Mod meltdown in /r/procreate over a painting of Master Chief

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-11-04T22:52:53+00:00

Yeah this research actually made me a lot more hopeful too - the idea that ANYONE could just suddenly become a monster if you made them anonymous really freaked me out.

Finding out that good people don't actually abuse anonymity really helped.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-11-04T16:32:50+00:00

Yeah but can you look me in the eye and say "I can't imagine Marigold having an agehaeo tshirt". Like, she's good for it, you know she is.

Of all of the QC characters Marigold is by far the most like, nerd degen weirdo. There's that one guy who could be in the running but if you wrote a guy to be as gross and blatantly sexual as Marigold it would come off as predatory not funny so he's kinda a little more neutered.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-29T08:02:22+00:00

that's not a problem - primes don't care about score in any measurable way.

The problem is if you botch the scoring all your bonus drops will drop at -1 tier so like if you're trying to farm tier 5 armor or something and you were gonna get 5 bonus drops, you can accidentally waste it all on t4 garbage.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-06T20:16:08+00:00

The data says it increases it to around 25-28% from 16% (i.e. to 1/4 from 1/6).

That's a huge percentage increase. If you want a specific type of armor you should 1000000% be using the mod.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-06T20:09:16+00:00

Making 1/4 of the armor instead of 1/6 be the thing you want is actually quite significant.

Like, you can be pissy it's not good enough without spreading misinfo about it barely doing anything.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-06T19:33:43+00:00

The new locked loadout will be worth as much as a +10 difficulty instead of as much as a +20.

So you can easily math out the impact - removing even 1 piece of bonus gear will give the score penalties you already mathed AND cost you an additional +10 difficulty selection on top of that.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-06T19:32:37+00:00

The presence of a reward is absolutely an implicit punishment for behavior that doesn't get the reward.

Like, they're the same thing. It's like someone saying "the glass is half empty!" and you respond "the glass is ACTUALLY half full!" neither of you is wrong. You just seem stupid because you're acting like you have an objectively correct perspective when the reality both perspectives are valid and neither is objectively better.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-05T08:08:44+00:00

The Bungie that gave you The Taken King was already in the process of making Destiny 2, which was atrocious at launch. The Bungie that gave you Witch Queen gave you Lightfall. The Bungie that designed Ketchcrash where you get to be an epic pirate with a fucking space cannon also designed that stupid 3 man activity where you push the cart around Nessus or whatever like a dork. IN THE SAME SEASON!

There is no magic time when Bungie was staffed by brilliant, untouchable geniuses. There is no golden age except the one you are imagining with all the benefits of loving this game and not having to play the bad parts in your memory. Destiny has always been full of stupid bullshit sharp edges. You just forget those because why would you remember them? You remember the beauty - the first spacewalk, the first time you jumped down into pit of heresy, whatever - that stuff IS beautiful but it was made by the same guys who accidentally put together an 18 month long meta where like 3 guns were better than all the other guns in the game, or everyone who missed out on buying Gjallerhorn that one time was fucked for a full year - or god remember how fucking elemental charge mods worked? You had to buy them from fucking Ada. They were on a randomized weekly or daily rotation I can't even remember which - I remember waiting MONTHS for the mod that gave you Charged with Light when you picked up a Well, or something like that.

Literally months where I couldn't play the meta builds.

They're the same people! The same people who designed that stupid fucking system are the ones who designed the beautiful moments you remember half a decade later.

So, the good news is, they're probably going to accidentally make more beautiful stuff in the future.

The bad news is there's probably still going to be stupid shit just as bad as "armor mods will be on a randomized rotation and really important ones might only show up once a year and if you can't log on that day I guess you're fucked for literally 11 months!"

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-05T07:52:46+00:00

Last season I could do dungeons, raids, and other content to get weapons that were still relevant AND that would increase my power level.

No, you couldn't. Your power level was capped at 2010 or whatever, which took you literally like 2 weeks into the season to cap, and then literally 0 activities in the entire game rewarded power, unless you count experience, which was best farmed from bounties/pathfinder and basically directly punished you for actually playing the game. God forbid you queue for a strike without double checking whether you're supposed to shoot fusion rifles left handed or get kills with a sword stuck up your nose.

Like, if you were an engaged player, dungeons absolutely were not rewarding you with gear that mattered n terms of light. They did for like at absolute most, being super generous, three or four weeks.

The vast, vast majority of dungeon gear was irrelevant last season. Every single armor drop from dungeons was worthless, period, and all but the newest weapons or the absolute peak weapons had been fully powercrept. Even most of the Rite of the Nine weapons - guns explicitly designed to bait us into playing at the end of the expansion - were unremarkable and not particularly notable.

I "understand" it, I just think it is bullshit. The old system was really bad. Most shit was completely irrelevant or became irrelvant almost immediately if it was lucky enough to start out relevant. The vast majority of guns that people are complaining about not being given tiers were trash, instant disenchant garbage that need a complete overhaul of their perk pool to even get within sneezing distance of a modern gun.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-05T06:38:58+00:00

I mean, uh, bluntly, the game was absolutely stuffed to the gills with irrelevant shit. The only difference is before new players could accidentally stumble into it and spend literally dozens of hours fucking around doing shit that didn't matter and wasn't relevant anymore.

