Destiny Patches and "Improvements"

So Destiny has been out for a good while now, and Bungie has had time to take in comments, look at their game and how people are playing it, and then implement changes they think benefit their game and player base.

For the most part I have agreed with a lot of the little tweeks: Auto Rifles are too powerful and although it saddens me because they are my favorite (not just because they were powerful), it probably needed to be done. Most recently they've said they will add "baby bumpers" to the Atheon raid to prevent players from pushing him off the edge. This is a good idea. That's clearly a bug and an exploit that defeats the spirit of the raid, I'm fine with that.  Bungie has also made it so engrams will give you at least that same rarity in item (ie green engrams will give you at least a green rarity item, and so on). Before you could finally get a purple engram, only to give you a blue item. It was frustrating.

However, there have been a number of changes that I have disliked a lot. For one they have decided to make it so 3 random players are teleported during the final fight against Atheon, instead of the furthest 3. This is ridiculous in my opinion. Now they have stated that they want everyone in the raid group to be able to do everything, so it's at least in line of what they said they wanted to do, but I personally think it's a mistake. During the raid everyone has a role. You have your groups of 2 players (normally) that take care of various sections like mini fireteams. During the Templar fight you have your various roles including the dedicated relic holder and Atheon-teleporting prevent-er (worst title ever). Then for the final boss we had roles of 2 portal guardian, floater, 2 oracle killers, and a relic holder. And now Bungie has stated that they are making the last boss choose 3 randoms and now anyone can be teleported and now everyone must be able to be any one of roles. Now that does make it more difficult, and a raid should be difficult, but I think it will just cause more panic and frustration. I imagine the hatred for certain poor players, that just don't happen to be good with a relic or guarding a portal, will be so great as to turn them off to the whole thing. I now dread taking in a new player to the raid for the first time, as I will have to cram so much information into their skulls and demand so much skill for it to be enjoyable for anyone (as nobody wants to fail tons of times). We had our roles throughout the whole raid, why not allow us to continue doing that, instead of implementing yet another RNG (random number generator) aspect to the game.

Second, they nerfed the Mythoclast. The Mythoclast is the hardest gun to obtain in the game (It can only be gotten as a random drop for beating the raid on hard) and is rightly the most powerful. I personally don't have one, but I would love to. Bungie reduced it's damage by 34%. Ouch. At the time of this writing they have announced that they will modify it further saying that they didn't want to hurt the PVE aspect of using this weapon as much, as they mainly wanted to nerf the gun from a PVP standpoint, but that brings me to my next point:

It seems that Bungie is mainly listening to former CoD players and little kids. Most of the changes in the game have been in the form of modifying weapon damage because of the multiplayer aspect, but it has spread to the PVE section as well. The forums and multiplayer in general are filled with what I'm assuming are little kids (whether they are immature kids in body or mind), who just whine and complain when they get killed in a match, screaming that everything is "OP". So instead of Bungie just calming down and letting those players either learn from their mistakes and become better, or just quit the game to everyone's relief, they are catering to them and going overboard on their modifications, almost ruining the best gun in the game. As I said they are trying to fix that mistake, but it just goes to show how impulsive they are being to cater to the biggest whiners.

They are also the ones that are screaming about the RNG element in this game, and are crying because they don't have every exotic in the game. Destiny has an RNG system in place and is very similar to an MMO in that aspect. That means that getting the various good loot is random. I have run the raid many times and I've only gotten one of the raid armor pieces, and that's what has kept me stuck on lvl 29 with over 50 ascendant shards waiting. Am I crying about that? No, that's part of the game, that's part of the grind. But instead we have a bunch of immature and impatient players (the staples of the modern gamer it seems) demanding that Bungie just give them everything that they want. This is the reason the Queen's Bounty event was such a disaster. We had little kids crying over not getting any legendary armor (even though they could guarantee themselves to get armor if they just played strikes or multiplayer enough and built up the marks and just buy it). Bungie just gave it to them. And to make matters worse, they removed the only reason us veterans had for playing in the event by removing the rewards we could get by destroying the said armor for ascendant materials.

Bungie also removed the loot cave in the game. I also think this was a mistake. Or mainly I think that this has started a chain of events down a slippery slope. In games like this people will be looking for the easiest way to level up or to get materials or money or kills or whatever. That will never change. The loot cave was the easiest place to get various engrams (although personally I never got anything decent but it was nice to upgrade my Cryptarch with all the worthless green and blue engrams), but Bungie took that away because they didn't want people to exploit the game I guess? The problem with that is that it wasn't really an exploit. Players were killing enemies in the game and hoping that through killing a ton of them, they would get a couple of engrams and maybe some good gear. That's just playing the game. Now people will just find the next "loot cave" (ie the greatest concentration of enemies) and use that to get better stuff. Will Bungie keep nerfing the game to the point that enemies only spawn every hour? What do they want us to do? If you want us to play other modes or strikes then you should make it worth our while. Strikes right now take too long and the bosses are just bullet sponges. I personally still love playing them but I understand that if you are trying to get some new gear, that is not the best way to go about doing that.

This brings me to my last point, and that is that although Bungie has been making a lot of little changes in the game, it has never been about adding anything, only taking it away. All of the hotfixes and patches seem to come from Bungie saying "you are not playing the game the way we wanted, so we're going to take something from you". Games need stuff like that, and it's good that they are trying to fix bugs and glitches, but that shouldn't be the only thing. Where's the stuff that makes our game better through addition? I have seem many good suggestions on the forums from players who are honestly trying to give good feedback and info on how the game could be improved (ammo synthesis quick-use buttons or raid matchmaking for example), but stuff like that hasn't been implemented. So much of what Bungie promised us has been a huge let down. The game isn't the sprawling open world that if we see it we can go to it. They story has been very lackluster so far (almost nonexistent). And although I keep hoping they will add stuff to make it better, I have not seen it.

Despite all these complaints I have I still enjoy the game. But I want it to be better. I want it to be the game we all thought we'd be getting. I just hope Bungie actually starts putting some stuff into the game that makes it better.