The underlying premise of your opinion is the idea that sharing more information with fans about a game in development is always good and not sharing more information is always bad. I disagree with the premise.

I think you have to be selective about what you choose to share. But after all these years, I think if you asked you'd find that most of these companies think that being more open has been a net-positive.

So I guess we do see it differently ;)

I think part of what you're bumping into here is a difference in expectations. How many game studios do you know that have the kind of open communication with their communities that we get from Bungie?

I really don't want this to drag on, but the answer is many.

Blizzard, Uber Entertainment, Bare Mettle, 22cans, Runic Games, Obsidian Entertainment, Frontier Developments; studios from the very large to the moderately small, but all have one thing in common: they're open about how they make their games to a much greater degree that Bungie. What used to be a fairly secretive process has become greatly more open: in part due to the challenges of how to finance an industry in upheaval, but also (I suspect) just because as their audience matures, they've come to expect a little more. Nobody expected to see behind the scenes documentaries of films in the 1950s, but they're more or less par for the course when you buy a film on DVD or Blu-Ray now.

So yes, I think my expectations have been set higher as a result of how other games companies have started to interact with their fans, and Bungie (in spite of a very good track record on the games they deliver) aren't living up to that expectation. Yours and others’ expectations are clearly a bit lower than mine. Is that entitlement on my part? Perhaps. But I'd prefer to think of it as a desire to see games developers continually strive to raise the bar.

The underlying premise of your opinion is the idea that sharing more information with fans about a game in development is always good and not sharing more information is always bad. I disagree with the premise.

Destiny can operate just fine without server access for short periods. The game is playable, and enemies die when you shoot them, if your connection is briefly interrupted. Too long though, and it boots you out.

I think a lot of code is run client side.

That's interesting. How did you test this, yanking the cable? Whenever my internet connection was disrupted during the beta I was instantly disconnected without warning, but guessing it depends if the game believes it's experiencing latency or packet loss vs outright disconnection.

I know this because across the bottom of my screen, it said "Attempting to connect to Destiny Servers". That was up for about 15 seconds, and I could still play the game normally. Granted no other players were around.

I think part of what you're bumping into here is a difference in expectations. How many game studios do you know that have the kind of open communication with their communities that we get from Bungie?

I really don't want this to drag on, but the answer is many.

Blizzard, Uber Entertainment, Bare Mettle, 22cans, Runic Games, Obsidian Entertainment, Frontier Developments; studios from the very large to the moderately small, but all have one thing in common: they're open about how they make their games to a much greater degree that Bungie. What used to be a fairly secretive process has become greatly more open: in part due to the challenges of how to finance an industry in upheaval, but also (I suspect) just because as their audience matures, they've come to expect a little more. Nobody expected to see behind the scenes documentaries of films in the 1950s, but they're more or less par for the course when you buy a film on DVD or Blu-Ray now.

So yes, I think my expectations have been set higher as a result of how other games companies have started to interact with their fans, and Bungie (in spite of a very good track record on the games they deliver) aren't living up to that expectation. Yours and others’ expectations are clearly a bit lower than mine. Is that entitlement on my part? Perhaps. But I'd prefer to think of it as a desire to see games developers continually strive to raise the bar.

But the impression I'm getting is that people aren't interested in hearing about criticism of Bungie's style of community interaction, so I shall leave the subject alone in future.

I think part of what you're bumping into here is a difference in expectations. How many game studios do you know that have the kind of open communication with their communities that we get from Bungie? I've gone into Destiny not expecting to hear anything at all about the game pre-launch. And yet, Bungie has kicked their doors open just enough so that we can all peek inside and start to get a sense of what this new franchise is all about. It's not something they have to do. Most studios don't. That's a fact I'm willing to accept when I invest in a new franchise. That Bungie interacts with its community at all is, in my opinion, merely icing on the cake. So, I'm fine with it if they want to play coy with most of the details (back to that whole 'joy in the discovery' argument again). Since I don't expect anything from them, anything I get is a gift. I suspect I'm not alone in this. Maybe you can see why, then, from my perspective, you come off as entitled and unnecessarily argumentative, even if that's not what you're trying to convey.

EDIT: The Matchmaking Technology of Destiny

"You have all of these examples of people who are doing big server cluster things like World of Warcraft or something like that. But we didn’t really want to do that, because if you think about those kinds of games, you’ve got a centralized server that’s simulating everything in the world, but that can only scale up to some number of players. Maybe it’s 1,000. Maybe it’s 5,000. Maybe it’s 20,000. You compare that to the population of a console game and it’s tiny.

So what that means is that you have to have dozens or hundreds of these separate servers. So we started out by thinking, “We want to have a single world that everybody can be in.”

