I'm curious after this week's Bombcast - has Jeff ever talked specifics on why he doesn't like the PvP in Destiny? I know he's generally a fan of CoD and other older multiplayer shooters, but as someone who really never played a ton of PvP shooters before Destiny, and doesn't have a good reference point, what are the biggest differences?

He has generally spoken very highly of the shooting feel and gameplay of Destiny itself (and somewhat understandably poo-poo'ed most other things), so I am curious what it is that turns him or other people off, or what CoD does so much better for them as a PvP experience?

Destiny PvP has a problem where once a new gun is found to be overpowered everyone starts using it and it gets real frustrating to play. Then instead of boosting other guns Bungie just depowers it and the community moves on to another gun

This. Also it just feels messy, you could hardly tell it's from the same team that made freaking Halo.

I don't think Jeff keeps up with Destiny's meta, so I doubt Thorn's prevalence prior to 2.0 was really the reason he didn't enjoy the multiplayer.

Actually, if I'm remembering correctly, he expressed grievances with the multiplayer during the beta (video's on the site).

My bet is the TTK just isn't fast enough for him (especially when you take into account how insanely low COD's TTK is). At the same time, Destiny's mobility options are limited compared to games Jeff's enjoyed recently (Titanfall and Advanced Warfare being obvious examples). Destiny might just hit this weird middle ground for him that's not necessarily slow, but not fast enough.

They've pretty openly said part of the issue is that there are too many ways players can one-shot each other with complete impunity. You're often killed without having even the first chance to defend yourself. And that happens too many times each match.

These all seem like valid comments. I'm mainly a PvE player as it is, but being mostly ignorant of other multiplayers, good to hear the general gripes people have are things I've felt from my own experiences.

While this is true I don't think Jeff played the Destiny PvP long enough to suffer through the Suros Regime reign, which was then followed by the Thorn reign. I think Jeff denounced the PvP a month or so after launch. So something else turned him away.

I've also found that Destiny has more "trades" than other games.

Also, there are times where I will put down an amount of damage that is supposed to be a kill and nothing happens.

I have the exotic that gives me two melee charges, and one of my talents gives me a chance to instantly reset the cooldown on melee. As a result, I can sometimes get around 4 or 5 melee hits off with arc damage. Seeing a guy take no damage from this, calmly turn around and shotgun me in the face is just a bit upsetting. I get that lag is playing a role here, but there won't be any damage applied from my hits ever most of the time when this occurs.

This, pretty much. Wish they introduced a system like in many MMOs where the most favorable PvP weapons are rewards for doing PvP. Also if you dont play a lot of matches on a regular basis the matchmaking is kind of awful because there aren't enough new/inexperienced people to fill matches.

There are issues with the mode for sure, but it is very possible to hold your own without having high level weapons. I actually like the back and forth instant kills at times. Those instances only really happen a few times per match when everyone gets their supers. It also keeps everyone moving, giving everything a more frantic feel and I've never once experienced camping outside of Trials of Osiris.

I really like Destiny PvP, though, and I still play it often, so I'm probably biased.

I've had fun with crucible multiplayer, but there are way too many ways to get insta-killed between getting shotgunned in the face and someone popping their super. It will always be kinda messy because of its pseudo MMO structure and the variances in loot.

The map rotation was horrid in the early days too, First Light and Bastion 90% of the time

Overall though, it's just a game where everyone dies really fast to a bunch of different things. I don't see how they fix it without either destroying abilities or changing how guns work between PvP and PvE

If that truly is one of Jeff's issues, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense considering he loves Call of Duty of so much. Call of Duty is essentially a game where the first person to shoot wins the engagement 90% of the time. Destiny may have many 1 hit kill scenarios, but there are still many semi protracted gunfights when primary weapons are involved. There's much more potential to outplay your opponent even if they shot first in Destiny than there is Call of Duty.

Ok, it's been a while since I've played Destiny, but at release I played lots of the PVP. After about a month I dropped it like a bad habit. Certain weapons had a clear advantage over others, it had little to do with skill of the player. Often this simply lead to frustration as a team with more PVP attuned weapons would have a massive advantage. Single shots would take out a cluster of team members while PVP weapons would require more shots to take down a enemy player. Also the class based skills always felt a bit cheap. If Destiny would take a few pages from COD I'd come back. Character classes with locked weapon types or the standard weapon customization through play. Heck they have 10 years supposedly to repair it, so I'll keep it in mind.

