gamedevelopment: What Destiny's Failures Can Teach Us About Game Design

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pokoko said:

Augen said:

pokoko said:
"Having progression tied to blind luck is incredibly frustrating for players, and is simply an example of bad game design."

Someone needs to tell Blizzard or that "World of Warcraft" project of theirs will be doooomed.

I barely played wow five years ago, but I do remember people mentioning "drop rates" so while it was sort of random, there was a mathematical percentage tied to "do this, get that".

Complete blind luck would be without any mechanism behind the reward.

I don't quite understand what you're saying.  That's what a drop rate means.  Any game like Destiny or WoW has to have a loot table with drop rates or it would never drop at all.  It has to be the same mechanism.  A loot table is the only way "luck" can work in programming.  Back when I first started raiding in WoW, I badly needed a dagger from Ragnaros that had like a 5% drop rate at the time.  I finally saw a Perdition's Blade drop but, since I was bidding for it with like 5 other Rogues, my real drop rate was more like 1%.  I never did get the blade and we eventually loved on to tougher content when it was released.

This is a mechanism MMO gamers are well versed in.  Destiny tried to bring this to console FPS gamers but I think that's a much more "I want this right now" crowd.  However, saying it's bad game design when it's the system of choice for tens of millions of people is kind of silly.

People's complain with Destiny was that even though you preformed wayyyy better than your teammates, they could get wayyyy better loot than you. Say you got 20 kills and the other guy only 2, yet the latter got a legendary weapon and you got nothing. 

I never played Wow for more than an hour, but from what I understand when raiding, people have to work together and 1 person's mistake can cost everyone the battle (that might be an exaggeration, but correct be if I'm wrong on this). That is not really the case on Destiny because of the FPS nature. In Wow every player focuses on a single enemy, in Destiny there are hordes of enemies (as well as a boss) and in the end, the game gives you a score, when you see that your score is higher than the other players and yet you didn't get anything, is natural to get pissed off. This doesn't mean that Destiny doesn't have teamwork like Wow does, but actually knowing by numbers that you did better than the other players and got nothing, imo, is a flawed game design. People probably wouldn't have complain if the score tab was removed altogether.

As far as I know, your score means absolutely nothing on Destiny's loot system.