crucible Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Crucible Is A Mess

November 1, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve had a series of nights that did not go exactly as plan, and last night was no difference. I had a useless and impromptu 4pm meeting which lead me to get out of work significantly later then planned, and a series of errands that needed to be tacked on before I hit the house. By the time I actually hit the computer I was already stepping into turtle mode and largely stayed there the rest of the night. This did however give me the opportunity to work on the weekly milestones for both my Titan and Hunter. As has been my plan for a bit, I chose to do them in reverse order of importance to me… starting with the Hunter and finishing with the Titan and it seems to have had the desired effect. As of yesterday I could hit 275 on the Titan and as of last nights shenanigans I managed to push the Hunter to 281 and the Titan subsequently to 283. I still have Nightfalls to do on both of them and I am hoping tonight I will feel up to group interaction and attempt to get those knocked out as well. From there it is a matter of getting the Warlock up and running and geared enough to start knocking the content out as well. The sticking point right now is the fact that I am significantly worse in the crucible than I was on the console.

Essentially whatever I had learned on the console seems to need unlearning… and instead I am having to adapt to an entirely new set of circumstances. I am improving, but every so slowly and one of the aspects that does not help is the horrific queuing mechanism present in Destiny 2. Firstly there is still the problem of 4v4 being a worse mode than 6v6 for a bunch of reasons not the least of which is… if you are not roaming with the pack you are dead. In 6v6 there were lots of sub groups that would break off from the main group and roam the map in twos and threes… but in 4v4 you tend to either encounter no one… or a murderball that is the entirety of the enemy team roaming around together. This is only made worse by the fact that you are constantly being presented with teams of four players from the same clan. In 6v6 queuing with one or two members of your clan was largely diluted by the fact that there were 3 or 4 other people on the team. Queuing as a pair… means you now represent half of the team and it greatly skews the end results. I feel like the grouping routing should in theory favor placing solo players with other solo players… and full teams against other full teams. However because of the constant complaining in Destiny 1 we have a system that favors connection speed over literally everything else and ends up throwing a monkey wrench in any semblance of proper queuing mechanics.

I realize the intent was to have Quick Play be a casual queue and Competitive be a more serious one… but that does not appear to be working. Competitive modes would be fine for full team vs full team interactions, or for e-sports tournament settings. However as a casual player they are miserable just because you are committing to an indefinite amount of time per match. I know that when I enter the quick play queue I am agreeing to something in the range of 8-10 minutes of my time. With competitive this is entirely variable based on how many matches you have to play to reach the objectives of the mode… which are not even really clear in my head. One mode seems to be that you have to win 6 out of 10 matches to move get on with your life, and the other seems to be a slightly lower number. Regardless unless you are just straight up throwing each match you are stuck there for thirty minutes. I’ve played competitive exactly 2 times per character to unlock the Call to Arms milestone and never looked back. I am hoping with the advent of season 2… we see some significant changes in the way the queue system works because right now the crucible is not fun at all and something I suffer through each week to get gear. If you removed the powerful rewards… I would probably never play crucible again other than Iron Banner… and even then it is still a gear chase and not something I actually enjoy playing. I have proven time and time again over the years that I am willing to suffer some serious bullshit for the minor prize of seeing a single number go up a few digits.

Iron Banner Issues

October 16, 2017 by Belghast

This past week for me at least has been all about the Iron Banner 2.0 event happening in Destiny 2. If Destiny Tracker is to be believed, I have played fifty Iron Banner matches over the last four days. That was enough to turn in 24 Iron Banner packages so far… aka the equivalent of 480 tokens. At this point I managed to pull a complete set of gear for my Titan and have collected all but one of the weapons available. The Hand Cannon is eluding me but I still have faith that I might manage to get it when I run through my daily milestones for Iron Banner today. To say I have a high tolerance for grinding is an understatement, and the more impressive stat is that every single bit of this has been solo. I will get into more about that later but suffice to say I feel like I experienced everything that is to be seen in the new Iron Banner. This month the game mode of choice was Control… which used to be my favorite mode for Iron Banner but in the 4 player crucible I seem to now favor Supremacy.