I really disliked the Destiny PvP for a very long time, as Exile can attest to, but I feel like when you really give it time and let it soak in so to speak it really starts to grow on you. It's a whole lot more mental that any other FPS that I've ever played and you have to be a lot more situationally aware. Knowing maps, game modes, spawn locations, super interaction with your own, etc, and using all of that information to determine your own loadout at any given time all play huge roles in your success or complete failure. All of that just takes a lot of time to soak in, which understandably rubs a lot of people the wrong way pretty quickly. Another big help is playing with other solid players that have the same basic understandings of Destiny PvP. For me personally, that's a big shoutout to guys like Exile and the rest of his Dot RU guys who have helped me up my Crucible game over the past 3-4 months dramatically.

The biggest issue with Destiny PvP is the lack of Dedicated servers. I don't have blazing internet speeds by any stretch but when I start rubber banding due to a shitty host I want to go punch baby seals. I can get over OP Thorn kills (pre-nerf) or shotgun BS but lagging in one of Bungies "premier" modes is not acceptable in my book.

I'd wager this is their exact criticism.

Call of Duty is founded entirely on that fast time-to-kill philosophy. That's how it is all the time for everyone. In Destiny, it's feast or famine. Casual players find themselves at the mercy of the super meter recharge rate and their ability to get and keep shotgun ammunition. You can either inflict one-hit kills on others, or you are locked an awkward, almost-Halo-paced dance.

Yeah, I think the pace of Destiny PvP is just too slow for him. Jeff is a Quake/CoD guy. As far as I can tell he never cared much for halo multiplayer which is close to destiny in many ways.

I personally feel like the whole loot/gun variety adds a lot to Destiny's regular FPS multiplayer and I couldn't see myself going back to halo or CoD after playing this. Sure, there are sometimes heavy balance issues but they've been addressing those and will keep addressing them on a more regular basis.

@zirilius: Crucible lag is absolutely the worse part of Destiny PvP currently, and always has been. So I completely understand that complaint. I think the weird thing about Destiny is that since it has such a longer time to kill than say COD, you notice how awful lag is with peer to peer connections. My biggest fear with Destiny PvP is that this is the largest concern of the community, and because of Activision, they will never address it.

If there's anything that stands as "unique" about Destiny PvP, it's this. Destiny is a power-weapon game. If you're good you can do well using normal weapons, but with heavy/special weapons, super powers, grenades and melee powers all being very attainable there will always be a bunch of situations where you just lose because your opponent had a better weapon.

When it works it works well and can be a whole lot of fun. It's just a shame the peer to peer connection can make Crucible downright unplayable at times.

I like your point about time to kill or engagement as I think that hits the nail on the head with regards to noticing the connection types. This is incredibly noticeable on the bigger maps too as the time it takes to spawn and get back in the fight. I hate to quit in the middle of matches because I'm not that guy when playing MP matches but its been downright unbearable sometimes.

It doesn't really surprise me that Activision doesn't want to put the money down for dedicated servers but I truly think that if they did they'd pull a ton of players away from other games.

doesnt help that every 5 seconds it feels like someone launches their special and gets a bunch of cheap kills or picks up special ammo. There are too many easy one shot kills in a match and in a hunter or warlock's case they can single handedly wipe out most or all of a team with one super. Also, the map design isn't all that good.

Coming up against a bladedancer or gunslinger is the single most aggravating thing I have ever experienced in a video game.

I really enjoyed Destinys PvP in the start but 8min matches with 5min+ loading between them just killed it in the long run.

Destiny uses a massive amount of bandwith using both upload and download for MP which is very unusal probably why its so laggy most don't have the bandwith or speed, Destiny using large amounts of data would make dedicated servers very expensive so nothing more than a pipe dream.

The next problem in Destiny is the amount of easy one hit kills your primary weapon should be your main tool but after special, heavy and supers you hardly ever need to use it.

Weapon balance is almost impossible without a massive overhaul of Destiny's damage model a high impact shotgun with the perk shot package can kill a opponent from a mile away the only way Bungie has to balance it is to either nerf the perk which will effect all guns and their pve performace or nerf all high impact shotguns, this is why the community lurches from one op gun to another nerfing one set of perks and guns will always lead to a buff for another set of guns and perks.

