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Destiny 2: Lightfall

Uncle Mike

By Uncle Mike
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Gorf King

Gorf King

Posted
Posted
16 hours ago, tnman said:

What Ghost is that? Looks swish.

 

It's the Interchange shell.

 

Guided games is a great idea, but unless they radically improve the system I don't think it has much of a future, especially when it comes to raids. I'd been curious about how this would work in practice for a while, so last Tuesday I applied as a seeker for a GG raid. I haven't anything to report about the quality of the actual raid experience because after almost 40 minutes of queueing - during which time you have to stay in orbit and can do literally nothing else at all but stare at the screen to accept or reject your time-limited guide offer when it pops up - I got a bit bored. So I fired up an LFG search and was hooked up with a 5 group within a couple of minutes. At 45 or so minutes, just as I was about to join my new group, the GG offer flashed on screen. I've heard it takes longer still for many people, and that's simply too long to be stuck doing nothing in orbit waiting for a QT event to pop up.

 

From those who've actually completed a GG I've heard largely, but not exclusively, negative reports. A friend joined a GG raid last night (about 45 mins queue time as with mine) and got as far as the first proper encounter when a disconnect occurred to one of the guides. They had to abandon and restart the guided game, as far as I can tell, and I'm not sure how successful a restart would have been because they voted to abandon the activity anyway. I've read an account by an experienced sherpa who tried to lead several guided raids but never completed one because a disconnect on each occasion meant it had to be abandoned - you can't simply rejoin a guided game. This in itself makes the endeavour perilous in an activity as long as a raid where you're carrying someone who will usually have to be talked through and coached in a complex activity that they've never completed before. Especially one that in no way has infamous death loop bugs at the end of two of its encounters (though these should be fixed next week, hopefully).

 

Sherpas have also reported difficulties with comms. Not only due to people not being on mic, but also because of people not speaking the language of the raid group. Fatally, there's no language selection option when looking for a group, so there's absolutely no guarantee your guides will speak the same language as you. I can understand Bungie's dilemma here - putting a language filter in the setup screen might make the wait for some people far longer than the eternity it seems to last now - but in an activity where good comms are essential, not being able to understand what's being said must be a real pisser.

 

Nightfalls seem a less perilous proposition, mainly due to the lack of complexity/teaching required, their very much shorter length, and the smaller size of the group. A clan mate and I offered a guided game through this week's Nightfall, and to make sure we'd give good game, we tried two-manning it a few times to ensure we would offer a decent product even if we had problems with the seeker's ability or comms. Our wait as guides was about a minute at most (because there are obviously far too few guides and far too many seekers), the guy who dropped in spoke English, and we basically just did the strike as if we were two-manning it. This had the unanticipated effect, which I was faintly embarrassed by as we proceeded, that we hardly 'guided' the seeker at all, and just did our own thing, but at least we completed the activity and the seeker seemed happy enough at the end. So Nightfalls seem a far more realistic, achievable proposition for the system as it stands.

 

My clan mate, however, the next day thought he'd give the system a try the other way around as a seeker on an alt, and reported that after his 25-minute wait the game turned out not as well, with a failure to complete. The two offering the game weren't good enough to finish the Nightfall, basically; and this is not the first report of guides being people who evidently haven't mastered the activity in question. 

 

That's been one of my biggest fears about the system since day one: there's no requirement for guides to have even completed the activity themselves before setting their group up as guides. I can't say to what degree the problem arises, but I'm fairly sure some must use GG as a tool to get enough people to attack an activity that they've never been able to get a full group for themselves. If that happens, it's bound to end in tears, and where the seeker is more experienced/competent than the group offering guidance, you know there's something wrong.

 

There's also a problem for people who are experienced, in that there's not much of an incentive to offer an activity, especially one as complex and time-consuming as a raid, over and over again. The first time you successfully complete a GG, the guide gets an emblem. The second time, nothing. And so on. And successfully taking someone through a raid gets nothing more than you'd get from offering a Nightfall - it's the same emblem, and then nothing thereafter. Sure, there are ticks you get on your clan's Oathkeeper score after you've completed enough GGs, but these serve only to advertise to future seekers that you're competent guides. So what's the incentive for clan groups to not just run the raids with their clan mates, instead taking up the far more perilous and time-consuming option of offering spaces every week to people who don't know how to play the activity in question? It's hard enough to get your own raid team together, after all. I think if Bungie don't incentivise the system better, that 45m-1hr wait to get into a guided raid is only going to get longer, as the curious clans try, and eventually abandon, the notion of being global sherpas due to the issues and lack of incentives noted above.