What Changed?

Traditionally the Crucible is an event that does some level synchronization to make sure every player is on a level field. Iron Banner however in Destiny 1 was one of the un-synced events that took into consideration what your gear level was. In truth however this didn’t really play a heavy role other than maybe dealing a few extra points of damage to someone significantly under your gear level. The entire event functioned based on the Iron Banner reputation that would reset to zero before the start of a new event. The ultimate goal was to level from 1 to rank 5, which then allowed you to purchase gear that was available from Lord Saladin. This generally consisted of two armor slots and two weapons, and then the same items were available as rewards at the end of matches. In my experience one in five to ten matches rewarded gear at the end.

Now Iron Banner is governed by a token based system much as is the case with all factions in Destiny 2. Additionally it relies on the same level synchronization that occurs in the Crucible so no more gear level advantages. Previously the only way to gain progress was to either complete a bounty or win the match. This meant if you had some really bad luck you could have a long streak of loses where you did not move your reputation forward at all. This time around you get 2 tokens for a loss and 5 tokens for a win, and it takes 20 tokens in total to get a package. The packages themselves contain 1 Iron Banner specific item, and on item from a long list of other miscellaneous weapons and armor. I should have taken much better care in opening my packages and tracked the items I got in each, but I will just say there were a significant number of duplicates.

The Problems

The issue with Iron Banner is a very nuanced one, that requires you to understand some of the base states of the game to understand how we got here. In Destiny 1 there was a constant refrain from players lashing out against skill based match making, and complaining about the number of “red bar” players with poor connections that they kept encountering. With Destiny 2 it feels like they stepped away from a lot of the intelligence that attempted to make decent matches for players. One of these is that the game no longer attempts to match teams of players against other teams, which is where the issue happens. Most of the weekend I spent time matched against partial or complete teams of players, and as a result had to fight a very uphill battle to get my wins.

The games seemed to be really hit or miss, I could go from being steamrolled one moment to being the odd man out on a team of three players that queued and in turn rolling over another team. In the rare instance when I got matched with a bunch of other random players… I did good. Like for example the above screenshot is one I think I will never be able to duplicate where I somehow ended up with a 6.4 efficiency rating…. which is their version of Kda. This is an issue because it ends up giving players a very uneven feeling experience, to go from ruling the world to succumbing to it… within the course of a single matching. The folks that managed to gather up a team, and were on voice chat however seemed to completely decimate all comers.

Problems With The Grind

Iron Banner was one of those events that I looked forward to each month, not necessarily because I loved the PVP but because it was an opportunity to move up in the world. What I mean by that is that in Destiny 1 there were a limited number of events that you could participate that scaled all the way to the level cap, Iron Banner was one of them. As a result I spent my weekends grinding away at Iron Banner incrementally improving my light level so that I could hang with the big dogs… but keep my relatively solitary play style. With Destiny 2 this concept is toast. Gear drops at the same item level that any other Legendary drop does, which means there is no real way to advance your power level through Iron Banner drops. Sure there is the random chance of getting an exotic to drop, but that is a once a night sort of event and even then you need some serious luck to get anything that will move the bar forward.

Now the meaningful grind is about the collection of available loot, but I fear this is going to be a very short lived process. I said earlier in the post that I have collected all but one weapon at this point, and a full set of gear for my titan. Additionally I have a few items for my hunter now, so currently there are ten items that I have not seen. Given that it is highly unlikely that we see an influx of new items before the next Iron Banner, then it means that my drive to keep participating is going to be less each time as I whittle down that list of needed items. Now were I able to keep using Iron Banner as a means to incrementally increase my power level, then more than likely I would continue to participate and even look forward to the event.