I really enjoyed the PVP a lot more than anything else in the base game but I found the supers to be infuriating at times. On one hand they're a cool differentiator to classic PVP but on the other hand Indra kills always feel awful when you're on the receiving end. They, at least at the time, weren't even balanced particularly well against each other. The warlocks big purple ball of fuck you seemed the cheapest but honestly they were all kinda cheap. Blade dancer being maybe the most balanced in that you could actually get killed if you used it at the wrong time.

@thepanzini:Bungie already has a ton of dedicated servers that handshake off the hosting so to speak, but for them to build and maintain full on dedicated servers that didn't pass off hosting for activities to players it would more than likely cost Activision an extra $2-3 million annually on Destiny. That sounds like a lot but when you think about how much money Destiny brings in it's not all that much. I think Activision counts on Destiny making around $500-750 million a year on average. Especially when it would make the largest impact on quality of life to Destiny. But it is Activision, so as much as I wish it would happen, I do agree with you that it's a bit of a pipedream. One of the real major problems is host choice on their end and having to host players with incredibly low ping rates to yourself, which is what causes the lag. This could be prevented rather easily by only matching players of like connections with each other all within one region but because of Destiny's party system it gets a bit tricky. It wouldn't work so well when two party member have varied pings and locations from each other. A major fix for this, and one even Bungie has mentioned is booting and banning players with bad connections. I think banning is a bit much but wouldn't mind a dunce cap sort of concept by throwing all poorly connected players into a cesspool of lag together so they aren't in games with people with proper connections, but once again, Destiny's party system kind of breaks this philosophy to an extent. Which is why the only true fix would be dedicated servers that control who's headshot actually registered first. Anyway, enough DS talk.

The last weapon balance and the new weapons seem to have really helped for the new shotguns because they reduced the base range of every available shotgun and made it rare to have shotpackage again. Where we are currently seeing a problem is with players using Year 1 perfect roll shotguns still, which still wreck like nobody's business. I think part of the major problem is most of the new map designs have small tight corners and force shotgun/sidearm play which kind of stinks. The biggest game mode offender here is Rumble, I cannot stand that mode now. Nobody uses anything but a shotgun, which is getting old real fast, so other than the Daily or Bounties, I don't touch it.

@humanity: It's funny how people's perspective of Year 1 supers change dependent on which class they played as. Hunters hated Voidwalkers because they could kill them from a distance in one go, but you usually only hit 1 and maybe 2 people if you were lucky. Voidwalkers didn't really come into their own as a viable threat unti HoW and Exotics like The Ram and Nothing Manacles (as someone who primarily runs a Warlock, there is still nothing more I hate than those stupid Nothing Manacles). If you wanted to get real fancy you'd run Sunsinger with that one hit melee and firebolts for days. Everyone hated Gunslingers and Bladedancers because lets be honest, both supers were way overpowered all of Year 1 in PvP. If you didn't get at least 3 kills as a Hunter per super, you were doing it wrong, and a 4+ kill spree wasn't unheard of. If spec'd right a Bladedancer has like 20 seconds to rampantly kill anyone he touches, has quicker movement speed than anyone on the map, a 50% damage reduction, and health regen on kill. The only thing more powerful than it now is the Titan Sunbreaker and that's only because it can trade the quick movement speed for kills at range with those hammers. Speaking of Titans, those poor Titans had the hard life in Year 1. You basically just had a panic slam for other supers or a bubble to create orbs for teammates. You even had and still have those tiny T-Rex arms. If you looked up the average K/D on Destiny Tracker by subclass of all guardians in Year 1 Bladedancers averaged around 1.19, Gunslingers 1.11, Voidwalkers .98, Sunsingers .94, Striker .86, and Defender .78. After The Taken King if you look up those numbers they look drastically different now. Gunslingers still hold there own at 1.05, and Bladedancers at 1. But all other classes are well under 1 (they reset stats in year 2, it only tracks the original 6 and stopped showing how far under 1 they now are) because of how powerful all of the year 2 subclasses are. I think the coming class balances that will hit before Trials will be interesting to say the least.

