Luke On Sunsetting (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Thursday, December 17, 2020, 16:11 (1443 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I don't agree with everything Luke says, but I think he thinks pretty long and hard about how Destiny works, and for the most part, I find his solutions to be well above the bottom of the barrel, when looking around at what others are suggesting. Sunsetting sucks, but I don't know what would make it better. I haven't heard any suggestions from the community that solve the problems BUNGIE needs to solve - just saying "hey, don't do this thing we don't want you to do" doesn't really help anything. They're doing it because they feel they have to, and nobody, so far, has provided an alternative that works for them. I don't like that, but I don't think they're smoking dope when they're planning.

What problems are they attempting to solve? I am genuinely asking, because I don’t think we’ve ever gotten a legitimate answer to that question. I’ve heard that it’s about balance and not having to work so hard at achieving it. I’ve heard it’s about making new stuff more appealing without having to make broken OP weapons to replace old OP weapons. Sunsetting demonstrably doesn’t solve either of those problems. I genuinely would like a frank discussion with Bungie about what they are trying to accomplish with sunsetting.

I was always under the impression it was about reducing the pool of possible interactions in a way that they could manage. If you've only got to worry about a year's worth of items, you don't need to worry that that obscure pulse rifle from year 1 that had a unique perk that was never followed up on will suddenly become the godkiller that ruins a challenging raid experience.

I think it was first envisioned to handle the plethora of mods, and then expanded to take care of things like weapon overabundance. (I don't think they've ever expressed that specifically; it's just a feeling I have. I think Cody's partially right with his argument that there are too many guns with similar - but not identical - perks; functionally, they're identical, but your QA team has to test them ALL, and that's hard. Thinning the herd makes their job less stressful, and (ostensibly) allows them to spend more time with stuff that actually DOES matter.)

That's just how it feels to me, though. I don't know how much of that is real. (The first part was stated explicitly, early on, though I haven't heard about it recently. The rest is just my feeling.)