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Learning from Destiny: Loot Scaling

October 5, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I was a bad human being. It was a pretty rough day at work because of reasons that I can’t really go into. So when I got home I decided to boot up Destiny and check out the newest running of the Iron Banner event. Quite literally the next thing I know it, it was almost 11 pm and I had spent the entire evening playing the game. This would have been no big deal were it not for the fact that Tuesday nights are a night set aside generally for Final Fantasy XIV and raiding there. I will have to send out my apologies later, but this is a testament to just how fun this “looter shooter” still is. For those who are uninitiated… the Iron Banner is a PVP event, and one that I participate in freely and actually look forward to. The reason behind this is that there is exclusive loot each time it runs from an awesome set of Iron Wolves themed gear and weapons. During year two this was an amazing way to get increases in your overall light levels, and with year three the gear that is available is completely new and fresh. Generally speaking each month the event brings two pieces of armor and two weapons, and this time around we have arms, class items, shotgun and auto rifle. These items can be gained through rewards at the end of the match, or by ranking up with the Iron Banner faction and purchasing specific rolls of each off the new leader of the Iron Banner… Lady Efrideet. This time around the daily quests reward loot instead of just getting packages at rank 3 and rank 5, and I managed to complete two armor packages and two weapons packages. I also managed to get to almost rank 4 in faction in the first night, which tells me that they are trying really hard to make this event feel like less of a grind. As far as drops… I got one awful roll on the Auto Rifle, and four pairs of the gauntlets… most of which are going to be used as infusion fuel for my Hunter and Warlock whenever I get around to playing them.

Distant Cousins

For lack of a better term, Bungie and Blizzard are cousins because they exist as part of the same larger company of Activision Blizzard. In fact it is rumored that during the planning for Taken King, Bungie had a sit down with the developers from Diablo 3 to talk about the lessons learned in crafting the “Loot 2.0” patch. Now it took a lot of tweaking but I feel like Bungie finally landed on a version of that formula that works for them. There are similar references in World of Warcraft Legion that draw ties back to Destiny, the most obvious is the above NPC in Dalaran that is named after the weekly NPC that shows up bringing awesome things and trading them for strange coins. However it feels like there are still a lot of lessons that the World of Warcraft team could learn from the things that Destiny is doing right. The games are designed very differently, but Destiny seems to have accomplished the holy grail of modern MMOs… being able to create static content that players will be willing to repeat over and over. The majority of the strike and crucible playlists are all pretty well worn at this point, but the way rewards are handed out makes a huge difference in the willingness of players to keep pushing forward and attacking the content.

Predictable Upgrades

Warcraft Legion is an expansion full of variable loot tables that shift and change through the use of the Warforging and Titanforging systems. This was a definite good step forward, because it gives a slightly glimmer of hope that something interesting might come from the forty ninth time you are running Eye of Azshara to help a guildie through it. The problem however is that it still feels like that glimmer of hope is an extremely tiny one. Lets take the Looking For Raid system for example to throw some numbers at. The baseline for all loot in that “raid” is 835, and more than likely if you defeat the personal loot boss… the item you are going to walk away with is that low item level. The zone as a whole has a maximum possible light level of 870, meaning that there is an extremely slim chance of still getting something useful from there if you run it on your main. Right now in Belghast I am sitting at 854 item level, and that means that most of the content that I run in the game other than normal or high mode raids, is not going to produce me any upgrades. However in the back of my head I know that it is theoretically possible, and I am having a hard time reconciling what is likely to happen with what might possibly happen. I mean I did manage to get a SECOND legendary last night off of an emissary chest… so I have more luck than I should have at times.

In World of Warcraft we have “Item Levels” but Destiny has essentially the same concept called “Light Levels”. Getting higher light means you perform better, just like getting higher item levels in theory means you have the potential to perform better. How Bungie handled this problem of potential for drop versus actual level dropping is that they started creating items based on the players current stats. So if I get a weapon in the game to drop from a package or decoding from an engram… its light level is set based on my current converted light level. Right now I am sitting at 351 light in Destiny, and I have a handful of items that are over that level but that is my average. When I get a new item it means that item will be 351 light or better, generally within a range of 5 light, so up to 356 in this case. Legendary engrams and item drops currently seem to have a cap around 385 in game, so I will continue to be able to keep leap frogging my way through light levels by consistently receiving upgrades each time something new drops. World of Warcraft loot should work like this, meaning that each time I do a quest out in the world…. the item of the level rewarded should be based on what my current item level is. I’ve had friends who have received up to 870 items from World Quests, so it does not seem unreasonable that any loot I get from doing them… should be at a minimum whatever my current average item level is.

