You know what? I miss Marcus Lehto. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Sunday, October 12, 2014, 01:19 (3939 days ago) @ someotherguy

This weekly update was so overtly condescending that I don't even know how to react aside from shock and anger.

I'm still enjoying the hell out of Destiny, even with a solid 60+ hours put into it...

BUT this week's BWU just made me angry. The tone was condescending, the explanation nonsensical, and the mail sack was (once again) full of filler nonsense instead of actually answering any important questions.

Oh, and the comment regarding quitters was utter rubbish -you do still get rep for losing. But not Iron Banner rep. And Iron Banner being a limited time event, a game you know you're not getting rep for is inherently a waste of your time

Huh. I thought this was one of the better responses Bungie has given us on something in recent memory. Better guns and armor matter, just not like people thought they would (as time-to-kill can apparently only increases where people were expecting to blow lesser players away in an instant) and not nearly as much as people thought they would (since supposedly right now a level 1 player would be at the same disadvantage as a level 23 player when facing off against someone fully upgraded at level 30). I think Bungie did the right thing by clearly explaining the current rules and by saying that the Iron Banner would "... very likely play by different rules the next time..."

What Bungie did wrong, I think, was not laying this stuff out ahead of time. A simple explanation of "for this first round of the Iron Banner we're keeping some limits in place in order to promote competitive play for players of all levels. Let us know how this feels as we'll be listening and will likely tweak the rules for future iterations of the Iron Banner based on your feedback." Even such a simple statement with no details would have prepared people for what was coming. Instead they said nothing.

Bungie needs to learn to step out ahead of problems like this instead of waiting to explain things after the fact. Really, I think this is true of a lot of their communications like the "Only Four Worlds" issue and the "Raid vs Raids" issue. Presumably they knew how many worlds would ship long before it slipped out that it would only be four. They could have played it up as a positive with: "four giant areas each bigger and far more varied than ODST's Mombasa Streets!" Same thing with confusion about the number of Raids shipping with the game. Instead of having confusion where some Bungie people said "raid" during interviews and some said "raids" they could have just told us that Destiny will ship with one great, challenging raid called the Vault of Glass with more to come. Bungie got around to addressing both these issues, but like with this Iron Banner uproar, they only did so after their community starting buzzing with confusion in the information vacuum they left for us.

So yeah, I don't see the condensation that you do, at least not this time around, but I do think Bungie has an overarching communications problem that needs to be addressed...