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I've played wonderful games I've only put 10 hours into (some even less) - games better than Destiny. The Last of Us is a really great game. Top 100 of all time for sure.

Not top 10?

Further, I would actually argue that the best types of games are the ones you can 'finish'. Open ended games with no explicit complete victory condition like Destiny are at a disadvantage.

I hope Destiny does end someday, and I hope it's glorious.

The flipside to that is: might it be unrealistic to be upset that a game isn't as fun after hundreds of hours as when we first started? Isn't it reasonable to not expect anything to provide us with continual glee every day for months and months... except perhaps a romantic partner? And even then... I mean even that doesn't sound very realistic, hah.

I agree 100%, which is why Bungie's idea of creating a game players will want to play everyday is misguided. You should design your game with zero filler, and put in as much fun as as your budget and schedule allows. Then, however long it lasts is how long it lasts.

I've played wonderful games I've only put 10 hours into (some even less) - games better than Destiny. The Last of Us is a really great game. Top 100 of all time for sure. I won't be playing it everyday, or even going forward except for when I want a nostaglic play through though. Is that a failing? NO. Having a player put down your game after completing / mastering it is not a sign your game is bad! There is nothing wrong with that. As long as the journey is super fun, challenging, and interesting then you've done well.

Further, I would actually argue that the best types of games are the ones you can 'finish'. Open ended games with no explicit complete victory condition like Destiny are at a disadvantage.

This is obviously well thought out and educated but it assumes quite a bit, especially an unvarying "we". For example, guns aren't in the top five reasons I play the game.

Nevertheless we are humans and all have dopamine neural circuitry and are subject to our own biological natures. So the vast majority of what I said does apply to all of us. I also mentioned that the literature was not settled. So I don't recognise the charge that I was being too sweeping in using "an unvarying we". I wasn't saying that there was no other possible interpretation for what Bungie is doing.

But, investment systems are understood and are a field in game making. There are experts in it and Bungie hired some. When people ask, "why can't an exotic's signature feature be unlocked earlier?", my answer would be, "because then you would not be so invested in the weapon".

They are called investment systems for a reason. They could be called, "unlocking stuff systems" or "upgrading things systems" but that doesn't reflect the idea of having gamer tie-in. If you can persuade yourself to just put a little more effort in to get what you want then you will put in more effort and get used to the amount of work that you are expending.

And since I have fun with the gameplay and the world, I'm not going out of my way to level gear. It just happens naturally. I'm patient, I upgrade when I can and if I'm not having fun I quit for the night, regardless of some statistic or the progress of a little green bar.

I get where people may not like the game. I get where someone might think Bungie made mistakes. But vilifying the developer as some evil genius mastermind manipulating all of us because you personally don't like their game? Well, you lose me there. :)

I am not saying that they are cunning foxes because I don't like the game. I am not saying that investment systems prey on inherent aspects of our biology because I don't like the game and I am not saying that there is definite method in what Bungie is doing because I don't like the game.

Would you like to argue that bungie didn't research this stuff when they set out to include an investment system? Were the experts they hired actually not experts? Did it all just happen by accident? Was every decision arbitrary or accidental?

I'm not saying that you are saying those things. I'm just engaging in Reductio ad absurdum to encourage you to think about this, to look beyond some notion that I am saying what I am saying because I, supposedly, don't like Destiny. When I say that Bungie hired experts who know what they are doing I am not saying that because I don't like the game. I am saying it because it is true.

I am also pointing out to people that some of the things they question did not happen by accident. Some people have asked why the signature features of an exotic are unlocked late in the tech tree. My answer is because the time taken to unlock them makes you invested in them.

It could be that you used unvarying we to mean that I thought that every person who plays Destiny is in it for the guns. I am not saying that. But you can't craft every post like a lawyer.

Destiny as a game is definitely majorly focussed on the gear. I would say that exploration was way down on Bungie's list. But maybe that is a discussion for another thread.

My post was addressed to Cody who would probably agree with me that the guns/gear and their levelling up are definitely the major thrust of the game. I was answering his question using what I think is a shared frame of reference (shared between myself and Cody).

Please don't take that as any form of, "don't butt in on our conversation". I didn't mean that at all. I'm just trying to explain why I used we when talking about the guns. I am explaining the context in which I used the we.

This is obviously well thought out and educated but it assumes quite a bit, especially an unvarying "we". For example, guns aren't in the top five reasons I play the game. And since I have fun with the gameplay and the world, I'm not going out of my way to level gear. It just happens naturally. I'm patient, I upgrade when I can and if I'm not having fun I quit for the night, regardless of some statistic or the progress of a little green bar.

If you can play that way, then that's fantastic. But some of us, who like the challenge of the high end content, have to keep up with everybody else playing it since you can't do it solo, and doing it unspoiled the first time is the most fun you can have with this game.

I get where people may not like the game. I get where someone might think Bungie made mistakes. But vilifying the developer as some evil genius mastermind manipulating all of us because you personally don't like their game? Well, you lose me there. :)

X is:

• ascendant blah
  
• spin metal
  
• glimmer
  
• whatever

Each of those things is a resource or you could call them currencies. Point is that there are so many to hide the fact that all you are doing is exchanging time played for a resource/currency.

