Now I want to play a Kro-guard again...

That's true, but getting a character you already had did at least apply some XP to that class (for those not in the know, in ME3 multiplayer all characters in a given class - soldier, adept, etc. - leveled up together).

Of course, if you happened to have that class at max level at the time you effectively got nothing.

Could have sworn that you unlocked shader options on a class when you already had it...

I think a Vendor overhaul should address this. Remove the ability to re-roll weapons, as that was the cause of the Felwinter/Party Crasher/other-sniper-shotgun debacle.
People who have their super rolls? Congrats, never shard those! But moving forward, Bungie needs to take more control, while giving us more options.
The fact that they gave people this power, then were genuinely surprised (according to the recent balancing article) that people exploited it is beyond words.

I think they weren't surprised that people exploited it. I think that they were surprised at how it being difficult (ish), but doable for anyone, and that en masse people did it, which greatly affected the meta-game, was what they were surprised about.

But it's been a while since I read that, so maybe bungie missed it. I know not how though... =)

You know the easiest way to fix this right? All they have to do is get rid of random perks. Make every version of Party Crasher exactly the same. Every version of All Fate is the same, etc. Every gun will be exactly the same as everyone else's gun.

I think that would go a long way toward making every gun feel unique, and everyone would know exactly what they're going up against.

To keep variety up, just have more guns as loot.

Granted, I'm not sure how they could implement this at this point without pissing people off, because the only way I can see doing it is retroactively changing everyone's stuff to whatever they decided the new set perks will be, and that obviously won't make people love them.

I think a Vendor overhaul should address this. Remove the ability to re-roll weapons, as that was the cause of the Felwinter/Party Crasher/other-sniper-shotgun debacle.
People who have their super rolls? Congrats, never shard those! But moving forward, Bungie needs to take more control, while giving us more options.
The fact that they gave people this power, then were genuinely surprised (according to the recent balancing article) that people exploited it is beyond words.

I think they weren't surprised that people exploited it. I think that they were surprised at how it being difficult (ish), but doable for anyone, and that en masse people did it, which greatly affected the meta-game, was what they were surprised about.

But it's been a while since I read that, so maybe bungie missed it. I know not how though... =)

I think I get where he is coming from. There was a little something lost when you can't tell what a gun is by looking at its name.

For a long time I recommended Three Little Words to people. While you could technically get a Three Little Words with random perks from a drop, the chances of that were so low that I felt confident that when I talked about Three Little Words people knew I was talking about the slow, hard hitting Crucible Vendor Pulse Rifle that came with 3rd Eye and Headseeker. When I got killed by it in the Crucible I pretty much knew what roll it had on it. To me, even though it wasn't 100% technically correct, Three Little Words was very much a specific gun.

Now, post-reforging, that very rarely holds true. I don't feel comfortable talking about a 55A-allFATE as if it is a unique or specific gun because my 55A-allFATE (with 3rd Eye and Hidden Hand) might be very different from your 55A-allFATE (say with Full Auto and Counter Balance or whatever). The ability to buy a weapon from a vendor then drastically change how it acts vs another gun with the same name in a way dilutes the Legendary-ness of the name...

If you can buy that then sure, Cody is right. A Praedyth's Timepiece is more "special" and "unique" than any random Spare Change.25 since there aren't any variants. It is exactly what it is. It's name refers to one very specific gun. Same thing with Exotics. We all know exactly what a Bad Juju or The Last Word are because there are precisely zero different reforged variants of either floating around.

That's something that I've thought about, too. During the Alpha, people coveted the Mitternacht. It was vicious, and the lack of perks meant that you knew what you were getting.
During the Beta, the Jigoku became the thing to get.
At launch, while the Shadow Price was greatly desired, the fact that you could get one as a random drop with five different perks slightly changed the value of the weapon. Sure you could get the Vendor's version, but if you were lucky, you'd get one with a better roll as a drop. This was rare enough that someone with a better roll than the vendors had a slight edge over others, but for the most part, you knew what you were dealing with when it killed you. Now, the default rolls from Vendor weapons are essentially placeholders that few people keep.
Why keep a vendor roll when you can get whatever you want?
Maybe they could have cycled the perks and added cosmetic differences (Shadow Price Mk-3, with a green and gold paint scheme, for example) to give you an idea of what perks it had on it, so you could check out the vendors to see if they had the same roll, or if his was a special random drop.