In order to really make this feel right, I think World of Warcraft would also have to move away from the current tiered system of item levels. Right now if we go back to the example of LFR, an item when it drops can be 835, 840, 845, 850, 855, 860, 865, or 870. Each time some combination of stats and “forged” suffix changes and tweaks up the stats and item level. It just feels like it would simply be cleaner for the purpose of giving players a constant but incremental flow of new gear… for each item to just have a variable level. So you could then get an item that was 844 or 858 depending upon what your current item level happened to be. The items we know are simply mathematical equations, with this or that stat scaling based on the item level. So in theory it should be just as easy to show you an item that was 862 as one that is 860, but the constant progression of slow bites of the apple as you keep improving your stats for me at least would feel better than running a bunch of content and seeing nothing but disenchant fodder as a result. This hit home especially hard as I have been trying to run mythic and heroics with friends to get them geared up… and so often when the personal loot boss finally submits… the end product is not an upgrade at all. As a result we have started trying to stack armor types, so that in theory at least SOMEONE in the party could benefit from the item. There are honestly a lot more lessons that I feel like Blizzard and the WoW team could learn from the way Destiny works, and I might elaborate on them in additional posts… but this loot post was a good starting place.

Over the Moon

October 4, 2016 by Belghast

The Great Escape

Over the last several months we have been trying desperately to make the extremely adorable Luna… a part of our family. Unfortunately things are not working amazingly well… because it feels like for every step forward we take a half dozen steps backwards. You ever seen one of those acts that juggles plates… well I have three plates precariously trying to hurdle themselves at the floor. If I can keep one cat happy… it seems like the others are in a total sense of disarray. In theory we probably should have said a month ago that this was not going to work out, and tried to take her back to the rescue shelter that we got her from. However she is such a remarkable cat… when none of the other cats are around. The positive is that it has been at least a week since a major fight, but we have been keeping Luna carefully sequestered from Kenzie and Allie. One of the ideas we had over the weekend was to install a baby gate. We of course knew that we would need a really tall one, so after a little searching we found one that was 36 inches tall and that once installed had a door in it that swung open to let us in and out of it. At first she hopped up on a little table and bounded over the gate… which required me to now move said gate out to the garage. After that however things seemed to be working pretty well.

The gate let the other cats stare in at her, and more importantly smell her in a setting that they were very familiar with… namely the bedroom where they already slept regularly. There was a little hissing back and forth but no charging. Luna is basically Belghast in Cat form… and whenever she is threatened she charges at danger much like my warrior character. Which is the huge problem we are having. Instead of a lot of hissing going on back and forth… and then cats going off to their corner to sulk for a bit like we have dealt with in previous interactions between foreign cats, we have charging. When I mean charging I mean running and jumping on the other cat and rolling around like mad around the house until momentum finally breaks them free charging. The positive there is that it has been awhile since this actually happened, but that is largely only because we are keeping them separated. Luna has been kept in my wife’s office which we set up to be a cat suite, with food, water and a litter box. The problem is… Luna really wants to roam freely because she likes the bedroom which is shared territory. So the theory was when I got home I would move her to the bedroom and let her chill under the bed. She is pretty good at meowing at me when she needs to go upstairs, at which time I carry her up on my shoulder and let her get food, water and more importantly use the bathroom.