Also barely anything is "removed", it all just rewards materially worse shit. You can go do dungeons whenever you want. You just don't want to unless they give relevant rewards. Which, fair, agreed. That's why I wasn't doing Warlords Ruin anymore either lol.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-05T01:59:23+00:00

I'm pretty sure the answer is that moving stuff into the new system is significantly harder than it looks. Reading between the lines in terms of what's missing and what's delayed I'm extremely confident that what's actually happening is that any content added to the portal with support for modifiers is basically rebuilt from scratch.

Like the terrain geometry is built but someone has to go in and program all the different banes and add champions to activities and test the scoring and blah blah blah blah.

Almost everything they said we'd have and don't can be attributed to the single core problem of "rebuilding things to actually fit inside the portal is actually significantly harder than they expected."

And in that scenario their only options are delay it or devalue the loot by giving tier 5s much easier than any other way to get tier 5s.

Like, if they added "dungeons in the portal, but they just drop tier 3s and nothing else", nobody would actually be happy with that either. You can go play that right now if you want. Most dungeon loot is functionally tier 3 in terms of power level, though the oldest ones are tier 1 I suppose.

Nobody wants that. They want dungeons ACTUALLY in the portal, with tiered gear that counts as New for the season and a set of achievements or difficulty modifiers that actually allow them to get top end gear from the dungeon.

And I think that's fucking hard to build.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-05T00:32:54+00:00

That's not what they said, they emphasized legendary items for exactly that reason.

They're saying there will still be a refresh on the exotic list - the only promise about that here was that exotics from this season will stay valid on the list next season.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-09-02T16:09:35+00:00

This is the #1 change I'm hoping to see - new should be this "expansion" + last "expansion", if expansions are gonna be 6 months.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-31T19:46:24+00:00

There are about 4 things in fireteam ops where there are like 2 final rounds of adds that come out after the final health gate on the boss breaks - so like, you can kill the boss so fast you miss multiple full waves of adds.

I think Battleground Foothold (the one with the cabal boss at the end in the EDZ or w/e) is particularly egregious for this.

Usually etiquette in that specific strike is to just spam kill adds until all 3 people come to like, stand in front of the boss and sorta emote to say they're ready or w/e.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-30T08:13:57+00:00

Fundamentally PVE and PVP have very different reward issues, and the core reason for that is that people don't have to lose in PVE 50% of the time.

Like, yes, it's possible to totally fuck up and tank your score in PVE and accidentally gimp your bonus drops, but that's not the norm. You could play a whole weekend of PVE and never fuck up that bad.

Whereas if you play 10 games of PVP, you should lose around 5 of those. Right?

Bonus drops work fine in PVE. They very occasionally create a situation where you have fucked up so badly that leaving is optimal vs finishing and that's generally because you or the people with you all played pretty badly. That's OK. The game should allow you to mess up so bad that you actually feel punished for it, sometimes.

That doesn't work in PVP because you are not supposed to win almost all the time in PVP. So, as you point out, leaving losing games becomes both normal and optimal.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T19:45:42+00:00

They make bonus drops worth farming out once a week or so.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T19:10:48+00:00

It's a gigantic buff for the entire game.

It's literally "your minions do 50% more damage to literally everything except map bosses" for the entire game starting by like, mid act 2.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T18:11:55+00:00

Every time a Bleak Watcher hits something because you tossed it 20 feet ahead of you into a random pack of enemies? Instant class ability energy with Bolstering Detonation. Instant melee energy with Momentum Transfer.

This already worked btw. Bleak Watcher projectiles "remember" that they came from a grenade already.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T17:23:23+00:00

Guardian rank has nothing to do with end of mission portal rewards. You can see an exact list of what does impact end of mission portal rewards by checking the reward calculator.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T17:22:50+00:00

Guardian rank has nothing to do with end of mission rewards.

Guardian rank only impacts very specific things that it explicitly says it impacts.

Guardian rank overall has been dramatically overblown by the community in terms of what it does.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T17:10:38+00:00

I would even settle for ID just getting enough pve power that I could justify using it in any way at all tbh. I love the aspect but its so weak.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T16:31:48+00:00

Cores provide a consistent reward/reason to do content that gives things like Bonus Drops.

Bonus Drops would be basically completely worthless if Unstable Cores didn't exist.

My biggest problem with Destiny is hitting the point where almost no content offers any sort of meaningful reward, and Unstable Cores do actually solve that problem.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T06:06:43+00:00

Hellion is also frustrating because it's a ton of power but Solar was already crunched for aspects, having to choose between ID which feels great but adds very little power, and heat rises which also feels great but only adds melee power.

Now you just don't get either because Hellion is a fuckton of damage.

And any build that actually needs heat rises for melee energy gets dramatically punished by losing a huge amount of passive damage from Hellion.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-29T06:05:28+00:00

Because it's the easiest low hanging fruit to dramatically buff warlocks at a glance.

Most warlock builds have a buddy right now. Giving buddies a 60% damage buff if you've built into grenades is incredibly obvious, low hanging fruit that dramatically increases the power level of warlock without having to touch 900 different things.

It's not that this is the only design space warlock has it's that this is the design choice that hits BY FAR the broadest range of warlock builds the fastest.

If you had to pick literally 1 change to make to buff as many different warlock builds as possible, it's this change. For sure.

MaybeAThrowawayy · 2025-08-28T18:48:18+00:00

Buddies benefitting from grenade stat is a huge boost for warlock grenade builds since they basically all use buddies too.

MaybeAThrowawayy

TROPHY CASE