I honestly wonder what the difference is. I haven’t really thought about it much. I only ever did it a handful of times, but I liked the Oryx encounter in King’s Fall. It was difficult, but a single mistake didn’t guarantee a wipe. And the actually mechanics of the fight were fun to execute.

Riven isn’t “hard,” it’s just annoying. Like, oh, he flinched so I missed my eye and now we’re fucked.

Oryx felt like a battle. Yes, there were semi-complex movements and mechanics involved, but the majority of the difficulty came from battling waves of dangerous enemies.

Riven doesn’t feel like a battle. You could take all the enemies out of the encounter, and it would still be a repetitive nuisance with wipe after wipe being caused by miscounting the eyes or slamming the wrong spot on a staircase. There is plenty of filler combat in it, but the encounter doesn’t hinge on any of it.

I mean, speak for yourself... Those snipers caused about 25% of my deaths.

But you wouldn't be so oblivious to the snipers if you weren't focused so hard on hitting the damn eyes...

I wish I could say that :D

I'm pretty confident I only died max 2 times while shooting the eyes (not counting at the end) from adds. And that is because I fell off the ledge into the adds.

So, not an incidental amount, though the issue of DR while in Super is its own bag of cats.

I honestly wonder what the difference is. I haven’t really thought about it much. I only ever did it a handful of times, but I liked the Oryx encounter in King’s Fall. It was difficult, but a single mistake didn’t guarantee a wipe. And the actually mechanics of the fight were fun to execute.

Riven isn’t “hard,” it’s just annoying. Like, oh, he flinched so I missed my eye and now we’re fucked.

Oryx felt like a battle. Yes, there were semi-complex movements and mechanics involved, but the majority of the difficulty came from battling waves of dangerous enemies.

Riven doesn’t feel like a battle. You could take all the enemies out of the encounter, and it would still be a repetitive nuisance with wipe after wipe being caused by miscounting the eyes or slamming the wrong spot on a staircase. There is plenty of filler combat in it, but the encounter doesn’t hinge on any of it.

I mean, speak for yourself... Those snipers caused about 25% of my deaths.

But you wouldn't be so oblivious to the snipers if you weren't focused so hard on hitting the damn eyes...

Oh, you're absolutely right. Infinite Nova Bombs or whatever is clearly in another realm compared to infinite enhancement cores.

Just out of curiosity, how many Enhancement Cores do you have? I imagine you're on the higher end of the scale around here.

I have around 40. The most I've ever had was right around 100. I can't imagine having 1,000, or even more.

I think I have about 125 right now. I was up over 150 a few days ago (I'd decided to do a bunch of Spider bounties for some, and then I got 3 curated weapons in a row in Bergusia forge, all dupes, which gave me 21 more), but I upgraded a bunch of stuff, and now I'm back down to 125.

These days, I'm usually between 50-100. I've never been near 200.

I honestly wonder what the difference is. I haven’t really thought about it much. I only ever did it a handful of times, but I liked the Oryx encounter in King’s Fall. It was difficult, but a single mistake didn’t guarantee a wipe. And the actually mechanics of the fight were fun to execute.

Riven isn’t “hard,” it’s just annoying. Like, oh, he flinched so I missed my eye and now we’re fucked.

Oryx felt like a battle. Yes, there were semi-complex movements and mechanics involved, but the majority of the difficulty came from battling waves of dangerous enemies.

Riven doesn’t feel like a battle. You could take all the enemies out of the encounter, and it would still be a repetitive nuisance with wipe after wipe being caused by miscounting the eyes or slamming the wrong spot on a staircase. There is plenty of filler combat in it, but the encounter doesn’t hinge on any of it.

I mean, speak for yourself... Those snipers caused about 25% of my deaths.

Just out of curiosity, how many Enhancement Cores do you have? I imagine you're on the higher end of the scale around here.

I have around 40. The most I've ever had was right around 100. I can't imagine having 1,000, or even more.

The infinite cores bug affects nobody but the exploiter.

The counter is that having fully Masterworked gear does give you an advantage over other players. I don't actually know how significant it is (not very, I think), but it is there.

Not to mention the "advantage" of being able to infuse as you wish and make the gear you like actually usable in high level activities.

Yeah, okay. Technically, I suppose that's true.

I already have all the gear I want to use infused at top level, and I haven't exploited that bug - doing so would just make things EASIER for me. (And I'd argue that most of the people who get pinnacle weapons already play enough that this makes doing what they want easier, rather than making something out of reach suddenly in reach. But that's a much squishier argument, since I have no actual stats.)

