Social interaction outside of game killed WoW. It guts all theme park designs, because they rely on obfuscation as a path for content (in contrast to, say, adventure games that use obfuscation as the content itself). You aren't interested in finding out what gear is best or making decisions, you just want a reward and you want your reward to be good. Thus, best-in-slot lists were created. You don't want to waste time working out various angles on your abilities to see how to optimize your DPS, so you just google it and spend 10 minutes on a practice dummy. Without individual experimentation/exploration, the whole system collapses and WoW has been struggling to find content to fill the void

So yes, laugh it off Bungie but this is kind of serious.

I often read guides after I've beaten a game. I've DONE it on my own - now I want to see how OTHERS do it.

Why do you want to see how others do it? Are you purely curious? Or is the idea to see if others do it better / faster / more efficiently / in a cooler way than you did?

Because it's fun?

Haven't you ever gotten nearly as much enjoyment out of watching someone play a game as you've gotten from playing it?

In fact, folks reading guides obviously do it because that is more fun than doing it on their own, or else they'd do it on their own.

Nope.

I often read guides after I've beaten a game. I've DONE it on my own - now I want to see how OTHERS do it.

I wish you wouldn't use phrases like 'In fact' when in fact what follows is NOT fact. Thanks.

Same here. I often watch let's play videos of games I've already finished to see how other people play them differently. Sometimes it's for RPGs where I know there are different routes, but I feel so strongly about the character that I'm playing that choosing a different route "just to see what happens" feels wrong. I've replayed all of the Mass Effect games at least once, and often I start out intending on reversing some of the major decisions, but when it comes down to it, I end up making the same decision because it feels right for the character I'm playing. (I've never saved Kaidan, I've never killed Wrex, and I've never not saved the Rachni queen).

I expect plenty of others also do it to approach achievement challenges that focus on collecting objects strewn about the game. Games often tell you how many out of the possible total objects you've found, but give you little or no indication of where the missing ones are, meaning you end up replaying the entire game doing nothing but searching dark corners. Instead, I'll look through a walkthrough's list of item locations until I see one I don't recognize, and then I'll focus a search on those levels, only resorting to actually reading the location of that item if I can't find it with a general search. I did this recently with novel pages during an Alan Wake replay.

If this is something players won't want to actually do themselves, or can't be bothered to do themselves, isn't that admitting the activity is kind of bad?

It's a comment on how difficult the encounters will be, not how unenjoyable they are.

I expected more from you Schooly. I thought you were one of the good ones.

I agree with Schooly.

You're reading too much into that entry. It's a poorly chosen way of illustrating the idea that the raids should be difficult.

That players turn to alternative methods to defeat difficult challenges in games is obvious; witness the proliferation of walkthroughs, cheatsheets, trainers, aimbots, and let's play videos.

Even if the wording of the original emphasizes a non-desirable reaction to said difficulty, it still gets the message across, whereas your suggested replacement is both counter-intuitive and confusing. Trying to solve an encounter yourself is the default action for all challenges, regardless of difficulty-- while resorting to video walkthroughs is what people do when it's very, very difficult.

players should only consult the guide if they are horribly stuck.

How do you define "horribly stuck"?

Stuck to the point where you are no longer enjoying yourself. This is going to be different points for every player.

It was a rhetorical question that lead to my point. ...Which was evidentially missed.

players should only consult the guide if they are horribly stuck.

How do you define "horribly stuck"?

Stuck to the point where you are no longer enjoying yourself. This is going to be different points for every player.

Classic difficulty came from stiff gear checks, which the raid designers of the time could very finely tune due to the relative simplicity of the available gear content. Compounding this was that the only way to get better gear was to beat the bosses that required slightly worse gear in the first place.

As someone who led raids from BWL to MSV, complexity and "gimmick" mechanics have become more prevalent over the years, but so too has the availability of alternative gear sources that allow players to gear past encounters.

As far as YouTube goes, you don't watch YouTube and then one shot any encounter (except maybe Morchok.) You still have to execute. Speaking as a raid leader,
go watch the Tankspot vid" is not so that they can execute the fight--only practice accomplishes that. It's so that I can skip spending 30 minutes explaining mechanics (that are in many cases only relevant to certain players) and get to the playing part.

Why not build encounters that still culminate in exhilirating, hard earned success, but require no explanation? If you can consistently pull that off, apply for the position. ;)

Also, phones ringing.

Bungie writes interesting worlds. I want to explore those worlds, and then move on to new ones; come back to the old ones to look around again, see what's changed. I most certainly do not want to do repeat "playthroughs" or whatever equivalent there is for Destiny.

The problem with your suggestion is that, based on existing games which utilize progressively improved gear, making the game unbeatable or at least extremely difficult to beat on the hardest difficulty without top-tier equipment requires artificial difficulty and not challenge. The issue comes from the fact that tiered equipment is rarely functionally different; the numbers go up, but what it does remains the same. Your Level 99 Sword of Truth still hits things, just like the garden hoe you started with, it just makes bigger chunks of health go away with each swing - but since encounters tend to scale numerically with level, you're not really any more effective than you were at the start. A really interesting difficulty curve involves making enemies function more intelligently, creating new encounters which throw more and various enemies at you in different environments, that sort of thing. Crysis (the first one!) did this really well; the enemy aimbot didn't improve on hard-mode, but they spoke Korean instead of English, you didn't have an aim-point without ironsights, no grenade indicator, and when driving a vehicle, you could either drive or operate the gun, but not both at once.