 

Guided games has a lot of promise, but the implementation is badly flawed at present. At the moment I can't really recommend it and would suggest that LFG sites offer a far quicker solution for solo players looking to tackle endgame activities, and on LFG you can at least check you'll be able to do comms when you get into a game, and can read the LFG group's description of what level they're at and what they expect from someone joining them. GG just leaves too many factors down to luck to be reliable and, despite the Oathkeeper's score system, provides less assurance of quality, and less incentive to provide quality, than LFG does. I hope Bungie take some of the feedback on board and beef the system up radically to address some of the issues above, as it's a great idea. It's just a well undercooked implementation.

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Qazimod

Qazimod

Posted
Posted

Ace post Gorf. It took me forever but eventually in D1 my character was at a point where my brother and I could scrape through some Nightfalls as a two-man fireteam. I'm not sure if I'm there just yet in D2 (that Zero Hour mod on the current one kills our "forget the timer, just finish the thing" mentality) but I've never tried GG so don't know what the experience is like...

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HarryBizzle

HarryBizzle

Posted
Posted

Realistically, what sort of level do you need to be to do the nightfall? I'm currently 218.

 

Hearing all that is quite disappointing but I had a look at the guided game wait time for the Raid yesterday and it was 1 minute for guides and 45 for seekers, as you mentioned, gorf. I imagine that will just get worse over time. 

 

I consoled myself with the fact that I should hopefully be able to find a "guided game" of sorts between here and my clan by the time I'm ready to attempt it. 

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Gorf King

Gorf King

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Posted

Yeah, just use your clan and this site's online folder. They're always going to be better options. Then LFG. Then Guided Games comes up way in last position, I'm afraid. That's mainly for raids, though - Nightfalls are nowhere near as complex, lengthy or demanding, and your wait will be far shorter there and your chances of successful completion an awful lot higher.

 

The issue is more for people who don't have a clan, or a website community like this, really. 

 

I dunno about how high you really need to be for NF. Anywhere over 240 in theory. Under that you might struggle, but again it depends who you're with. Some insane fuckers solo the Nightfall*, so hook up with one of them and you're gold if you just want to get the activity done even if you don't do anything. (I don't know any of them, btw.)


* How to solo the Nightfall if youse are dead leet:

Spoiler



 

 

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Shimmyhill

Shimmyhill

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Isn’t guided games still in beta? I know when I got some tokens a while back it suggested it was still a test so could explain the lower numbers.

 

As I always thought in Destiny, matchmaking the Raids or Nightfalls is a terrible idea and while guided gamers is a much better approach it goes to show how hard the solution is if people offered as guides aren’t able to complete nightfalls etc.

 

We used LFG a few times in Destiny and it was always good and on occasion added people to PSN and played with them loads, as long as you had a gally of course!

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Broker

Broker

Posted
Posted
20 hours ago, Starbreaker said:

Have we got a PS4 clan? Just started playing this having not touched the original and I'm a bit lost. 

 

The PS4 clan is full but there's a few alts around.

 

14 hours ago, HarryBizzle said:

 

Thanks. I really enjoy public events but I find playing with randoms a bit frustrating. They never seem to stick around for the next one and I'm forever having to fast travel to reload into an instance that hopefully has others in it. 

 

If you start people often arrive and join. You can solo most of them anyway.

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tnman

tnman

Posted
Posted
49 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

That's been one of my biggest fears about the system since day one: there's no requirement for guides to have even completed the activity themselves before setting their group up as guides. I can't say to what degree the problem arises, but I'm fairly sure some must use GG as a tool to get enough people to attack an activity that they've never been able to get a full group for themselves.

 

Certainly I've done a couple of GG Nightfalls where the guides admitted to using it as matchmaking under another name.

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Gorf King

Gorf King

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Posted

Yeah, I'm not sure what the solution is. But one quite simple measure that might improve things would be to require that each member of the guide team has at least one completion of the activity in question under their belts before they're allowed to be in a guide team. You don't want to be too restrictive or stuffy about things, but you've got to be fair to seekers when the whole thing is called 'guided games' rather than 'matchmaking with randoms'. There should be some degree of competence, if not necessarily expertise, in the guiding team. I don't think the ticks are enough really, because you only start to get those after a few GGs have been completed and scores tallied. One or two bad experiences before then are likely to put seekers off using the system in future, so you should have some sort of baseline to start off with.

