour. There would be some aspect of the terrain that would allow me to sneak up and get close for a highjack, or a power weapon somewhere on the map that I could conceivably get to. There were usually options. And on the flip side, the enemy player in the tank needed to consider those potential counters, and actively work to negate them in order to maintain the advantage that the tank could provide.

In Destiny, none of there just isn’t that strategic layer. You just press 1 button and the player(s) in front of you dies, near instantaneously. It is possible to screw up with your super, and it is sometimes possible for the enemy to effectively counter (usually with a super of their own). It just all feels so thin and thoughtless and spammy to me. And again, I’m totally cool with a bit of that. But IB matches now consistently devolve into bouts of trying to out spawn-camp each other with roaming supers. It doesn’t always happen, but frequently enough to ruin much of the overall experience for me. Which is a shame, because there is a lot about D2 PvP that I really enjoy.

I’m curious, are you just flat out against the concept of an unskilled player being able to kill a skilled player with a Super?

I get that nearly killing someone only to get Fists of Panic-ed triggers a feeling of disappointment/unfairness, but even with a maxed out Super recharge build I think you only get two supers a game unless you are racking up the kills / Control point captures. Team orb generation can help with that but really only give you a third Super, I would imagine. Even if the unskilled player is doing spectacularly well with their Supers, they only get maybe a minute and a half of Super time vs eight and a half minutes where they have no advantage. And, really, it’s far less than that because the other team can use their Supers to shutdown enemy Supers.

In the end, it should all work out. The better shooter will have an advantage for the majority of the game. And skilled players get their own Supers which they should also be better at using. I guess I don’t see Supers as a rubber band mechanism because it should at least cancel out. What’s left should be player skill and team coordination. For every time the enemy chains Supers one after the other, your team should have the same chance to return the favor. Even your team getting shut down by Supers or heavy ammo is part of the other team being skilled at map control. Countering one Super with another may not require a lot of button presses, but it generally requires situational awareness and some amount of good timing.

I think there’s clearly something to be said for wanting a game with Destiny’s gunplay without having to deal with Supers. A more pure shooter, if you will. Counterstrike and Destiny both exist because there are players who enjoy one style over the other. What I don’t agree with is the concept that Supers give unskilled players an advantage. Yes, in that moment the Void Titan blocks your rocket then kills you with a shield throw he has a temporary advantage. But you get the same advantage and being better at the shooting aspects you will get a Super advantage more often.

So, if anything, I think maybe the opposite is true: Destiny favors skilled players and teams by providing them with more Super opportunities while unskilled players who aren’t winning as many gun battles are also subject to enemy Supers more often which costs them positional advantage and things like Control points.

Coming back around to my initial question, I feel like maybe your real beef with Destiny is that you think the unskilled player should never ever have an advantage. If that’s the case, I think the answer is more that some other game will make you happier and less a problem with Destiny itself.

Back during the D1 beta on First Light I realized I was getting sniped a lot but then realized I could swap to a sniper rifle myself. Since then, I’ve always thought of Destiny’s Crucible gameplay as enforcing balance through superior firepower. And aside from the occasionally misbalanced Super or ability, I do think that Destiny maintains a good level of balance, fairness, and respect for player skill.

For me, it’s less about the final score at the end of the match, and more about the many instances of moment to moment frustration that come from dying repeatedly without being outplayed. As Cody pointed out, a player who is getting more kills between supers will ultimately get their super back more frequently, thus they’ll dish out even more super kills than they’ll take (on average). My gripe is that I can do absolutely everything right in an individual encounter, from my positioning and movement to communication to gunplay, and die because the enemy has an instant-win button ready and I didn’t at that moment. And more often than not, there is absolutely nothing I could do do avoid that death.

I’m not against supers as a blanket idea. I thought they generally added an interesting wrinkle to Trials in D1 because you would generally only get 1 super per match, so there was a real strategic layer to using them in a way that was most impactful. Plus, most of a Trials game would progress without supers being part of the equation, so there was a sort of tension building towards the 1 or 2 rounds when all the supers would suddenly come out. But in D2 Quickplay or Iron Banner, it’s almost non-stop supers after the first couple minutes, and that is just gameplay that I don’t fin fun it rewarding, whether I’m on the receiving end or dishing it out.

And just to be totally clear, I’m not calling for this to change or be removed, if people like it. I just think the game would benefit from some kind of mode that supported a more controlled, less chaotic form of gameplay.