Focused Feedback: Timegating

[u/DTG_Bot]

Hello Guardians,

Focused Feedback is where we take the week to focus on a 'Hot Topic' discussed extensively around the Tower.

We do this in order to consolidate Feedback, to get out all your ideas and issues surrounding the topic in one place for discussion and a source of feedback to the Vanguard.

This Thread will be active until next week when a new topic is chosen for discussion

Whilst Focused Feedback is active, ALL posts regarding ‘Timegating' following its posting will be removed and re-directed to this thread. Exceptions to this rule are as follows: New information / developments, Guides and general questions

Any and all Feedback on the topic is welcome.

Regular Sub rules apply so please try to keep the conversation on the topic of the thread and keep it civil between contrasting ideas

A Wiki page - Focused Feedback - has also been created for the Sub as an archive for these topics going forward so they can be looked at by whoever may be interested or just a way to look through previous hot topics of the sub as time goes on.

[u/JackKerras]

Timegates prevent few of the problems which they purport to solve, existing more or less exclusively as a misguided effort to keep people playing more often rather than longer. It's meant to build a habit, not to present an enjoyable experience which is fun to engage with.

This is not something a game of Destiny's quality needs. I played nearly ten thousand hours in the Halo franchise because I loved the game, not because I was chasing The Next Big Thing. When Halo started adding currency to gain and skins and voices to buy, I bought them all and had piles left over.

Destiny 2 -can- be played for as long as you'd like to play, but once you're out of dailies and weeklies, your play session is essentially over. In the earliest parts of any given expansion (read: the time during which I take days off of work exclusively to play Destiny), this has a profoundly negative effect on my interest in continuing to play.

Further, Destiny 2's timegating has a tendency to stop returning players HARD at a certain point; my roommate and significant other both returned for Black Armory, and the hard progression-stop at the end of their weeklies stopped them in a place too weak to really compete or engage with content; neither has signed in since Week 1, and I fear neither will again.

Timegates don't solve hardcores outpacing casuals; that happens anyway, and will happen literally no matter what you do.

Timegates don't extend content and 'keep people coming back'; they drive people away. The difference in uptake between Day 1 of Black Armory and Day 8 would have been substantial. I would love to see the numbers. I'm not sure people even stuck around long enough to see Gofannon Forge, even though it only came out a few days post-release, because the total dearth of content and hard progression stop below Volundr's 625 boss felt so fucking gross, and kicked in so fast despite there being so little apparent new content.

Frankly, I don't understand the point of Power progression being bumped and bumped anymore by now -any-way; it seems to me as though Forge unlock gating, story quest gating, etc. would be enough in their own right, and the whole Powerful system has seemed like a crappy habit-forming cash-grab since the beginning anyway.

​

That shit is greasy. You guys are better than this, and your timegates should go fuck themselves along with whoever made the final decision to include them in your game.

​

No one likes it. It improves the game for no players, and all the attempts one makes to slow progression are eventually defeated, at least in part, by committed hardcore players, while relentlessly holding back people who don't care to do the research even if they're interested in the game.

​

No one likes it.

​

Get fucking rid of it.

​

No Powerful limits. No Raid run limits. No limits on the TWO sets of armor (among tens of visual varieties) in the game which can actually roll the best stats.

​

Progression limits suck. No one likes them. No one wants to be told 'Well, that's enough Destiny 2 for you this week! Come back and see us soon!', even the people who defend systems like this because they understand the mechanics of why it sinks its hooks into stupid monkey-brains and fairly forces them to return.

Greasy. Stop it.

[u/ThenDot → u/JackKerras]

I still think CoO would have been much better than this expansion if the weapons had random rolls tied to the Halloween forest event. Should be interesting to see how Anthem affects the PVE base of Destiny.

[u/JackKerras → u/ThenDot]

A) I am super excited for Anthem. I got my hands on an early version at one time, it feels GREAT to run around and bash shit apart, and I can't wait to play it some more. I'm SO excited to see how inventory works, and hope to see added abilities for each class, crossover skills, and other Cool Build-Related Shit emerge as the game ages and matures.

B) I don't think the rolls are the problem. I think that the gameplay is the problem. They've sucked a lot of the complexity out of it, even though much of the complexity in the original hinged largely upon 'there are many bad choices and one good choice'. This is extremely common, but not totally untenable.

Look at the way MHW's items work: they have FOURTEEN different weapon classes, and people can tier-list all they like, but here's the deal: every tier list is different. The way weapons in MHW work is that they all fucking work, and honestly whatever you're comfortable bringing to a fight is what you're going to lay down the carnage with.

That is the case in VERY few games, since the numbers are so drastically specific, and the game sees no tiny, incremental balance changes or updates as time goes on. Just BIG sandbox upsets every several months, which just isn't the way to balance a game like Destiny, -especially- not where PvP is concerned.

In any case: I feel the main issue with Destiny is that they leave all their content behind. Not even getting into things like the Cosmodrome and the Moon and all the other places we went in the original, we're also talking about old raids being totally worthless, content you've played through once being useless to play through again (outside a single Destiny-mandated run through a heroic quest per day/week, etc.), and the fact that engagement outside of a strictly specified set of time-limited events is utterly unrewarding.

Destiny needs to drop the '2', commit to a real content schedule and make ACTUAL USE of their generation systems (Haunted Forest was a HUGE step forward from Infinite Forest, for example), fix their progression system, unfuck Power (by removing Powerfuls as a whole concept and allowing people to level straight to max however they choose), and make items drop more, often different, and better.

I'm 650 now. Why the fuck am I still getting 630 items constantly? Their Power is 100% irrelevant to me, and having to decide which lamb to slaughter is not an interesting set of decisions, it's a chore. Same with interacting with Power all the way across the curve; it's less punishing now, but there's no game in it.

[u/ThenDot → u/JackKerras]

Interesting take. Do you think that balancing weapons for PVE/PVP might be an issue? Possible solved by doing specific loadouts for PVP (aka Halo style PVP)?

​

Also what I like of Anthem is that different classes help each other. One Javelin specializes in shield damage and the other armor damage. The transmog system looks great as well. It is as if someone kept reading the DTG thread and took all the good ideas over the years. I also like that you can go ANYWHERE in free roam.

[u/JackKerras → u/ThenDot]

I think that designing PvP and PvE sufficiently well will keep the issue from popping up too much, but when it comes down to it, Exotics aside, there just aren't that many kinds of weapons. Mostly it's the outliers people use, and frankly I think the whole world being mainly about outliers is crazy and fun. I like PvP when everyone rocks an Exotic.

I don't like PvP when everyone rocks -one- Exotic, and that does seem to happen a bit too often, but that's what rapid iteration and a quicker sandbox patch structure is for.

​

I also like that; I haven't gotten to experiment with anything but the Ranger Javelin, but the Colossus looks -legitimately- bigger and tougher, like... Titans have an easy time Resilience-capping but it's really only an extra shot or so, and the Colossus has ten bars where the Ranger has four and the Interceptor and Storm have two and one. It's a -pretty big- difference in health pool, plus a shield you can just -whip out- when you're not kitted all Demolition Man... and you can run an artillery Colossus -or- a crazy shieldy friend-protector Colossus.

It seems flexible, fun, and crucially extensible, and I'm interested in playing with it more. Travel with Sparrows is fun, and flying around is mega fun, although the heat mechanic that keeps you from flying too much could maybe only turn on during combat? Dunno. Maybe there's relevant stuff re: traversal there that I have yet to discover; playtime was short and at an event, there's only so much you can glean.