We took this mesh-based networking that we’ve been developing for years and years with Halo and adapted that networking to work in a seamless interconnected world full of other players and AIs. So when you’re playing a destination you’re moving from area to area and every one of those areas has got this mesh networking with a group of players that are in it at this one time. And then it has its own servers for that particular area so you’re continuously moving around between these groups of both consoles and also dedicated servers that are hosting it."

Continues at link above.

Destiny can operate just fine without server access for short periods. The game is playable, and enemies die when you shoot them, if your connection is briefly interrupted. Too long though, and it boots you out.

I think a lot of code is run client side.

That's interesting. How did you test this, yanking the cable? Whenever my internet connection was disrupted during the beta I was instantly disconnected without warning, but guessing it depends if the game believes it's experiencing latency or packet loss vs outright disconnection.

That would seem to suggest it's not quite as heavily a client/server architecture as I imagined. Still, it's surprising that it lets you kill enemies without any means of confirming they're dead at the server - even Halo PC's multiplayer didn't do this iirc.

You have a game client which is installed / run locally by the player. It must connect to a game server to do anything: it can't be run without a persistent connection. Whilst playing the game, your client has knowledge of your game's state.
You then also have the game server which runs continually, but crucially it also maintains state for every client's game. This way, you can't (for example) somehow fool the client into thinking you've killed an enemy when you haven't, because the server will be able to verify what you have and haven't done in the game world. It's more accurate to think of the game as running on the server, but you're issuing commands to your character via the client.

Destiny can operate just fine without server access for short periods. The game is playable, and enemies die when you shoot them, if your connection is briefly interrupted. Too long though, and it boots you out.

I think a lot of code is run client side.

I gotta ask... doesn't it get tiring harping on the same point every day for weeks?

I'm thinking that maybe you should consider NOT posting the next time you find an example of a behavior you don't like, if it's a behavior you've already complained about. While I agree with your oft-stated premise that purely positive feedback is not useful for a developer (or really any venture), I think that maybe you've taken that thought a little too far to the other side.

I do take your point, and I appreciate some people think I'm a bit of a stuck record on this kind of thing. What motivates me to keep highlighting these things, though, is that nobody else seems to flag them. There's been lots of interesting and positive debate about the Destiny Beta's shortcomings, and whilst I've gotten involved in a lot of it, I've found a lot of people have enumerated the important points that I might have made myself.

Not so on this subject. But the impression I'm getting is that people aren't interested in hearing about criticism of Bungie's style of community interaction, so I shall leave the subject alone in future.

ugh, this again?
There might be people like that here, but there aren't many and he's not one of them. We can take criticism, we can talk about negative points, what most of us don't like is someone repeating themselves a lot* and it's more annoying when what they're saying is negative. I suspect that people don't bring up the issues you bring up either because they don't care or because you do it first, and you have been for a long time now. People do agree with you on here sometimes, sometimes it's a lot even; I'm not sure if you're taking that into account or not. I agree with most of what you say, personally, but not how you usually say it or how you bring it up at seemingly every opportunity, and I might bring it up myself if you didn't always do it first.
Which leads me to the other thing I want to say, how about picking your battles? Yeah that was kind of a vague and flowery and maybe even waffling answer but it was a vague question and personally I think the asker was looking more for reassurance than anything else, and not this:

I'm pretty sure the question was more likely to have been about one of:

* Decrypting engrams in the field
* Going straight from the tower to a mission/crucible
* Richer communication options

None of these would have been deployed silently in the background, I suspect.

I think you're projecting there.

* I remember a few years ago, I think it was 2009 or 2010, there was a noticeable backlash against rampant positivity and defense of Bungie on HBO, and yes, I've only seen this happen once while I've seen the opposite happen multiple times, but it demonstrates it's not a one-way street

- you don't really have any idea what sort of changes DeeJ was referring to, so assuming they're MMO-style changes might be short-sighted
- Bungie has said, over and over and over, that Destiny is a shooter, not an MMO. You can continue to treat it like an MMO, but that might be short-sighted

Ignoring the 'is it really an MMO?' debate (which I think a lot of games journalists are more or less in agreement with now), the main reason I framed it in those terms is because of the nature of the software in such games, and how it is architected:

You have a game client which is installed / run locally by the player. It must connect to a game server to do anything: it can't be run without a persistent connection. Whilst playing the game, your client has knowledge of your game's state.
You then also have the game server which runs continually, but crucially it also maintains state for every client's game. This way, you can't (for example) somehow fool the client into thinking you've killed an enemy when you haven't, because the server will be able to verify what you have and haven't done in the game world. It's more accurate to think of the game as running on the server, but you're issuing commands to your character via the client.