@hestilllives19: The grass is always greener on the other side I suppose. I mained a hunter and bladedancer was either phenomenal or terrible. Plenty of times I would turn on bladedancer and then a titan would simply use his slam and kill me. Likewise with warlocks who could super me from a distance. This is all before the first DLC rolled out. Of course bladedancer if used in a very specific situation would be amazing, i.e. tight corridors or small areas where people didn't see you coming and couldn't shoot you to death before you dashed to them. Out of all the supers it was probably the most fun to use and the most satisfying to rack up huge chains with. That said I always thought there wasn't enough balance between them - plenty of times I managed to actually knife a titan that was in mid slam animation while in bladedancer and he would still not die.

But like I said, all supers feel cheap when you're on the receiving end because it is basically instant death. Despite all that I still thought that the crucible was a lot of fun and parts of it felt really refreshing when compared to stuff like Call of Duty or Halo.

@humanity: I mainly ran Sunsinger on my Warlock in both PvE and PvP in Year 1 but since I had all 3 I seriously considered running my Hunter in PvP more often because Bladedance kills were so much easier, especially with Blink. Yeah, Destiny's abilities can feel incredibly cheap at times. Strikers running Unstoppable that somehow are invincible before they actually use super because of bad lag pings and stuff like that. When it works well it's fantanstic. But at it's worse it can be a bit of a jumbled mess. But that jumbled mess has grown on me for sure. It's interesting after playing the COD beta that they are following directly in Destiny's footsteps with classes and abilities for multiplayer.

I Greatly enjoy the PVP multiplayer, and every time Jeff has just blatantly shut down the PVP in Destiny has always seemed abrupt and without explanation.

I'm not saying its' perfect. The complaints about whenever an overpowered gun shows up and everyone starts using it is somewhat true, but you can definitely get by in the PVP without the "Best" guns. I just find it to be an enjoyable part of the game, and with each piece of DLC they have increased the drop rate of good gear from crucible matches so its not just entertaining, but also rewarding. I really like most of the multiplayer levels, they are pretty much all well designed (with a couple outliers).

I dunno man, I love the shit out of the Crucible. But Jeff also doesn't like Majora's Mask or Red Dead Redemption, so we can't all be perfect.

It's crazy to me to think this is from the people who brought me oddball, crazy King and juggernaut. Then they have this game with all these crazy mechanics and they aren't taking advantage of them at all. I mean where is the mode where one player holds a relic, and everyone tries to kill them?

@vikingdeath1 said:

I wanted to touch on this. I agree completely with your comment on being able to hang in multiplayer in Destiny without the "best" guns. For a long time, Suros Regime was the hot ticket, then Thorn and The Last Word. With just casual MP play, I managed to improve my k/d ratio immensely. I, for the most part, used the Zero Point LOTP, a legendary scout rifle that had explosive ammo and really good range, as my primary. My special weapon would usually be set as the Vestian Dynasty, the legendary sidearm that anyone in the game could get by doing just a small part of the House of Wolves content. My heavy was always Truth, which is an exotic rocket launcher.

My best match (I went on a 15 kill streak in IB) was playing a bladedancer with those exact weapons equipped and depending on the range, I could either get longer to medium range people with precision hits with my scout rifle or up close with the sidearm. I used the sticky grenades and only used my super when I saw a grouping that looked unprepared. Really, it's all about knowing your power set and weapons. Yes, Thorn is OP if you just keep running at guys who have it, but if you play smart and try to not just rush people, you can take them out pretty easily.

Powers can be overpowered (heh) but I think there is a good balance if you try to be aware of your surroundings. You can hear anyone pop their super if you're close, and most people doing a super will be in a specific animation. If you are aware of what is happening, you can run away or attempt to return fire. I managed to get a bladedancer with my nightstalker arrow last night, so you can trade supers, stick them with grenades or even a well placed shotgun can take someone out.

In fact, my only problems with multiplayer are the maps. Some maps are super fun to play (for me) and some are a chore. I also hate that when the DLC hit, it was all new maps. I'd like it to be more mixed, but they probably are trying to get people familiar with the new maps. I like the more open maps with some closed spaces (Twilight Gap, Fire Base Delphi, etc) but some of the new ones seem like all enclosed spaces, which is annoying. :) Still, if you learn the maps, you can get better at anticipating what people are going to do. I'm no expert, but that's just what I've experienced in my time with the game since the beta.