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HarryBizzle

HarryBizzle

Posted
Posted

Oh God, just did my first Strike. I am so not ready for the Nightfall. :lol:

 

That should have been set to Benny Hill. Still, got there in the end. I don't think I'm going to have time to do the two initial strikes and then whatever I need to do to get my powerful engram before the reset but I also did the first few patrols and managed to unlock Flashpoints. Should have done that way earlier but I had no idea it was a thing. Should be able to get that engram before the reset.

 

 


Hawthorne still won't give me any clan engrams. Is that because my clan earned them before I actually hit 20?

 

 

 

@Swallow That app is great. Much better than the official one. Thanks.

 

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Shimmyhill

Shimmyhill

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, HarryBizzle said:

Oh God, just did my first Strike. I am so not ready for the Nightfall. :lol:

 

That should have been set to Benny Hill. Still, got there in the end. I don't think I'm going to have time to do the two initial strikes and then whatever I need to do to get my powerful engram before the reset but I also did the first few patrols and managed to unlock Flashpoints. Should have done that way earlier but I had no idea it was a thing. Should be able to get that engram before the reset.

 

 


Hawthorne still won't give me any clan engrams. Is that because my clan earned them before I actually hit 20?

 

 

 

@Swallow That app is great. Much better than the official one. Thanks.

 

 

If you’re about daytime tomorrow I can run some strikes with you

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Gorf King

Gorf King

Posted
Posted
23 minutes ago, HarryBizzle said:

Hawthorne still won't give me any clan engrams. Is that because my clan earned them before I actually hit 20?

 

Maybe. Either that or it may be that they get earned and distributed before someone gets their clan banner. Not sure, as we haven't got any feedback on that, but at least you'll have three guaranteed ones next week.

 

After putting my foot in Trials' door for the first time last night, I can fairly confidently predict we'll rarely if ever get the Trials clan engram. And totally guarantee it'll never come from a team with me in it, because that was my first and last visit. I never did well in my few Trials in year one - though we did get to 7 wins a few times - but this I really don't like at all. As well as being sweaty as hell, which you'd expect, to me it's just dull. I think that's true of PvP as a whole in D2 compared to D1 - it's fine if you like tactical, team-shooting gun games I suppose. And many people do. But it just lacks the flamboyance and fun, the scope for individual moments of madness, than D1 did. I miss the sixes and the overpowered abilities and supers and guns, the possibility of the maverick, crazy play. It all just feels so worthy and one-note.

 

And obviously I'm crap at it, which doesn't help. On the plus side, we did get matched against some scuffers early on and so got our first win in match two, but foolishly persisted into match three and a horrible beatdown. I might have opted for leaving after the second match, because in the words of the meta commentator in Yakuza Zero, I must confess I only did it for the trophy. And, as in that game, I was slightly embarrassed to do so. It ain't for me.

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HarryBizzle

HarryBizzle

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, Gorf King said:

Not sure, as we haven't got any feedback on that, but at least you'll have three guaranteed ones next week.

 

3? My clan hasn't done Trials of the Nine or the Raid this week.

 

 

@Shimmyhill I should be around tomorrow and can hopefully get an hour or so to myself for some Destiny 2. Would be good to play with you.

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Shimmyhill

Shimmyhill

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, HarryBizzle said:

 

3? My clan hasn't done Trials of the Nine or the Raid this week.

 

 

@Shimmyhill I should be around tomorrow and can hopefully get an hour or so to myself for some Destiny 2. Would be good to play with you.

 

Cool, daytime until about 1500 is good for me, send me an invite or msg on PSN and we can shoot some enemy scum!

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Mr Ben

Mr Ben

Posted
Posted

Is that the full raid armour set and 2 weapons? Have you not had any raid duplicates? 3 raid helmets in one week makes me wish I'd snapped that broom in front of the rudolph nosed robot in D1 now.

 

I have that handcannon, and its the best primary handcannon I've seen so far (not sure about the raid one), but its essentially a Nameless Midnight scout, but as a handcannon. I prefer the scout purely for the range.

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mikeyl

mikeyl

Posted
Posted

Oh, I got too many raid auto rifles, which is a pretty good rifle when I’m not pointing it at the ceiling. Most of the armour set was picked up over 2 runs via chests (!).

 

Nameless midnight is a blast but it is pretty slow handling I think, and takes a few more shots to down bad guys over the handcanon.

 

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