The way it is now, with the ability to get any roll you want (if you have the resources to spare), there's little reason to run around without an optimized roll (Send It on Hand Cannons, Field Scout on MGs, Rangefinder/SP on Shotguns, etc.). I think Bungie put too much power in the hands of the player, when they could have been in control of what people could easily get their hands on (and automated algorithms are NOT the answer).

I think a Vendor overhaul should address this. Remove the ability to re-roll weapons, as that was the cause of the Felwinter/Party Crasher/other-sniper-shotgun debacle.
People who have their super rolls? Congrats, never shard those! But moving forward, Bungie needs to take more control, while giving us more options.
The fact that they gave people this power, then were genuinely surprised (according to the recent balancing article) that people exploited it is beyond words.

For a long time I recommended Three Little Words to people. While you could technically get a Three Little Words with random perks from a drop, the chances of that were so low that I felt confident that when I talked about Three Little Words people knew I was talking about the slow, hard hitting Crucible Vendor Pulse Rifle that came with 3rd Eye and Headseeker. When I got killed by it in the Crucible I pretty much knew what roll it had on it. To me, even though it wasn't 100% technically correct, Three Little Words was very much a specific gun.

Now, post-reforging, that very rarely holds true. I don't feel comfortable talking about a 55A-allFATE as if it is a unique or specific gun because my 55A-allFATE (with 3rd Eye and Hidden Hand) might be very different from your 55A-allFATE (say with Full Auto and Counter Balance or whatever). The ability to buy a weapon from a vendor then drastically change how it acts vs another gun with the same name in a way dilutes the Legendary-ness of the name...

If you can buy that then sure, Cody is right. A Praedyth's Timepiece is more "special" and "unique" than any random Spare Change.25 since there aren't any variants. It is exactly what it is. It's name refers to one very specific gun. Same thing with Exotics. We all know exactly what a Bad Juju or The Last Word are because there are precisely zero different reforged variants of either floating around.

That seems a bit extreme. Especially since previously a bad roll was something you were simply stuck with or sharded. Are you just against reforging all together?

I'm leaning toward not having random perks on weapons at all. Not only would everything be easier to balance, but all the legendary guns would be and feel unique. Currently only the raid weapons and exotics feel special, and surprise! They are the ones with fixed perks.

Really? The stuff I get jealous about is the stuff that folks spend forever re-rolling... combinations of perks I simply haven't been able to get myself. Exotics... eh. Everyone's got 'em now.

Weird. Not only don't we agree, we hold OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS. About something that should, on the surface, be obvious.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it, about all those absolute statements you make? :)

Maybe I should clarify that what I meant was that they would be unique relative to each other. I have the resources to roll whatever I want, so one legendary of the same archetype is basically just as good as another. The differences are minor when I can get the same perks on both. You see it differently probably because you can't simply re roll on a whim.

By the way what I wrote was so overwhelmingly subjective as my experience I cannot fathom how you took it as anything other than my opinion.

How much real money did people actually spend on resupply packs? I'd bet it was quite a bit, actually. I think everyone knows people that have spent stupid amounts of money on shit like Candy Crush or whatever the new hot mobile game is now. I didn't play much ME3 multiplayer, so I don't even know what the resupply packs cost, but I know plenty of people that probably would have spent over a hundred bucks on them, a dollar at a time. They're lazy like that. These are guys that were collecting other people's discarded Mt. Dew bottles for the Halo 4 Double XP, and buying ridiculous amounts of it on their own.

Really? The stuff I get jealous about is the stuff that folks spend forever re-rolling... combinations of perks I simply haven't been able to get myself. Exotics... eh. Everyone's got 'em now.

This.

