Bungie wields a dual-edged sword by sponsoring its community of crackhead gamers for the crack that is Destiny. Recently, one of the designers of the newest announce release 'The Taken King' has said that they have created player emotes that are so cool that people 'would throw money at the screen' to have them. The big controversy is that with what is essentially 'Destiny 2', the people at Bungie have got the nerve to make an all new Collector's Edition for 80 bucks which includes all the content from 'Destiny 1'.
Since I game with many Destiny primadonnas I heard grief about this last week. It reminded me of a couple things.
First of all, prior to this, I think the biggest controversy by the dainty whiners in the Bungie forums, (who go out of their way to describe how they're actually still in love with Bungie (like co-dependent lovers)) was the idea that Bungie had included 'Dark Below' maps in the original game. IE, Bungie is trying to ripoff their players by forcing them to pay for content they had already downloaded. Evidently some players had managed to obsessively glitch their way into areas of the game that had yet to be populated or completed. So the speculation was that 'huge' areas of content were already in place and that Bungie was cheesing development so they could just 'flip a switch' and charge more money for work that had already been completed.
I stopped going to Bungie's forums after this kind of crappy complaint became common. So it is actually possible that people still complain about that while I pay it no mind. As far as I knew, the release of the Dark Below showed that only one room was used in that next release. Obviously I didn't even pay attention to the glitchers. If you have the patience to watch 10 minutes of that video, then maybe you fall into my category of dainty. Bungie explained of course that as important as art direction is, the skyboxes and levels/rooms are the simplest pieces to add. The difficult work is in spawning the enemies and making everything a game instead of just an empty room you walk through.
The second thing I note on this matter is something I've understood for a while in my studies of Taleb. That is the matter of affording to make mistakes. When we hate on rich people, it's generally because they are powerful and stupid. How can one be powerful and stupid at the same time? Simple. When you are rich, you can afford to make mistakes. Related to this matter is whether or not money buys happiness. Well, if you make a lot of mistakes and you don't have money, you'll be more upset at your losses. Think of the expression "There's an hour that I'll never get back."
So consequently, the people who are likely to complain most bitterly over the features of Destiny 2, or anything for that matter, are those whose bang for buck satisfaction level requirement is very high. Which is an interestingly different take on the term 'high maintenance' which we generally ascribe to more affluent people.
I've spent well over 1000 hours in Destiny since September and I'm perfectly satisfied that the 80 bucks or whatever I paid for it is money well spent. In fact, I think about that almost all the time when I have free time. Downloading a two hour movie for 10 bucks is a complete waste of money to me, whereas I would easily spend $100 a year to play Destiny.
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I should add that as a gamer, my style is that of a completionist, and I also appreciate that which I appreciate. In other words, I am very happy taking my time to complete every aspect of a game. I'm never in a hurry to be first. Many of the Destiny gripers want more, more more, and then blast through the content to maximize their player levels, then complain that there is nothing new to do. Yes it's a grind to maximize as soon as possible and then boring to do everything else once you've reached the highest level. That's something of a jaded personality trait, if you ask me. Like the man who does everything possible to get the Wall Street job and half million dollar compensation package before the age of 30 and then calls the rest of the nation 'flyover country'.
One rather hopes that high stakes players remain at the high stakes tables, or that they can actually be commensurately happy playing penny ante games with the common man.
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