This means that when an issue comes up that the developer wants to fix, there's two ways of going about it. The first is to issue a client patch, which changes the way the game behaves locally, but also potentially what commands it sends to the server. The other option is to skip issuing a patch entirely and only deploy a change to how the server runs the game state. A hypothetical example of this would be changing the health of an enemy: provided that the game client only communicates what damage you're doing to an enemy, but waits for the server to report back what that enemy's health is, then fixes like that can happen without any need to update the client; this saves on forcing potentially millions of players to download a fix before they can play.

In WoW they've used this to hot fix the behaviour of player abilities: the tooltip usually needs a client patch to fix, but if a given ability was allowing an exploit, say, they could change how it behaved *on the server* instantly and it'd take effect for everyone. This is the kind of thing I imagine DeeJ was talking about, as I have to imagine Destiny would be engineered to allow server-side behaviour fixes independent of the client. It's less whether the gameplay is/isn't MMO-like (which is debatable, although I think it is) and it's more to do with whether the client/server is MMO-like (which I'm certain is the case).

I think server-side changes to the game are not as easy as you think they are, even for really (seemingly) simple things.

Maybe not in a 7-year old game, but this kind of thing has existed in the MMO world for a decade or so. Unless you assume that Bungie isn't keeping up with the state of the art circa 2005, this stuff really shouldn't be a surprise.

Two quick points:

- you don't really have any idea what sort of changes DeeJ was referring to, so assuming they're MMO-style changes might be short-sighted
- Bungie has said, over and over and over, that Destiny is a shooter, not an MMO. You can continue to treat it like an MMO, but that might be short-sighted

I think server-side changes to the game are not as easy as you think they are, even for really (seemingly) simple things.

Maybe not in a 7-year old game, but this kind of thing has existed in the MMO world for a decade or so. Unless you assume that Bungie isn't keeping up with the state of the art circa 2005, this stuff really shouldn't be a surprise.

This was a hand-waving answer? I found it pretty clear he was stating that they can make changes very quickly and even on the fly when they need to. Basically saying even if we don't make some changes before the game goes gold it doesn't mean we can't make them.

Yeah, that's the way I interpret that too, but it's also kind of rhetorical. I think it's more or less a given that they can tweak variables in the background and deploy server-side changes to the game. That kind of thing is old hat in online games. I'm pretty sure the question was more likely to have been about one of:

* Decrypting engrams in the field
* Going straight from the tower to a mission/crucible
* Richer communication options

None of these would have been deployed silently in the background, I suspect.

I wonder if there's not more to the Tower than the Beta showed us - and so the answer to the first two points might have been "we're not really willing to tell you about why we're not making those changes right now". (The third item on your list is a wish that many, perhaps most of us have - I'm definitely hoping we hear about those changes soon.) However, your "more or less a given" statement might be off a bit; do you remember a few years back, when a fusion coil on Valhalla took nearly 6 months to be removed from Matchmaking after Bungie ACKNOWLEDGED it was usable in ways that they hadn't anticipated? I think server-side changes to the game are not as easy as you think they are, even for really (seemingly) simple things.

This was a hand-waving answer? I found it pretty clear he was stating that they can make changes very quickly and even on the fly when they need to. Basically saying even if we don't make some changes before the game goes gold it doesn't mean we can't make them.

Yeah, that's the way I interpret that too, but it's also kind of rhetorical. I think it's more or less a given that they can tweak variables in the background and deploy server-side changes to the game. That kind of thing is old hat in online games. I'm pretty sure the question was more likely to have been about one of:

* Decrypting engrams in the field
* Going straight from the tower to a mission/crucible
* Richer communication options

None of these would have been deployed silently in the background, I suspect.

I gotta ask... doesn't it get tiring harping on the same point every day for weeks?

I'm thinking that maybe you should consider NOT posting the next time you find an example of a behavior you don't like, if it's a behavior you've already complained about. While I agree with your oft-stated premise that purely positive feedback is not useful for a developer (or really any venture), I think that maybe you've taken that thought a little too far to the other side.

I do take your point, and I appreciate some people think I'm a bit of a stuck record on this kind of thing. What motivates me to keep highlighting these things, though, is that nobody else seems to flag them. There's been lots of interesting and positive debate about the Destiny Beta's shortcomings, and whilst I've gotten involved in a lot of it, I've found a lot of people have enumerated the important points that I might have made myself.

Not so on this subject. But the impression I'm getting is that people aren't interested in hearing about criticism of Bungie's style of community interaction, so I shall leave the subject alone in future.