This state of equilibrium seemed to be working. The other two cats were calming down, and starting to get back into their normal routines… although Kenzie has regressed a bit. All of this however was the case until last night when Luna apparently figured out how to dead jump over the gate. So the reality of this situation is that the gate does a great job of keeping the other two cats out of the bedroom, who are both fat and lazy… but that doesn’t really solve the problem at hand. The amount of stress that this whole situation has caused me is pretty intense, given that it feels like my home is in a constant state of chaos. I don’t handle chaos for extended periods of time very well. I am trying to do whatever I can to stabilize it, but it feels like when I get one plate spinning… two other plates try and topple. Much of our strategy has been that I hang with Kenzie and Allie and my wife hangs with Luna… which works great during the weekend when we are both off but does not work at all during the work week when our get home times are so drastically varied. Mostly at this point we feel extremely invested in the situation and it would break our hearts if we have to say goodbye, but I am rapidly running out of ideas. We have tried so many things, and so far none of them are really working. I keep hoping that time is the key and that things will calm down eventually when they realize that they have more in common than they have different. Personality wise the three of them should be getting along amazingly well. Luna is almost perfectly situated halfway between the personalities of Allie and Kenzie. If we can just get her past the initial attack instinct when she is afraid we might make progress.

Regularly Playing: September/October Edition

October 3, 2016 by Belghast

Once again I have let a bit of time pass since my last one of these posts. As a result I am going to do a combo post since I think I can for the most part predict what the next month will bring gaming wise. The general idea is that every so often I “true up” my sidebar, and bring it into alignment with what I am actually playing on a regular basis. Some of these might be an every day occurrence, but they represent a regular rotation of games you are likely to see me talking about. Since I am apparently unable to do these monthly, it might just be a sort every other month thing. Originally I admit this was designed as easy to conjure up content, for when I was struggling to think of anything to write… and somehow became something more in the process.

To Those Remaining

World of Warcraft

At this very moment this is sort of my gaming “main squeeze”. It feels really strange to once again be enthralled by WoW after it teetered on the brink of being removed from this list for so long. Legion was extremely good, as were the events leading up to it. The only slight problem I am having is that my army of alts is seeing far less love than they did in Warlords. Right now I have two characters to 110 the new level cap, and in truth I could probably never alt again and still have plenty of things to do. The catch there however is that I once again want access to tradeskills that my army of alts had. The first alt I pushed to 110 was done for the fact that I wanted access to mining… not necessarily because I wanted to play that character. In fact once I hit 110 I have tried really hard to shift that character to DPS mode after largely leveling as a tank, because I am not sure if I really like tanking as a Paladin. Paladin tanking just doesn’t feel anywhere near as good as Warrior tanking does right now, and as a result when I tank instances for my friends… I find myself missing Belghast. Instead I am trying to focus on being a Retribution paladin, which works well enough given that the bodyguard for Paladins is a tank. In any case… I could rattle on at length about this game but chances are you too are playing and have your own stories. Legion was the expansion where Blizzard learned so many lessons and I believe in some small way started transitioning the game to an interesting future.

Final Fantasy XIV

This game is barely holding in there and I wrote about my feelings at length the other day. There is just something about the game that isn’t clicking with me, however over the weekend I found out that the story line is leading to apparently a pretty interesting place. That means that over the course of this week I will be popping in and consuming locust-like the new content patch in the hopes of being able to talk about it on next weeks AggroChat. For this reason more than any others I am leaving it on the list, in the hopes that wherever they are going with the story will rekindle my fires of caring about the game. For the time being however it teeters on the brink of removal, knowing that even if I do… it is certain to make its way back eventually. Final Fantasy XIV is one of those games that I truly love… even if I don’t necessarily want to be playing it at the moment.

Rift

Rift is also teetering precariously on the precipice of being removed from the list. The only reason being because I just simply am not playing right now. I have too much other stuff that is keeping me engaged and at the moment my “rift time” involves logging in every day to collect rewards and then logging right back out. That said I know that Starfall Prophecy will be coming soon and with it a number of changes that sound like they are going to be excellent for the game. For the moment however I am collecting the pre-launch currency and seeing just how many I can end up getting before things go live.

