This DLC policy is absurd and violates business ethics. (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Saturday, December 13, 2014, 10:35 (3883 days ago) @ Vortech

I'm Talking about content pack ownership permutations. I Think you're on the right track to what I'm talking about when you refer to menu clutter. Adding more daily weekly is not linear because people can skip any number of packs, it's just that right now there is only one. Anyway. It's a reason if they go down the road of serving d/w up to people without the full set it should be done silently in the background at launch like matchmaking chooses a map.

I'm still not seeing the issue. My vision was that everyone would always be able to play the d/w/n, but depending on what content you purchased, you'd be able to choose between different options (in addition to the current choice of different difficulties). There's two major ways in which that could be realized: having an option for each content pack, or simply making it so that if the current week's "normal" choice is DLC, a base-game level is also available. They could even set it up so that the party leader was able to see in the selection window which option(s) their current party could and couldn't play.

If you were imagining that it would always reduce everything down to a single visible option for any given player, that would have some weird design hurdles (which choice to show, how to handle parties where different players have different options), but managing the system would still not exponentially increase in complexity with new DLC unless you literally accomplished the result by having the person managing the game fill out a general-purpose decision-making tree every time they updated the d/w/n. This would indeed be a confusing mess (both for players and Bungie!), but there's no reason to handle it like that. Rather, you'd want to have the person to just drop a couple options into a prioritized list, and each client's game would tick down the list until it got to an option that they could play, or something like that.
(But I'd really rather avoid any solution that shows a single option in each player's lists anyway, since it either make the party system confusing or break it, depending on implementation).