Yes, the exotics are more special in a way, because their perks are more unique and interesting (some times). Red Death's health regen, Gally's wolf rounds, etc., etc. But as long as you have it, everyone's exotic is exactly the same. With the legendary weapons, that's not true.

But I haven't been playing for super long, so I don't have resources built up like crazy. I've never had more than 30 motes of light at a time; I certainly don't have a hundred or more like a lot of people seem to.

So reforging is a big decision for me. Do I settle for only full auto, or do I try to get full auto and firefly? Is Grenades and Horseshoes enough, or do I keep going to get it and Tripod?

This sounds awful on paper, just more of what we expect from Destiny: getting screwed by RNG and grinding for resources. But for whatever reason, it works for me, and I like it. It feels great when I get that perfect roll that I wanted, and it's made me fall in love with some perks that I would have otherwise ignored, because I settle for taking the one perk I really wanted, and whatever else happens to drop with it.

If I were on the other side of this debate one of my first targets would be to question whether ME3's microtransactions really had anything to do with its additional multiplayer content. They really kept on artists and programmers, enough to design several new maps and guns and subclasses with custom animations, based on people paying a few dollars at a time for resupply packs? Or was all that budgeted from the start and the additional money they got over time was just pure profit? Are there any sources or quotes to support one version over the other?

Of course, this question can be raised about most DLC. Where does the money actually go?

That seems a bit extreme. Especially since previously a bad roll was something you were simply stuck with or sharded. Are you just against reforging all together?

I'm leaning toward not having random perks on weapons at all. Not only would everything be easier to balance, but all the legendary guns would be and feel unique. Currently only the raid weapons and exotics feel special, and surprise! They are the ones with fixed perks.

Really? The stuff I get jealous about is the stuff that folks spend forever re-rolling... combinations of perks I simply haven't been able to get myself. Exotics... eh. Everyone's got 'em now.

Weird. Not only don't we agree, we hold OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS. About something that should, on the surface, be obvious.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it, about all those absolute statements you make? :)

I would agree as long as we are sure that the current "low" selling price is actually hurting the content. And that it's not bad developers or poor budgeting or corporate greed or that it is actually pretty hard to make a great game no matter how much money you have. But even if the current new game price point is too low, can't the argument be made that no matter what price we raise new games to a flow of microtransactions done in a "good" Mass Effect 3 style would allow a developer to provide even more content?

I don't think I personally have enough information about how developers make money to really answer this.

Seriously, how does Bungie make money from Destiny? Do they get royalties? Or is more like Activision saying, we'll pay you $X to make the game, and $X to make an expansion. If microtransactions are added, where does that money go? Does Bungie get it, or Activision?

I don't know the answers, and that largely depends on what the effect of microtransactions would be. Because I'm pessimistic about it, I imagine the increased profits would largely just end up in Activision's pocket, and not much would make it back to Bungie to fund further projects.

And yet another very popular and well funded scifi IP used a microtransaction model to Massively great Effect. The reality that it can work and can work well is right in front of you.

Lots of people pointing out to Cody the consensus that ME3 rocks and that the microtransactions worked as proof that microtransactions can work in general, which sort of avoids something. Much like Cody desperately grasping onto a few people who agree with his point in relation to ME3, a lot of others are using ME3, one of maybe a few solid and successful, fun games that implement microtransactions in a mostly well-done way, as some sort of proof that they can work. ME3's particular multiplayer style of gaming happened to fit the scheme. There are an endless supply of other examples that fully back up what Cody is saying. He's dead wrong about ME3, but I have a feeling that he'd be right if microtransactions are truly implemented into Destiny.

No, not "some sort of proof." Proof. Because Mass Effect 3's method largely did work. The distinction between the two matters to me.

That said, you are correct. Microtransactions don't have a bad reputation because most games do great jobs like Mass Effect 3 or Team Fortress 2 (which I've never played but always heard good things about), they have a bad reputation because most games either do a terrible job of implementing microtransaction content or they just straight up abuse microtransactions in an awfully diverse variety of ways. But Cody doesn't acknowledge that any game can do it well. And that's just intellectually dishonest of him when an example of doing it right (or mostly right, as I think the ME3 detractors in this thread do have some valid complaints about the ME3 way of doing things) is the basis of the entire thread.

