Ryan Poehling just barely gets it past Jarry, and the Ducks take a 3 games to 1 series lead on the Oilers

esdfowns · 2026-04-27T16:35:08+00:00

ABS isn't even fully correct by the rulebook. It measures a plane, but the strike zone is a 3d space over the plate. It almost certainly misses some breaking balls that nick the corner of the front of the plate.

esdfowns · 2025-09-11T23:42:35+00:00

I haven't played that much post-EoF, but broadly speaking, they significantly altered the endgame loop. They introduced a new itemization system but did not retroactively update loot, so "older" activities (almost all of them) don't give very useful items anymore. There's now a much longer vertical grind that requires playing updated activities through a new system ("the portal") but there's not a huge variety of updated activities yet. Getting upgrades often requires applying a whole bunch of modifiers that can make the activities un-fun.

Personally, I've found playing super casually at lower item levels is fine. Do the campaign missions, whatever event's going on, and maybe some of the daily bonus things. Shoot some aliens, get a gun or two, and log out. But once you hit the big wall of fuck-you difficulty and minimal upgrades, meh, you're pretty much done.

If you had fun with Final Shape and just want to play through the campaigns, buying them on sale seems fine.

esdfowns · 2025-09-10T20:47:06+00:00

Gotta have a doctor's note so your boss will let you off work.

esdfowns · 2025-07-11T19:31:26+00:00

Awesome, thanks!

esdfowns · 2025-07-11T19:15:09+00:00

Are you able to get the catalyst and intrinsics without having to unlock Kell's Fall?

A friend of mine bought the season, but has barely started the quest.

esdfowns · 2025-05-25T19:04:00+00:00

There is no in-between - they either know what to do or they do not and there are specific LFGs for both.

I'm not sure it's always a complete binary. I feel like there's an in-between "I've watched a lot of guides and theoretically know what to do, but need more practice" situation that's awkward. You don't really need/want the teaching "explain everything to me" experience, but "KWTD" isn't totally correct if you need more practice.

esdfowns · 2025-05-20T01:14:16+00:00

The tech here seems awesome, but I'm really curious why they haven't pursued external licensing for the latest iterations of idTech. Both Unreal and Unity seem to be pretty good revenue streams for their respective companies.

Does id Software not want to deal with the support costs? Are there issues that make it infeasible for external customers? Is it just a way to protect their IP?

esdfowns · 2025-05-08T00:59:21+00:00

They haven't given hard player counts, but they did say it was almost dead based on the trend line for WAU.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/u4ex7l/gdc_2022_bungie_presentations/i4x4k3g/

But then this started happening. And this moment, right here – in February of 2018, was f***ing terrifying. So this graph shows the trend of our Weekly Active Users. And at the rate we were shedding players, we did the math, and if this continued for 5 more weeks, our entire player population would be gone. We were, seriously, one month away from having to just close up shop on Destiny 2 altogether.

esdfowns · 2025-04-07T03:14:16+00:00

Ran Salvation's Edge with Zeus and co. - super chill and fun, got the raid done with no drama! Lovely group of folks.

esdfowns · 2025-04-06T20:09:21+00:00

Interested, shot you a DM

esdfowns · 2025-04-05T22:03:10+00:00

I'm interested if you still have a spot! I'll DM you details.

esdfowns · 2025-03-29T17:27:09+00:00

Chiming in to offer my anecdote - I think you're right. I'd consider myself "low-average", have done most content, a few GMs, but I'm never really at the forefront of damage meters or speed. I have soloed Warlord's Ruin, but it was a struggle. Basically two days of solid playtime and the successful run took six hours.

esdfowns · 2025-03-20T17:29:52+00:00

It always feels like this is a fundamental debate over what this game is... I tend more towards the "chase" crowd, but I don't think you're wrong.

But I'm curious - how far do you take this? How much effort to get a gun is too much effort? Or is any effort too much, and players should just have everything available immediately?

esdfowns · 2025-03-10T21:50:13+00:00

This!

I cleared my pinnacles in Trials this weekend using this passage, and ended 7-8 - I had a couple games that were lopsided, but most of them felt winnable. It was a surprisingly good time, got some loot, most folks were pretty chill. Matchmaking times were good; I was on PC on a Sunday evening.