Regardless, it's not game-breaking, the way that infinite novas were game-breaking, or instagibbing Primevals was game-breaking.

I still think there's a clear line between one type of bug and the other.

I honestly wonder what the difference is. I haven’t really thought about it much. I only ever did it a handful of times, but I liked the Oryx encounter in King’s Fall. It was difficult, but a single mistake didn’t guarantee a wipe. And the actually mechanics of the fight were fun to execute.

Riven isn’t “hard,” it’s just annoying. Like, oh, he flinched so I missed my eye and now we’re fucked.

Oryx felt like a battle. Yes, there were semi-complex movements and mechanics involved, but the majority of the difficulty came from battling waves of dangerous enemies.

Riven doesn’t feel like a battle. You could take all the enemies out of the encounter, and it would still be a repetitive nuisance with wipe after wipe being caused by miscounting the eyes or slamming the wrong spot on a staircase. There is plenty of filler combat in it, but the encounter doesn’t hinge on any of it.

The infinite cores bug affects nobody but the exploiter.

The counter is that having fully Masterworked gear does give you an advantage over other players. I don't actually know how significant it is (not very, I think), but it is there.

Not to mention the "advantage" of being able to infuse as you wish and make the gear you like actually usable in high level activities.

But . . .

Well, as far as I can tell, if this bug gave some schmucks like me the ability to catch up with some streamer that plays the game as a full time job, then I'm all for it.

How can you read the developers mind?

If you are in a situation where you can keep acquiring weapons, how are you supposed to know it’s not just a clever thing to do just like buying seeds to sell to Vance?

You don’t. You are just doing what the game lets you do. Don’t blame the players.

People keep bringing this up. I don't buy it for a second. If people can't spot obvious bugs in the code like this then they are naive or blind. Sure, I can't blame the players, unless they are intentionally doing an exploit.

I love how we have never talked about the infinite tether/nova bomb exploit. Yep, I love how people abused that and made Destiny unfun for so many people. Are you saying that was intentional? I don't know why I asked that question, I know you are going to say yes. It's exploits like that where, you are just being a dick and obviously abusing the game from what Bungie intended to make. Yeah, you can say "but we don't know what Bungie was trying to do" but you are just being naive.

Here's a place where Cruel's distinction between bugs that affect others and bugs that only affect one player comes into play.

The infinite tether/nova bomb bugs (and the sentry armor bug) are bugs that BREAK THE GAME FOR PEOPLE NOT EXPLOITING IT.

The infinite cores bug affects nobody but the exploiter.

As a hippie musical once taught me, be whatever you are, do whatever you want to do, just so long as you don't hurt anybody.

Riven isn’t “hard,” it’s just annoying. Like, oh, he flinched so I missed my eye and now we’re fucked.

I am okay with a progression system, I am just tired of having the activities for any real progression being dictated to me.

Yeah this is really my only big complaint with current Destiny economy. Spending hours in the game is fun, but the progression is not based on time played but on luck and unfun grind. I have played a lot of Season of the Drifter but I am level 385 and have 0 new exotics and very few of the new gear despite a lot of time played. While I'm loving the gameplay and activities, that part does irk me.

How can you read the developers mind?

If you are in a situation where you can keep acquiring weapons, how are you supposed to know it’s not just a clever thing to do just like buying seeds to sell to Vance?

You don’t. You are just doing what the game lets you do. Don’t blame the players.

People keep bringing this up. I don't buy it for a second. If people can't spot obvious bugs in the code like this then they are naive or blind. Sure, I can't blame the players, unless they are intentionally doing an exploit.

I love how we have never talked about the infinite tether/nova bomb exploit. Yep, I love how people abused that and made Destiny unfun for so many people. Are you saying that was intentional? I don't know why I asked that question, I know you are going to say yes. It's exploits like that where, you are just being a dick and obviously abusing the game from what Bungie intended to make. Yeah, you can say "but we don't know what Bungie was trying to do" but you are just being naive.

I’ve still never beat Riven. The week my team spent trying to do it legitimately while blind was the most thoroughly unfun thing I’ve done in Destiny, and killed any motivation I had to complete that raid, cheese or not. If I hadn’t been blind and knew about the cheese, my experience would have been much better (on that encounter—doing the rest of that raid blind is near the top of the list of most fun things I’ve done in Destiny).