The Future

I’ve tried to remain largely positive about Destiny 2 because in a few weeks we will be starting the process all over again with the launch of the PC version. There are however issues here and there that sort of stick out as annoyances. The core problem with Destiny 2 is that more than anything it is a direct sequel to Destiny 1. What I mean by that is in some ways it feels like we took a step backwards to a world where everything that happened in Taken King and Rise of Iron never existed. It makes me wonder if this project was launched before the release of Taken King, and they simply never applied the good parts of years two and three before launch. I was a die-hard Destiny 1 player, and I watched that game improve in so many ways over the three years since release. Similarly I have all the faith in the world that a lot of these rough spots will get ironed out as we move forward. Destiny 2 is a much better starting point than Destiny 1 ever could have been, but much like I feel sometimes with World of Warcraft… I get a little wistful when I think about what could have been had we taken all of the good from TTK and ROI into the new game.

Beyond the Light

October 10, 2017 by Belghast

For the last few weeks I have been making contact with a lot of players in preparation for the launch of Destiny 2 on the PC platform. One of the patterns that I have noticed is that while there will be a ton of us playing, there are a significant number of different clans in the works. Even among my own guild-mates it has been decided to go with a Greysky Armada clan rather than joining another, so I will end up splitting time between that on the PC and Tequila Mockingbird on the PS4. Basically the common theme that I kept seeing was that we were going to be a pretty fragmented bunch going forward. Ages ago I created the Beyond the Light discord, and then never really did anything with it. The theory behind it was to have a clan agnostic place for folks to come together and get help doing stuff in Destiny. Since the early marketing material for Destiny 2 talked about us losing our connection with the light… it seemed like a really fitting name. The idea is to create a sort of hub for our little corner of the gaming verse, and facilitate cross clan activities. The channel names themselves are pretty general purpose and I decided to follow a pattern of the various weapon foundries for voice channels. The idea being that anyone can use any channel for any purpose that is needed at the moment.

The reason why I chose a discord rather than a slack or even a new Blizzard Social area… is the fact that Destiny 2 PC based voice chat is horrible. I am not sure how many of you actually tried using this during the PC beta, but it was horrific. Currently we only have about fourteen members, but I figure the discord will grow as we get closer and closer to the PC launch. There are break out channels for the various classes and we’ve already gotten into some discussions on Warlocks and Titans thus far. I’ve largely treated the PS4 launch as a sort of extended paid beta process for the eventual PC launch, and I have attempted to gather up as much information as I could along the way. If nothing else it should be a good place to find people to go do heroic public quests with and maybe even eventually pick up raids. There are already Destiny themed discords out there, but honestly they felt huge and impersonal… or in the case of the one associated with the reddit… fairly toxic at times. I wanted to create a happy place to hang and enjoy this game with all of the people who may or may not share the same banner as me. Effectively everyone is welcome pending they behave themselves. There isn’t a lot of formal structure right now but I figure that will come with time.

The other big news of the week is that Iron Banner is back and its reset day! Like every other activity this one is going to be based on a token system, and I have to say I really like this. There are a lot of complaints from players who like seeing weapons drop, and technically they still do in modes like the Crucible. However I would far rather have a predictable path to get rewards that I can work my way towards than to rely entirely on luck. The other aspect of this that I absolutely love is the fact that tokens go into the shared account inventory, meaning you can grind out the rewards on one character and then swap over to another character to consume them. I personally plan on holding all of my Iron Banner tokens until I have completed the powerful rewards milestones for the week so that I can potentially get items at a higher light level than where I am currently standing. Right now I see a handful of weapons that look really interesting, including an Iron Banner themed version of my beloved Origin Story. Additionally I think the gear set this time is amazing for Titans at least, so I hope to gather up most of a set there as well. This evening my goal is to eat some Tikka Masala that I have going in the crock pot… and play a bunch of Iron Banner. Side note you should be able to double dip the Call to Arms weekly milestone while doing Iron Banner so if you have not unlocked that… I highly suggest you do Lord Shaxx’s two early crucible milestones so you can start working towards yet another luminous engram.

