Hello Gaffers,
I would like more than anything to fix the shader system in Destiny 2. I posted a design doc to the Bungie forum that fixes what I believe to be the problematic bit of the current shader system that the old shader is deleted when applying a new one while keeping Bungie's goals of incentivizing shader-hunting intact. It has received a lot of good traction so far. If you're interested in giving a little more permanency to your shader grinding, please have a look through the doc and upvote it if you agree. I just want Bungie to at least read it, yet I fear that it will get buried under less thought-out posts in the coming days that are just full of red mist, bile, and upvoted out of spite.
A Proposed Solution to Consumable Shaders in Destiny 2
Its a solid suggestion. I think the biggest issue would be how it would effect Bungie's bottom line. There is obviously a financial equilibrium to find between a loop that asks players to purchase disposable shaders and incentivizes that vs having shaders be much more permanent and potentially encouraging players to make less shader purchases.
I suppose the current arguement would be that if you have a piece of gear that you love why not aquire a 2nd and shade that if you permenantly want two different shades of the same item.
I won't pretend to know how this could be implimented at a technical level. However it seems like the best solution would be a modified version of what exists for exotic items where you can essentially print versions of past exotics that you have aquired and then dissasembled.
Applying the same criteria to your one time use shader idea is a good compromise where once a shader had been applied to a specific piece of legendary or exotic gear it could be selected as the defult colour for when a clone piece was manufactured.
In this way everybody wins. Players get to permenantly tie shaders to specific gear and Bungie gets to charge a fee (albiet diminished) for everytime the player wants to change a shader. This keeps the economy structurally the same while incentivizing players to purchase more shaders due to their more permenant nature.
I'm not sure about how the memory bloat issue would be effected but i would imagine that tying it to an existing system would help substantially. Ideally you would probably just add an extra step in the ledgendary/exotic reprint process.
IE currently Step 1 = Go to Console Step 2 = select gear Step 3 = Print Item
Under any proposed changes it would be
Step 1 Go to console. 2. Select Gear. 3. Select applied shader 4. Print item.
By placing the shader change process into the item reprint console it should hypothetically reduce memory bloat as the game would only need to remember what items you had purchaced/used when at a specific ingame console and not something that the game needs to remember at all times.