When those limited resources are absolutely finite. In Deus Ex you get a set amount of experience as you progress through the game to put toward abilities. You can't grind for it; you get what you get. This is meaningful progression that isn't bullshit. When there is no upper bound to what you can earn it becomes pointless because it's not decision making so much as just a test of how much time you want to spend earning resources. Because you could just grind out cores all day long and power everything up. It's not the resources that are limited: it's your time.

I’m okay with time being a resource, if that time has meaning. If guns could be Masterworked simply by the act of the player using them, it would accomplish much the same thing, but it would feel meaningful. The guns you like would become Masterworked simply because you like them and use them a bunch. Finding the balance of time there would be tricky.

My issue isn’t in spending time with the game. The game is fun. My issue is that largely my time feels wasted doing checklists for bullshit resources. Oh, sweet, let’s knock out some more wanted bounties, as if that’s compelling content.

I am okay with a progression system, I am just tired of having the activities for any real progression being dictated to me.

There is a difference between cheesing the raids and getting 1000 cores.

The raid is ostensibly fun and challenging to do the 'real' way. Earning 1000 cores is bullshit busy work, and needing cores gets in the way of fun.

It's like Bungie lost sight of why people play Destiny. And yes, everyone likes different things but I think most people play to have fun and do cool things with their friends. Needing items and requiring grind to powerup actively impedes your ability to hop on and play fun activities with your buddies.

Find your game's strengths and play them up, while getting rid of what gets in the way of that.

While there is some amount of fun that can be derived from giving the player limited resources and forcing them to choose to upgrade X or Y... it has gotten almost to the point that more often than not I seem to be almost out of resources and am being asked to split them between A,B,C,D,E,F,G, and H. And while that is happening, I can't play some of the activities I want (without suffering a penalty to damage dealt and taken) until I grind out the resources to upgrade all those letters...

But Destiny players are all too eager to use cheeses even when there's nothing to gain. During Last Wish, for instance, the crew I played with beat the Raid a couple of times without any cheese but we kept encounter people who never beat it without cheesing it. That was very disappointing. Some of that for sure comes from the fact that Riven is a very unforgiving encounter. But I will continue to argue that some of it comes because too many are not willing to ever call out any cheeses or cheats for what they are.

I have never beaten The Last Wish “properly”. I’ve spent a couple hours attempting it with several groups, so I’m familiar with the proper strategy. And in my opinion, that fight is possibly the worst, least fun encounter in all of Destiny. If it weren’t for the cheese, I’d never have gone back to Last Wish. That’s, like, totally just my opinion man. BUT, the raid is not a self-contained activity. It is also one of the best activities for levelling up. Plus it’s the only way to get certain awesome weapons, and one of the few sources of armor with enhanced perks. So when a cheese was discovered that’s us skip the majority of the Riven encounter, I personally was all for it.

That’s the thing with a game like Destiny, where activities are not simply things to do for their own enjoyment, but pathways to other unique content (such as exclusive weapons). If it weren’t for the Riven cheese, I’d never have bothered with trying to beat Last Wish, which means I’d never have gotten 1000 Voices. Without that weapon, my Gambit experience over the past ~6 months would have been significantly different. A bad encounter (IMO) is no big deal on its own, but when it stands as a barrier between the player and other fun, unique content, well that’s a whole different situation.

This is where I have a deep personal disconnect with Bungie’s supposed design goals. They seem to believe that things like hitting level 700 is some kind of inherently meaningful achievement. But it isn’t. Not for me, at least, or anyone I play with. I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment from it. I think “thank god I don’t have to worry about that crap anymore, and I can just focus on doing things purely for the fun of it”. Raids hit a similar point for me. Obviously, there is some inherent satisfaction that comes from completing a raid, at least the first few times. But when it can take 20, 40, or even 60 completions before you get 1000 Voices or Anarchy to drop, we’re well past the point of an activity being intrinsically rewarding. On a side note, I think this specific issue is why so many people have a cynical point of view when it comes to some of Bungie’s design goals. When they talk about power levels or infusion systems as being part of a system that feels rewarding, many of us call “BS” on that because our experience with those systems is literally the exact opposite of what Bungie claims to believe they are.