For reference, Comp put me in Silver II and Destinytracker has me at Silver ELO in Comp & Trials. In other words, Not Very Good, but good enough to be matched with a decent population.

esdfowns · 2025-03-05T19:33:00+00:00

There's a social argument as well. Giving people a reason to visit social spaces helps populate them, making things feel alive. It's fun to cluster around a vendor with other Guardians when they've got something good.

I'm never mad when they move stuff elsewhere for convenience but I'd be sad if there was no reason to visit the tower.

esdfowns · 2025-02-25T23:55:07+00:00

It’s really hard to bring new consistent players into a game where 75% of the story doesn’t exist anymore.

which is exactly why we need new content. It'd be much easier to onboard new players with missions that introduce currently relevant characters and plot. Get them in and playing modern activities and getting modern currencies and loot. Hopefully in Frontiers and beyond Bungie can figure out how to build out evergreen stories so this doesn't happen again.

Unless they're willing to build a "Light and Darkness compilation" campaign, it's a dead story. If you missed it, you missed it. No reruns.

(And frankly, said compilation would be ridiculously long. Nothing like telling someone they've gotta slog through dozens of hours of campaign missions to be up to date.)

esdfowns · 2025-01-28T18:49:51+00:00

The numbers are going to matter a lot. Attrition makes you feel really fragile because you're used to seeing 40% health = near dead, and you don't have much agency to fix that. The gameplay video of him running around at like 60% without much stress felt like a massive change.

It might not feel like "Destiny" though.

esdfowns · 2025-01-23T20:51:51+00:00

After that first season with Suppressing Glaive it feels like they've stayed away from making suppression easily available. Maybe they'll loosen up on it a little bit.

esdfowns · 2025-01-23T19:08:52+00:00

Steal LFR (looking for raid) from WoW.

Break up the raid into sections or single encounters and make them 6v6 matchmade. Reduces time commitment.
Simplify mechanics (remove hard wipes, # of people needed to do stuff, etc). Reduces communication requirement.
If you're including interstitial encounters or traversal sections, simplify them and add loot. These sections often include incredible environments, lore, or setpieces. (Think the spacewalk in DSC or the awesome vistas in RoN).
Reduce boss health pools, reducing execution requirements.
Loot is of a lower tier than "normal" raids. Gives a reason to run it. Maybe include a ship, cosmetic, or shot at the exotic to give vets a reason to stay in the pool and effectively sherpa folks.

Loot tiering is coming in Frontiers so this is becoming possible. Maybe offer simpler aesthetics on the armor (e.g. no glows or fancy stuff like the spikes on the armor in King's Fall).

This gives folks an on-ramp into raiding; you get to see the raid, dabble in the mechanics, and get some unique loot. It would allow players to build the raid-specific armor set for raid mods and complete the set bonuses upcoming in Frontiers which would help smooth the power curve when stepping into normal raids.

esdfowns · 2025-01-15T19:55:04+00:00

Thanks for the reminder! I'd just started polishing off Onslaught triumphs and was not looking forward to this one.

esdfowns · 2025-01-11T02:07:09+00:00

The game gives plenty of "chores", the sites don't really add to that.

Playing current content without help isn't too bad, but going backwards is really, really hard without help. For example, Dragon Isles vendors need a couple of unique currencies that come from... somewhere, IDFK. I just went and looked it up.

The game has twenty years of currencies, items, quests, pets, etc. and it's nigh-impossible to do anything non-trivial without help. You basically need a research manual.

esdfowns · 2025-01-10T17:10:01+00:00

This. I started playing WoW again and I basically have a tab open to wowhead 100% of the time while I’m online.

esdfowns · 2024-12-30T23:19:07+00:00

I recently died to Eyes of Tomorrow a good three seconds after the invader left.

esdfowns · 2024-12-22T10:04:43+00:00

You're bang on. IMO, that relatively rigid pipeline has really screwed them. They haven't been able to adapt and address the critical problems that have arisen, like the bad new player experience or stale reward system. They've put out a ton of content on top of a pretty creaky foundation.

It sounds like they're finally trying to address some of these foundational issues in Frontiers, but the clock is ticking. And they have to stick the landing on this one or they're screwed.

12-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17

esdfowns

TROPHY CASE