Bungie, of course, could totally knock this out of the park if they made higher-tier items functionally different. Or maybe even do away with tiers of items, and just have item types; no Mark IX Battle Rifle with Extended Magazine and Anti-Tank Augments versus Hunting Rifle, but rather mid-range anti-personnel rifle versus shotgun, or heavy-but-slow armor versus fragile-but-agile light armor.

Uhhh, I'm rambling, back to the point. There are players, myself included, who tackle a game on hard-mode right off (well, never could do that on Halo, but most other shooters). We've been playing first-person shooters since we could walk, we know what we're doing, and we don't want developers trying to slow us down by forcing us to wade through a swamp of grinding to get a nice new gun or whatever; we want to jump right in and have our shooting-and-strafing skills be challenged.

While we're on the subject of job descriptions, does Bungie really ask their producers to juggle chainsaws?

"If you have an amazing attention to detail and can juggle chainsaws, chew gum, and write a sonnet at the same time, then you might be just right for this team."

I mean, the gum chewing and sonnet writing seems pretty normal but the rest sounds super dangerous and I bet it violates several OSHA standards and practices.

I will admit that I know very little about chainsaw juggling, so maybe someone could educate me a bit about such activities. Is it common to put yourself in such mortal danger to work on the production team at Bungie? How much skill does it take? Can you learn it on your own, or should you join the circus?

:)

To my knowledge, OSHA regulations are remarkably silent on the operation of power tools in a commercial workspace. To be on the safe side, I would recommend wearing proper safety equipment (Full face guard, gloves, steel toed boots, and earplugs are a must) and performing the act in a well-ventilated environment to prevent the buildup of fumes.

A quick search reminded me that you should check the guards and safety interlocks before starting the chainsaw. And while refueling, bring the motor to a complete stop and rest it on a stable surface.

Hmm... you know, the modifications required to keep the chainsaws running just MIGHT be in violation of code 1910.243(a)(2)(i)

While we're on the subject of job descriptions, does Bungie really ask their producers to juggle chainsaws?

http://www.bungie.net/en-us/AboutUs#page=careers&job=10348

"If you have an amazing attention to detail and can juggle chainsaws, chew gum, and write a sonnet at the same time, then you might be just right for this team."

I mean, the gum chewing and sonnet writing seems pretty normal but the rest sounds super dangerous and I bet it violates several OSHA standards and practices.

Is this really the way producers think? Stay on your toes guys; don't succumb to this.

I will admit that I know very little about chainsaw juggling, so maybe someone could educate me a bit about such activities. Is it common to put yourself in such mortal danger to work on the production team at Bungie? How much skill does it take? Can you learn it on your own, or should you join the circus?

:)

"As a Job Description Designer you will work around paranoid fanboys to create memorable, bond-building descriptions that potential job applicants will scour YouTube to defeat."

Ah, skimming the thread I realize most things have been said, but I have to use that year I lost to hard core WoW raiding in some way.

lol.

This thing with raids sure does make me wonder how Destiny will actually play. I am not going to play a slow MMO like WoW again, the skill ceiling was fairly low, the real ceiling was knowledge about the encounters and the gear you had. The whole point becomes the grind towards better gear to make your character more capable, something that restarted every expansion. I really hope Destiny will work different somehow... o_o

I strongly believe the syrupy slow pace will naturally be fixed by a smaller "raid size". Scholo and Strat were more playable/quicker/doable primarily because they were 5 man instances, not because they took less player skill or less knowledge of the fight.

Maybe I suggested players should only consult the guide if they are horribly stuck.

You're such hero Cody. Simultaneously taking people's money and telling them they shouldn't use their purchase.

Maybe I feel the Portal 2 and Vanquish guides had a lot to offer beyond the hints, such as interviews with the developers, artwork, story analysis, etc.

Maybe the guides went beyond just telling players how to solve the game, and instead taught them how to extend their creativity to solve things in their own way, essentially training them to think outside the box beyond what's in the guide, especially considering they are obsolete hours after they are sold anyway thanks to the internet.

So you throw in some extras to sweeten the deal. Stand business practice. Obviously online communities that originally form around tactics discussion/trading can offer nothing even remotely comparable...

Did you even read any of them?

If you can decry Bungie's entire design philosophy based on a job advertisement for a mode you don't understand in a game you know very little about then...

just don't make raids stupid plz. k thx bye.

http://www.bungie.net/en-us/AboutUs#page=careers&job=10348

"If you have an amazing attention to detail and can juggle chainsaws, chew gum, and write a sonnet at the same time, then you might be just right for this team."

I mean, the gum chewing and sonnet writing seems pretty normal but the rest sounds super dangerous and I bet it violates several OSHA standards and practices.

Is this really the way producers think? Stay on your toes guys; don't succumb to this.

I will admit that I know very little about chainsaw juggling, so maybe someone could educate me a bit about such activities. Is it common to put yourself in such mortal danger to work on the production team at Bungie? How much skill does it take? Can you learn it on your own, or should you join the circus?

:)

There aren't any 'rules' about how a game is (or should be) played or enjoyed, and your insistence that there's a 'right' way grates. A lot.

I'm sorry if I give off that impression, and that's obviously not true that there's only one way to enjoy a game. If that were the case I wouldn't play games, and it would defeat the purpose of them being interactive.

That's not the point I'm making. The point I'm ultimately making is that of the value of certain challenges, and judging by the responses here, WoW style RAIDs do not seem to be a very valuable, rewarding challenge in general.