Back to the main point though, all of this shows very poor judgement on Bungie’s part. The initial “problem” was so not a problem that it never occurred to most of us that it wasn’t by design. You earn a pinnacle weapon by completing a triumph that is shared across 3 characters, and all 3 characters get to claim the drop. It seemed perfectly fair and logical. Yes, you could dismantle 1 or 2 of the duplicates and get a handful of cores out of it, but many players just opted to keep the multiple drops so they could experiment with different mods and/or not worry about transferring guns between characters. It was a nice, fair, player-friendly system. But Bungie is so apparently paranoid about even the most minor bypassing of their player time-throttling system (enchantment cores) that they decided to patch that out. In doing so they created a far more rare but also far more lucrative exploit. And their solution to that problem was to take action in such a way that shows, yet again, that they are more protective of their throttling system than they are of the player’s experience. I don’t throw the Gambit Prime armor glitch in this category, because that was directly impacting players’ experience in a negative way. But cores are not something that anyone wants, likes, or enjoys.

So all in-all, I feel that your stance against “exploiters” is misplaced in this case. Destiny is a wonderful game that also has a long history of putting frustrating and unnecessary barriers between the players and the things that players want to do in the game. Cores are one of the most obvious and flagrant examples of that trend. If bungie fucks up and introduces a bug that allows a tiny handful of players to bypass that bullshit design element, then good for those players as far as I’m concerned. It isn’t impacting any other players in a negative way. I’m just disappointed that Bungie has their priorities so utterly inverted in this particular case.

I enjoyed the Vault of Glass Oracles and Confluxes sequence, and yet the default strategy even among DBOers became sniping them from well beyond the play space. Similarly, I enjoyed the Abyss section of Crota's End and the only the fly teamwork it required to get a whole team across, and yet it eventually became everyone holding back while a single cloaked Hunter walked the entire path with zero excitement.

I literally never saw either of those things. I don’t doubt it happened, but I did both of those raids dozens of times, and I never saw anyone do either of those things, and it was suggested very infrequently. I didn’t do VoG while it was still current, to be fair, but I was doing Crota while it was new. There are plenty of people willing to do things legitimately.

In Vault of Glass, the default strategy for the final boss was to designate three people who knew what they were doing to be teleported and three people who didn't to be left behind. This lead to some players being totally unable to function if they happened to get teleported in with the relic. It always saddens me when I come across someone who has never done some part part of a Raid or another because their teams have only ever cheesed it. I can easily recall that happening in a few of the Raids. More often in some than others, for sure, but I suspect it's happened in most of them to me at some point or another.

It goes on and on, this culture of "if you can cheese it, do so!" poisons the game for those of us who would like a challenge and who enjoy teamwork or a challenge or heck, just enjoy getting to play with friends longer rather than shorter.

I’d still argue that the fact that people feel the need to cheese something indicates a problem with the way the game is designed. I never saw those cheeses, but I wouldn’t blame someone for doing them if they were just trying to get the one drop they wanted, whether it be the One armor piece they need for light level or that rare gun drop. That’s the difference. If you don’t want to participate in those methods, find a like-minded group instead of hating the players that are taking the most efficient route through an activity they might not be all that interested in for the thing they actually want.

It can indicate a problem, but not always. I got the experience of helping some people beat Last Wish for the first time the intended way well over a month after its release. They'd beaten it more times than me, but never without the cluster rocket cheese.

If content is too hard or unforgiving (Riven boss fight) or the grind is too great (Enhancement Cores) I'd far prefer Bungie fix it than circumventing things. Is my position really a "Ah, so nothing. Got it." level of unreasonable?

We’ll never know, as you didn’t say any of that. You’re only stated position was people should be banned for daring to get some free cores.

You know, I did make a few posts between then and now. You quoted most of them during our back and forth yet you responded to my question as if I only had the one post. Curious that...

I wasn’t aware some light-hearted snark was a mortal sin to your sensibilities, but, again, to be fair, I guess I should, because this conversation plays out almost every time you and I interact on this forum. Maybe one of us will learn from it at some point. Fair warning, it probably won’t be me. (:

Nah, you're fine. And I'm having fun making my point. It is not a simple one. It's not just "everyone who uses an exploit should be banned." It's more about the acceptance of any and all cheesing and exploits slowly leading to a community of gamers who become toxic to the community and to other players. At some point players know that what they are doing is against the rules up to and including straight up cheating, yet nobody ever seems to be willing to call those players out on their behavior anymore allowing it to spread further and wider.

While there is some amount of fun that can be derived from giving the player limited resources and forcing them to choose to upgrade X or Y...

When those limited resources are absolutely finite. In Deus Ex you get a set amount of experience as you progress through the game to put toward abilities. You can't grind for it; you get what you get. This is meaningful progression that isn't bullshit. When there is no upper bound to what you can earn it becomes pointless because it's not decision making so much as just a test of how much time you want to spend earning resources. Because you could just grind out cores all day long and power everything up. It's not the resources that are limited: it's your time.