I do agree that microtransactions would probably be a bad thing for Destiny if nothing else changed. If expansions continued to cost $15 - $40 with that additional revenue stream then something would be very wrong. But what if the future smaller HoW style expansions dropped to $5 and the big TTK ones dropped to $10 because of microtransactions? Or if they became free? For me at least, it would then depend on exactly how the transactions were implemented. If its just people buying funny looking hats then sure, go for it. If it were to be something horrible like you see a lot in the mobile world where you have to pay to get more artificially scarce daily respawns or whatever... then heck no!

I'm firmly in the camp of just raising the base price of games across the board. These games have been launching at $60 for too long. Microsoft bumped Xbox Live pricing, and while there was initial backlash, they're doing just fine. Industry-wide increases in game pricing would be just as fine.

I would agree as long as we are sure that the current "low" selling price is actually hurting the content. And that it's not bad developers or poor budgeting or corporate greed or that it is actually pretty hard to make a great game no matter how much money you have. But even if the current new game price point is too low, can't the argument be made that no matter what price we raise new games to a flow of microtransactions done in a "good" Mass Effect 3 style would allow a developer to provide even more content?

And yet another very popular and well funded scifi IP used a microtransaction model to Massively great Effect. The reality that it can work and can work well is right in front of you.

Lots of people pointing out to Cody the consensus that ME3 rocks and that the microtransactions worked as proof that microtransactions can work in general, which sort of avoids something. Much like Cody desperately grasping onto a few people who agree with his point in relation to ME3, a lot of others are using ME3, one of maybe a few solid and successful, fun games that implement microtransactions in a mostly well-done way, as some sort of proof that they can work. ME3's particular multiplayer style of gaming happened to fit the scheme. There are an endless supply of other examples that fully back up what Cody is saying. He's dead wrong about ME3, but I have a feeling that he'd be right if microtransactions are truly implemented into Destiny.

I'm firmly in the camp of just raising the base price of games across the board. These games have been launching at $60 for too long. Microsoft bumped Xbox Live pricing, and while there was initial backlash, they're doing just fine. Industry-wide increases in game pricing would be just as fine.

Racing games are especially bad. Open world racing games blow. There's nothing to be gained by driving aimlessly from one race to the next. I want to race, not spent ninety percent of the game driving from objective to the next, or trying to find all your fucking billboards to smash. Just . . . please stop doing this, developers. If you can't fill your open world game with interesting things to do, and most of the time spent in said open world is just moving from one object to the next, it doesn't work.

I don't even check the vendors anymore because nothing changes. I have all the weapons I want. Hell, if they even rotated in weapons every week with the reset it would make everything seem fresh.

Instead of letting players re-roll their weapons, what they should have done was a weekly reset of the rolls on vendor stocks, as well as a cycling of different weapons (the return of The Devil You Know!). That way, you can spend your marks on more than just boring Resources (which I don't even bother with anymore, both sit at 200 on all characters), and each reset is more anticipated, because you never know what rolls the vendors will have (and it adds a risk/reward system to spending all of your marks).

I always wondered why Bungie didn't do this. It seems like a no-brainer.

In a recent interview, someone said they don't want your epic stories to revolve around "I went and bought this cool gun!" That's why they don't do it :-p

Standard Legendaries should be bought from vendors and be random. All the exotics and unique legendaries should have a story behind them. But not stories like I killed this guy and got my 8th dragons breath. Nobody wants that story.

*goes off to Vanguard more fools*

That seems a bit extreme. Especially since previously a bad roll was something you were simply stuck with or sharded. Are you just against reforging all together?

I'm leaning toward not having random perks on weapons at all. Not only would everything be easier to balance, but all the legendary guns would be and feel unique. Currently only the raid weapons and exotics feel special, and surprise! They are the ones with fixed perks.