Sparrows weren't intended to be on Mercury... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Wednesday, December 04, 2019, 13:19 (1820 days ago) @ cheapLEY

They said not long after Curse of Osiris that sparrows on Mercury caused some sort of performance issues they couldn’t fix, so they just got rid of them.

I guess it’s possible that those problems occurred early enough that the design of Mercury was changed somehow to compensate, but that wasn’t the impression I got.

It wasn't that Sparrows on Mercury caused bugs/performance issues mid-development, it was that adding sparrows into the already-launched CoO caused bugs. Launching without them was a design choice.

More to the point, it didn't take them two years to root out the issue and fix it, they simply chose not to prioritize looking into it until Year 3. To quote DeeJ:

"To give some context on why QOL is sometimes delayed or not acted upon, I want to call out the Mercury Sparrow bullet in particular. This was something that players were asking about many, many moons ago. It's something that the team actually tried to implement, but it ended up causing some bugs that would crash the game, or impact various activities on Mercury. This jammed up our development timeline, as we essentially lost resources that could have been allocated to testing other content that was being cooked up.

Ultimately, it was decided that the Mercury Sparrow QOL request needed to be reverted and looked at again in the future, as we didn't have enough time to hammer away at the issues brought on by the change. To put another way, each QOL request has a trade off. Do we go back and add sparrows to mercury, or do we spend the same amount of test time on things like the Dreaming City curse cycle? What if a simple QOL request ends up bringing deep rooted bugs that require more time to hammer out? Keep working on that, or hit other items that are easier to implement?"