To The Returning and New

Destiny: Rise of Iron

I knew this one would not stay gone long from the list, especially with the impending release of an expansion. I’ve talked about my thoughts on Rise of Iron, and while it seems strange to call it an expansion… it is definitely a return to amazing Destiny fun. The more time I spend in the plaguelands the more I love them, and it seems like right now it is fitting this role of wanting to play something… that doesn’t require much of me. I end up booting it up quite often when I first get home from work, or if I am trying to wind down before going to bed. It lets me get in… kill some baddies and walk away with some loot… some of it is actually usable. There are some interesting things going on, namely that engrams seem to upgrade in quality way more often. I opened two legendary engrams last night and got exotic items from them for example, and while blue engrams seem to be light locked at 340… they are upgrading into legendary items pretty often as well. I am definitely enjoying myself again and looking forward to being able to hit the light levels that will allow me to do group content once again.

Guild Wars 2

Now in the “games I never thought I would be adding to this list” category we have Guild Wars 2. I have a bit of a sordid past with this game, so much so that I don’t even think I have an existing sidebar graphic for it. However this month thanks to Tam latching onto it… it is seeing a bit of traction among the AggroChat crew. As a result I am begrudgingly playing it much the same way as Tam is begrudgingly playing World of Warcraft. We still have yet to run a dungeon, which is something we need to remedy and the next time the folks are doing content in this game… I really need to log in and join in. For the most however any time I would spend in this game is getting gobbled up by the Legion machine. I really need to give it more of a fair shake… in spite of not quite feeling like I want it to feel.

To Those Parting

Pokemon Go

This one is leaving not entirely of my own choice. For quite awhile now this has been my go to boredom mobile game and a huge motivation to get out into the world and walk. However recently they released a patch that has effectively locked me out of the game. For whatever reason my phone shows up as it has been rooted… even though it is not. This is a problem that is happening to a ton of people playing this game, and I have a feeling that it is caused by the fact that there is an update that fails to patch into my phone. I’ve gone so far as to wipe the phone and take it back to a factory rom and still run into the problems with one patch failing to load past 28%. As a result I am barred from participating in this game, and it is leaving the list. I keep hoping that at some point they will remove this patch and I can get back to catching pokemon, but I highly doubt that.

Diablo 3

This season was a bit of a struggle because at the same time it launched… the pre-launch event started up in Legion. Any time I would have been spending in Diablo 3, got gobbled up by World of Warcraft. Grace and I however made it through the season journey, or at least in my case far enough to unlock the cosmetic items. There is no way I am going to be spending enough time to unlock the stash tab this time around, and my support structure in this game is also devoting 100% of their time to WoW. So for the time being I am removing it from the list until next time a season starts up.

No Mans Sky

This one never really stood a chance. It launched at a time when I was super devoted to a bunch of other games… and quite honestly I just have not given it the time needed to really sink its teeth in. The bit I played I enjoyed, and I could see myself spending hours playing it. The big problem however is it is not a game I am playing with friends… and felt super lonely. There are times I need this sort of game, and I am sure when I get into one of those extended funk periods I will break it back out and roam the lonelyverse.

Eorzean Melancholy

September 29, 2016 by Belghast

I find myself going through a bit of an odd patch with Final Fantasy XIV, or more so I guess one that has been dragging on far longer than I expected. When A Realm Reborn launched I was reluctantly playing because my friends were playing. However something happened along the way and I fell in love with Eorzea. We drifted apart once our little circle of friends started exiting the game, only to come back a year or so later in full force. Ultimately Final Fantasy XIV was the game that we left, without really having a reason other than simply running out of things we were able to do. Mind you… not things we WANTED to do… things we could realistically do with the gear levels we had without copious amounts of grinding. When we ultimately came back there was an entire years worth of content waiting for us to explore and it quite literally took every moment up to the release of the expansion… and a bit after it to be able to see and explore all of it. I cannot remember another expansion for any game that I looked forward to with near the anticipation that I did Heavensward. While the story content was fun to level through, it was also an expansion of limited scope. It is strange that getting two dungeons per patch cycle instead of three makes a huge difference… but it really did and it made each new set of experts feel monotonous. You would ultimately have the dungeon you liked, and the dungeon that you disliked… and it always felt like you ended up getting queued into the dungeon you really did not care for. I am looking at you Neverreap.

