In their latest Weekly Update yesterday, Bungie teased that the release date for Destiny’s upcoming House of Wolves expansion will be announced at some point this month.
Until then though, the developer is making some changes to the game with update 1.1.2. Today, Bungie revealed that certain PvE aspects are being addressed in the update, including Raid bug fixes and Strike difficulty tweaks.
For Raids, Senior Designer Gavin Irby says they’ll make some targeted fixes with update 1.1.2 and “in particular, we wanted to improve the Atheon and Crota boss encounters. They’re challenging enough without the game getting in your way.”
As Activities Engineer Sean Chan adds, other Raid bug fixes include ones where “players weren’t doing damage to Minotaurs with the Relic shield. Turns out that the complicated hit test we use to detect a melee hit just missed the combatant because of the long-legged shape of its body. Some of these bugs were truly baffling, but we dug deep and went to great lengths to improve things.”
As for Strikes, User Research Lead John Hopson says the Cerberus Vae III Strike is arguably the longest and hardest Strike in the game, with one of the lowest completion rates and a 27 minute completion time on Normal. When it’s appeared as the Nightfall, it’s had the lowest completion rate of any Strike activity in Destiny.
After Hopson added that the Dust Palace Strike takes 23 minutes on Normal, Production Engineer Brenton Woodrow discussed the Strike changes they’re making:
Our goal was to ease the difficulty for the least-completed strikes. In order to do this, we focused on the final boss encounters, which were fairly lengthy on higher tiers. We addressed this by reducing the strength for several of the major combatants. We also felt that the bosses themselves could use some tweaking. We reduced Valus Ta’Aurc’s health by a third and reduced the Psion Flayers’ shields by about 15%. We locked these changes after several playtests with the designers and feel that they bring these encounters in line with the rest of the Strikes.
Another aspect of Destiny Bungie is well aware of are “toxic players,” who negatively impact the experience of hundreds or thousands of other players.
As Hopson explained, some people have been temporarily banned from matchmaking:
Sitting idle in Strikes and PvP has been on our radar for a while now, but it’s become clear that a small number of the worst idlers are responsible for damaging the experiences of thousands of other players. One player not contributing in an activity might seem like a small thing, but it can make a Weekly Heroic Strike unbeatable or make a Crucible match unwinnable. Those little bits of damage to the experiences other players adds up over time.
This week, we’ve restricted a small number of the most toxic players from matchmaking. The restrictions we’re putting on their accounts are temporary and apply only to the activities where they were chronically idle. If the affected players keep up this behavior after the restrictions lapse, we will apply stronger and (eventually) permanent restrictions on their accounts.
You don’t have to worry about accidentally being restricted, as the developers focus on truly dedicated idlers. As well, Bungie urges you to use the reporting system to let them know how your teammates are affecting your Destiny experience.
Have you had any bad experiences with other Destiny players? Are you going to visit Xur this weekend?
[Source: Bungie]