It looks like you are trying to achieve lots of things but the underlying truth is that you buy resource with time.

And yes, to answer your question, you aren't doing it because solving the problem is interesting, you are doing it for two reasons:

• the resource let's you do things that do interest you (the fun)
  
• our brains are wired to engage in grind - once we start it is hard to disengage

Not all scientists agree on how this works, the literature is not settled but...

Dopamine used to be seen as a reward hormone. The idea was that you get a hit once you achive the goal as a rewarded for doing the grind.

But when people looked at when the dopamine was being released it wasn't after the goal was achieved, it was during the grind.

The old idea was that an organism would work out that the grind would achieve a good end and the organism would grind in anticipation of reward.

The thing is that not all organisms are bright. You would need all organisms to be bright enough to make the connection and plan ahead before a dopamine reward mechanism could evolve. If dopamine worked as a reward hormone.

Dopamine and dopamine like transmitters go way back in evolutionary terms and pretty much every organism needs to do some form of grind to get enough resources.

A mechanism that makes the grind its own reward is more likely to arise than a mechanism that depends on foresight before it could work.

So we are probably hardwired to just get on with shit without too much complaint. It is our higher cognitive faculties that lead us to question why we are doing this.

But once we have bought into the need for the grind, if even for a while, then we get into the habit and carry on even though it isn't, making us happy. We are trapped in our biology. And people who make investment systems know this.

In addition, once we achieve a certain level of success we do not want to slip back. We are invested. So if changes are made to return us to a less successful state then we will redouble our efforts to get back to our former level. This works as long as we can feel that it will only take a bit more work, if it's just a bit more of what we have already been doing.

Our intellects are an enemy to the investment system, if we start saying to ourselves, "wait a minute...".

Although we understand all this we are still slaves to our biology and the main fun of Destiny is in the weapons. We want to try them all out. An exotic doesn't deliver its signature ability until quite late in its tech tree. That is no accident; by the time you unlock it you have become invested in the weapon.

There is nothing haphazard or accidental about the decisions that bungie has made. They didn't hire investment systems experts for nothing.

The decisions all make sense when viewed in that light. They present you with a myriad of small problems whose answer is always: spend a bit more time playing to solve them.

These aren't really interesting problems to solve though. Why spend the time when the problems aren't challenging?

Maybe I'll take the time to upgrade one or two of my favorite exotics but unless I really don't like the gear from the new expansion I don't expect I'll be doing this much.

I always skip that fusion rifle bounty you mentioned (and rarely use fusion rifles altogether), but I use the rest of the bounties to mix up my patrols. Even after completing them though, I'll keep patrolling for fun.

At least we can all agree that that one is the worst. Seriously, 20 times? How often do they think that happens? I cheese the bounty every single damn time because the likelihood of it happening in normal gameplay is so low. I think 5 might have been a more reasonable target. Or 1.

Unlike the rest of you with your agendas and soapboxes, I'm having so much damn fun with the game and playing with my buddies, etc. I'm expressing that to Deej. That's it.

If that were your complete intent, you would have started a new thread. Your post was meant to be a counterpoint to all the bitching. You had an agenda too.

Please. How thin is the air way up there? Deej posted a reply, and he barely responds to me here, so I figure I'd get a better shot at having him read my post if I replied to one of his. That's some agenda on my part.

Take your psych 101 elsewhere.

- m

I've tried to abstain from over exaggerating analogies, but I am a human with emotions, and they occasionally find their way out.

When it comes right down to it, most of us who continue playing into the expansions will undoubtedly be picking up the new-shiny's that come along with said DLC, so this "upgrading" will probably be a small drop in an ever-expanding bucket. What is frustrating in the here and now is the feeling that our current "investments" (the stuff we've earned and poured time into upgrading) in the self same "INVESTMENT SYSTEM" are feeling more and more devalued by the very design of a game with many planned expansions. This probably wouldn't be an issue at all, IF we were all long-time WOW (or other MMO/RPG); but most of us aren't. Most of us are long-time Bungie, aka Halo & Marathon fans (I know there were many others; I'm just picking the more recent and obvious ones). And the game design of those classic Bungie titles was completely devoid of ANY formal "investment system". The player investment system was simply, "hey, this is fun, I'm gonna keep playing!" At least, that was MY take on it.

That's what's really throwing me (and others, I think) for a loop; these new "features" of Destiny just don't "feel" like something from the Bungie we thought we knew. We're missing the simplicity of the "hey, this is fun, I'm gonna play more", because there are SO MANY different options that reward you (temporarily, it seems) for investing in them. It's a bit of a mixed-message to say they want us creating lasting characters in a persistent world, when they take away (temporarily, granted) the very things we have used to DEFINE our characters.

I think I speak for more than myself when I say; I need to stop expecting Destiny to behave like Halo, and I need to stop expecting today's Destiny-making-Bungie to operate like yesteryear's Halo-making-Bungie. They're different beasts, and they need different upbringing.

