One person got up to ask why they didn't have a Gjallarhorn despite playing for over 700 hours. Hopson said that unfortunately, SOMEone had to end up being that unlucky.
That's a very weird answer to make, honestly.
Instead of acknowledging an obvious flaw in their design, they prefer playing the "suck it up, life's a bitch" line, like they can't change anything about their system...
Another person got up to ask if Bungie could stop Xur from selling more No Land Beyond—the gun that is infamous for being awful. Hopson said it was out of his control.
It seems like it's nobody's responsibility what shows up at Xur's.
I especially like the fact that the person asks if
Bungie could make him stop selling NLB, and he answers that
he personally has no control over it.
Surely someone does, though...
Hopson mentioned that Bungie didn't expect the random drops to be as big of a deal as they ended up being. What they were expecting was for players to simply buy better gear, and to have random drops act as the cherry on top, so to speak. Instead, players have latched onto the RNG, and it's affecting their perception of the game.
I would love to buy better gear, sadly I can't buy neither raid gear nor the exotics I am missing, because somehow the mysterious guy responsible for Xur got them out of the table
because. What he's describing totally works up until level 31, and I'm totally fine with that, and I actually think it is pretty well designed, even if it could be more refined / better presented to the players.
But what people are bitching about with the RNG comes at endgame, when vendors don't offer anything interesting to you anymore, and you are relegated to playing the slots machine to get better gear.
I'm ok with them using this design in the idea that it will get people keep on playing more than if they could buy anything they wanted from a raid or exotic vendor, but don't play the line of "RNG is just cherry on top" when it clearly is not once you reach endgame, please. And if you really want to make RNG less relevant, start introducing ways for us to grind and buy those endgame gears, even if it means having to grind for several weeks to buy a specific exotic of our choice.
RNG really is their scapegoat for deflecting a lot of the critics made at the game.
"Xur is random, it's not our fault he's selling Dragon's Breath yet again!".
"You still don't have the Horn? Well, someone has to be unlucky, you know...".
"Oh yeah, what a bastard this Rahool is, heh, won't give an exotic either!".
etc.
The hardest missions for players end up being ones like the "Chamber of the Night" level—essentially, levels where players are locked in a room where they have to defeat waves, right before having to go up against a boss. These levels don't have save points between waves, and they exist as "skill checks" for players—you can't hang back and snipe or anything like that. "You're either good enough to survive or not," Hopson said. Apparently, some of these levels ended up being so difficult, that they lost a "few percentage of players" during these points—and sometimes, these players wouldn't ever try the levels again.
Well, to be fair, it's also that this design is not really fun to play with. What they did with TDB's missions is that they once again looked at how players played the game, decided it was not the correct way, and
forced their hand to make them follow the "how you are supposed to be having fun" mantra. People use small caveats or stay at the entrance to take pot shots / snipe away? Well, let's just make circular rooms with lots of adds in them, and block the entry with a closing door / random sigil appearing on the ground! I didn't find those missions really that much difficult, but it's true that I only played them a few times before becoming incredibly bored by this particular design. Before TDB I used to religiously complete the daily every day, on all my characters. Now I just don't even look at it anymore, because having those boring missions show up that often gave me the habit of not considering this feature anymore...
I don't know why they keep on having those Q&A sessions when they keep on feeding us the same non-answers. And even though I'm now quite used to it, I'll always find it sad seeing how they really don't seem to understand their own game...