Once again we faded away from the game, and while I stayed subscribed this time… I pretty much only poked my head in for new content patches and holiday events. Recently we made a push to “get the band back together” and start raiding again. The problem there being that while I am interested in raiding with my friends… I really want to put zero effort into actually getting the gear NEEDED to raid properly. When I lay out the options I have before me each night… I never end up choosing to spend my time in Final Fantasy XIV. This week another content patch was released, and the game has almost lapped me once again since I was existing in “barely eligible” territory before. There are several of the new things, like the story content that I can complete right now with my item level. However to be a proper and reasonable tank I really need to get in and devote some time to gearing. Unfortunately I really just don’t want to. It is extremely hard to stay viable in a game that you find yourself only willing to play once a a week. The malaise has been strong with this game for me, and I am not entirely sure why. I have always been one to complete each and every holiday and quest that springs up… and now I have this sad line of broken quests that I never actually finished. I completed one part of the multi-part burning rangers quest… but never actually finished that up so while I have the armor I have none of the poses. The Yokai event has been started but I have not actually put enough effort into anything to actually get pets or weapons. Similarly I realized last night that I apparently completely missed The Rising, because while I kept thinking I will do it someday… I ran out of somedays to do it in. Finally the Palace of the Dead arrived… and while I have done some with friends I have yet to actually finish any weapons.

I guess it disturbs me how uninteresting all of this seems to me right now, and I have no clue why. Its like waking up one morning and realizing that you and your best friend… really don’t have much in common. So often when I fade away from an MMO there are clear reasons why, this decision or that decision that caused me to get frustrated and quit. Final Fantasy XIV however is just simply dying from my own neglect and unwillingness to visit it. On some level that makes me really sad because I am not sure what it was about the Heavensward cycle that made it so much less sticky for me personally than the Realm Reborn. I think a big part of it is my attraction to loot, and the fact that it feels like there is nothing that I can really do with my time other than hopping on the expert dungeon train. What I mean is that FFXIV for all intents and purposes is a lootless game… or at the very least a game devoid of interesting drops. Sure there are chests at the end of dungeon encounters that reward items, but I am talking about is open world free range loot. I like the fact that in other MMOs there is always a chance, albeit slim that I might get something awesome to drop when I kill any random mob out in the world. This pushes me to run amok and slaughter everything I come across… in the hopes that this one might be the one that gives me something awesome. Final Fantasy unfortunately gives me stacks and stacks of crafting materials that I don’t care about, especially since I find the auction house system and selling said materials cumbersome as hell. So what ends up happening is every mob death feels equally meaningless to me, because there are no situations being set up like that one time I killed a Giant in Stranglethorn and go`dt the Skullflame Shield.

Final Fantasy XIV has hands down some of the best group content, but similarly it is equally boring. Sure there are the occasional item that has a nifty graphic that you can pick up from roulette, but for the most part you are running dungeons not to get interesting gear… but instead to increment a number of tokens until you can then spend those saved tokens on a piece of gear. Even then, for the most part gear is an incremental stat stick, that unless you are replacing a 180 with a 220… is not immediately noticeable that the game feels immediately better. Granted this is a problem with a lot of MMOs when you pick up items that don’t do something. I am running into this problem with World of Warcraft at the moment in that every single trinket I get just seems to give me a bunch of stats and doesn’t actually do much in the interesting column. The big problem however is that I just don’t feel more awesome when I put on better upgrades in Final Fantasy XIV… largely because how I judge that “feel” is by my effectiveness to take down random stuff out in the open world. Since there is nothing actually interesting to kill in the open world… it is defusing that feedback circle for me. Ultimately I get gear to feel more powerful taking down things that maybe I once struggled. It is the “Sand Giant” effect played out in a smaller scale over and over and over for me. In Everquest there were these mobs called Sand Giants that decimated players in what was ultimately a level 20ish zone called the Oasis of Marr. However there was a moment of sweet retribution when you could come back at 45-50ish and destroy them and get all of that pent up revenge. Gearing in an MMO has this same effect for me… as I level there are always big bads that I maybe struggled to take down… and then it feels great to eventually turn the tables on them. Apart from the early raid content… I don’t have that experience in FFXIV and I think it is why the open world combat feels so dull to me. Anyways… this post has gone on far longer than I expected it to, but it still is sad to me… that for many of these reasons… I am just not finding myself playing much Final Fantasy.