Also, always remember Bungie's motto; We make games WE want to play.

And now I'm gonna shut up, hit "Submit" and go play some more Destiny!

Maybe a lot of the issues some folks are seeing are simply from overplaying Destiny?

Yes absolutely. Destiny's problem is that is designed, and encouraged to be overplayed. There is not enough content and challenge to sustain the amount of playtime Bungie wants.

Don't know where you deciphered Bungie's hourly playtime expectations of me, nor do I see how that's relevant, but what I'm saying is I think Destiny has already accomplished something by inspiring me to play 100 more hours than most games I finish. Doesn't matter to me what Bungie intended, I can still be impressed and hugely satisfied with that fact, compared to most art and entertainment I pursue. :)

The flipside to that is: might it be unrealistic to be upset that a game isn't as fun after hundreds of hours as when we first started? Isn't it reasonable to not expect anything to provide us with continual glee every day for months and months... except perhaps a romantic partner? And even then... I mean even that doesn't sound very realistic, hah.

Actually... now that I think about it, I've probably spent more time with Destiny than my partner lately... Oops.

I mean, let's say you're right and Bungie shot for the stars. I still got to Mars and that's still pretty freaking cool and I think way better than most games I've tried.

*sigh*
You know very well that's all subjective. You can't credibly call them out on not putting a high priority on making something be fun and worth doing for its own sake unless you can show that they don't think this stuff is fun or worth doing for its own sake.
Their motto ("We make games we want to play") implies they do in fact check those things-- nothing implies that their idea of fun and yours will line up.
I think there's a point to be made somewhere in here, but you're couching it again in this "my views > your views" standpoint that you can't seem to get away from for more than a few months.

Name ONE person who would like to farm materials for an hour to upgrade their gun. Nobody? If it were fun, why'd they change it and let you buy materials now?

That depends on your definition of farming. I've run around old Russia, and even just The Steppes, the area you spawn in, for an hour, two hours, more even, just shooting, stabbing grenading, and super-ing enemies and picking up spinmetal and chests and upgrading anything that unlocks, and enjoyed it a lot, more than I would've expected a few months ago.

Because it wasn't fun, people complained and they fixed it. They are caving on a ton of their decisions to make the game more fun. You cannot with a straight face say that you would routinely do patrol missions if you got no reward or there were no bounties for them.

I can tell you that because I do them without thought of reward all the time. Bigger motivators include the flashing and beeping getting a little annoying after a while, my natural inclination to have every widget and flip every switch, getting me to move around the world (because, again, I have nothing better to do, and I'm not great at making decisions), and possibly telling me something new. (The example I like to bring up for that last one is "go scan [x]", where x is a previously unidentified object. It fits scenery, gameplay, and canon together, if only on a surface level, and that makes the world feel more real. It tells me: this is an object with a name or designation; it has some kind of significance; the City wants to know about it, so they care about what it signifies; and they're sending me to find out about it, which sounds like a reasonable task to have me do since I'm in the area and I can handle whatever danger there might be.)

As for them changing the currency exchange, since ascendant materials aren't required to upgrade exotic items now, and since it sounds like Vanguard and Crucible marks will soon matter much less to whether or not you can buy a given legendary item (the amount of time and effort it takes to go up a rank is more than enough to max out your marks), environmental materials are a bigger bottleneck on item progression than before and will become even more of one, so it makes sense to make them easier to get, and since marks will seemingly be less useful it makes sense to provide a new way to use them.

Well, that, and the scenario I described above for old Russia gets materials relatively quickly but it's also a scenario I admit most people probably wouldn't find that fun (which is a shame, to me, because those people are missing out on a very simple, continuous kind of fun), and while I'm swimming in spinmetal and have tons of helium and spirit bloom and a good deal of relic iron, I've seen a lot of people complaining about not having enough, which probably has to do with them finding gathering it to not be fun (and because relic iron is perplexingly hard to spot and spirit bloom kind of blends into foliage). If it's not fun for the majority of players it makes sense to reduce the need for it-- but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have any fun inherent to it, and it doesn't mean Bungie didn't think it was fun. It might mean they should've thought about it and playtested it more, but then you get into grey areas and weighing opinions and it gets messy fast, and eventually someone has to make a decision. I think they made, if not the right decision, at least a reasonable and respectable decision-- and I respect that they may have changed their minds, or that they might be putting the players' enjoyment ahead of some their original goals and decisions, since player enjoyment should be the primary goal.

Maybe a lot of the issues some folks are seeing are simply from overplaying Destiny?

Yes absolutely. Destiny's problem is that is designed, and encouraged to be overplayed. There is not enough content and challenge to sustain the amount of playtime Bungie wants.

Games are the same way. First raid was great. Second was even better.

I think they are different, in the sense that watching a film isn't a challenge. Being presented with the raid, having no clue what to do, what weapons to use, or what strategy to deploy, makes for an amazingly fun time of working it out that exists only if you are unspoiled.

This is why Flawless raider was fun: we were once again working out ourselves the best way to do things and figuring it out.