When A Beta Isn’t

August 30, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I managed to run the Inverted Spire strike with a few friends… Grace and Ammo. For Grace it was her first time running the strike and while she was not as rabid… was also a veteran of Destiny 1. Ammo on the other hand… the closest she had ever been to Destiny was drawing my Sunbreaker themed avatar. If you know me very well… or are in that core group of people that I hang out regularly with… you have had to listen to countless hours of me retelling things that happened in Destiny. All of that apparently made her curious enough to try it out now that it was coming to the PC and available for download through the already very familiar Battle.net client. Ammo while completely new to Destiny was by no means an FPS rookie because over the last year or so she has played a significant amount of Overwatch and is way the hell better than I am at it. One of the things that I like about Destiny on the PC is how largely ubiquitous basic controls are if you have ever played a modern shooter. Sure there are all manner of extraneous “super power” keys but the core gameplay of shoot shoot reload fall into the standard control scheme we are all used to. The only real adjustment period of me was figuring out which key binds near WASD did which “power moves”. Grace took to the game rather quickly and got to play big kid at several moments as she was able to get over and rez the rookie well before I could. All in all it was a really fun experience and I am super glad that I wound up running the strike in this manner, since during the PS4 beta I largely just random queued for it.

Last nights experience got me thinking that maybe just maybe releasing through the Battle.net client was more than just a way of having to skip the infrastructure development costs of going to a brand new platform. Overwatch is a weird game because while it is at its core a competitive shooter… it is also one wrapped in so much story that it is impossible to not at least know some of it even if you are not actively playing the game. This is a game that I saw be adopted at frightening rates by gamers who were well versed in the Blizzard ecosystem but never really considered themselves fans of the first person shooter genre. As a result many have had their horizons broadened to realize that yes they could do this shooter thing and with practice get rather damned good at it. Now we have this Destiny thing coming along and poking its head into their already familiar gaming environment… so why not take a peek. I’ve already seen a lot of posts on my twitter feed talking about how individuals are enjoying the Destiny experience but only ever downloaded it because it was available for free through the Battle.net client. Cross pollination is really beautiful thing… and I have found myself in this same boat several times in the past. I am not the biggest fan of League of Legends… but I immediately tried Heroes of the Storm because I wanted to see the Blizzard take on it. I am not really a huge fan of RTS games anymore… but I occasionally play Starcraft II because it has amazing storytelling. I think the Battle.net coup for Destiny… will be bringing a whole bunch of new eyes into the franchise.

Here is where we get to the problem. The “Beta” that we are getting to experience isn’t actually Destiny. It is a bit of a hollow shell that should have been clearly labelled as a demo, because it lacks so many of the reasons why I spent so many hours playing the first game. If you look at my time played on the tracker sites… something like 77% of my time was spent doing random stuff on Patrol missions. I liked roaming around, doing events… unlocking secrets on the dreadnaught… all the while enjoying the really amazing gunplay. Where are the events like Archon’s Forge or Court of Oryx… that I could literally spend hours running over and over. Don’t get me wrong… the Inverted Spire strike is a hell of a lot of fun, and even the 4 player Crucible is starting to grow on me. The problem being however is that we really are not putting the best foot forward for a bunch of players that may or may not have ever experienced the franchise. The other problem is that we are not exactly doing a great job of giving players that bounced hard off of Destiny 1 a great reason to feel positive about coming back. Sure the Homecoming mission has more story elements in it than the entire vanilla game… but I am questioning if that is enough. I am bought in for the long haul because I have loved Destiny as a concept and an experience since the moment I got into the original Alpha of the game on the PS4. Taken King proved to me that the game was worth my devotion and I have been back and at least peripherally active ever since. I am a member of their core demographic… but had they maybe given us something other than a demo… it might be enough to gain new followers rather than just galvanize their existing player base. I hope people can see through the cracks and see the game that is ultimately going to be there behind the walled gardens. I feel like I can and since I am also rabidly gobbling up all of the news that is leaking out about the content that is waiting on the console players September 6th… I am so sold that I am planning on playing once again on two different platforms. I am just not sure that we sold Ammo on the experience other than giving her a fun night of running a space shooter dungeon.