I'm curious, what are your thoughts on the possibility of having servers split up to hold and perform dedicated content? MMOs have you choose a server on login, and some servers have XP bonuses or pvp focus, so would it be possible to break up Destiny with all of it's content ever released into separate servers that run parts of the game? For example you could load into a server that has vanilla D2 up to season of Arrivals all in one set of servers (assuming you have that content downloaded seperately), or you could choose to load into servers that have Beyond Light onwards. PvP would be it's own server and raids/dungeons could exist in a seperate bundle of servers. The only shared content that is on every server is the Tower so you can access the Vault and bounties. Ideally this would eliminate the Destiny Content Vault because all content could exist at once without becoming overwhelming and you'd only need to download the server you want to play on. And if it were possible to access the servers of D1 so you could switch between playing D1 and D2 more seamlessly, then Destiny could just be soft relaunched as a complete all-in-one edition. I've had this idea since they announced the DCV and vaulting content and I really think it's possible to have all of Destiny run if it was broken up into more manageable chunks that exist isolated enough to not break on itself, but can still be called on and accessed whenever. I feel like this would also make it easier to identify problems when the sandboxes and scripts are more split up...but maybe I'm horribly misunderstanding how a server can be utilized and this is not possible

[quote]I'm curious, what are your thoughts on the possibility of having servers split up to hold and perform dedicated content? MMOs have you choose a server on login, and some servers have XP bonuses or pvp focus, so would it be possible to break up Destiny with all of it's content ever released into separate servers that run parts of the game? For example you could load into a server that has vanilla D2 up to season of Arrivals all in one set of servers (assuming you have that content downloaded seperately), or you could choose to load into servers that have Beyond Light onwards. PvP would be it's own server and raids/dungeons could exist in a seperate bundle of servers. The only shared content that is on every server is the Tower so you can access the Vault and bounties. Ideally this would eliminate the Destiny Content Vault because all content could exist at once without becoming overwhelming and you'd only need to download the server you want to play on. And if it were possible to access the servers of D1 so you could switch between playing D1 and D2 more seamlessly, then Destiny could just be soft relaunched as a complete all-in-one edition. I've had this idea since they announced the DCV and vaulting content and I really think it's possible to have all of Destiny run if it was broken up into more manageable chunks that exist isolated enough to not break on itself, but can still be called on and accessed whenever. I feel like this would also make it easier to identify problems when the sandboxes and scripts are more split up...but maybe I'm horribly misunderstanding how a server can be utilized and this is not possible[/quote] Ok. So I've been giving this question some thought the last few days. My initial thought on the matter recognizes my ignorance of how the existing architecture is currently setup. Without that knowledge, all I'm doing is opining and sharing possibilities. So basically anything I say here is useless I think. Also, I'm not a game developer. The most I've ever done is map making for quake. My brother-in-law is the lead environmental artist for COD at Treyarch though. Shout out to him! But let's play this out. It sounds to me, based on your question, that you're less interested in fixing the current problems and more interested in bungie housing all their content ever and making it available. Now technically I think that could be done by using different node groups or host classes in separate environments or VPCs where the code is smart enough to handoff clients to disparate gaming environments. But that gets very expensive and likely not worth the costs of both infrastructure and management including operations and development. The beautiful thing about sunsetting your software is recouping the cost of maintaining old software and trying to keep it relevant. There's likely a really good reason d1 was EOLed in favor of d2. So from a player perspective your idea has merit but from a cost perspective it has all kinds of (likely) negative connotation in cost and maintenance with likely very little ROI (return on investment). Basically they'd be spending a ton of money to keep everything available and no (or not enough) money would be coming in to cover the costs of keeping the lights on. They'd have to take money from the parts of destiny which are flourishing to help the parts which are languishing. That's a bad business model. That would take away from innovation in the flourishing stuff and eventually destiny would die. So I see it as likely not a good idea. Ideal for us players but not so ideal in the end for anyone I think. Btw, a DCV is just a content store. I'm most familiar with AWS so that would be S3 in this scenario... or any other kind of block storage in my estimation. The nice thing about online block storage is that it's available en masse. But there's a cost and management to that as well. The larger that gets, the more unwieldy things get with management. I could see how this might get really crazy to manage depending on how the game(s) are developed, managed, etc. The problem is that humans are not great at properly planning out projects for extensibility to handle major paradigm shifts. As a developer, to make such a migration, one has take into account existing content (which is still being served) while creating and integrating the new paradigm content, and then deprecate the old stuff so a proper migration has taken successfully occurred. That's usually a long arduous process and most companies aren't great at executing that kind of exercise, so shortcuts are taken, or a decision is made to scrap the old and write brand new (d1 to d2 I surmise), or they just never implement the new and hobble in the old forever, or easy changes are made but the new plan is never fully implemented, etc, etc. The short story is it's really, really hard. So anyway, hopefully I've given some information to consider sufficient to answer this question. The short answer is I doubt it is worth it, but it could probably be done.

I appreciate you taking the time to look at my question. I studied some coding and game design but never learned how creating an online multiplayer works. I do care about current problems with the game, but when I think about longevity of a franchise, I think the elephant in the room that will cause bigger problems down the road is this model of scraping content, especially content paid for by consumers. When I talk to people about Destiny, they either can't get into it because they've missed too much already or they don't like the grind being so time limited when they have other games and jobs eating up that time. When I look at Destiny 1, how any new player can go and experience mostly everything that game ever had, that's what I'd consider good game design, the experience isn't lost on people 20 years later. This however is a huge problem with Destiny 2. You have such a continuity problem with telling this story to anyone who hasn't been playing the whole time, and eventually it will reach a point where the game will struggle bringing any new players in because many people don't actually agree with the "you had to be there" model. It sounds cool in theory, but cutting content after a set time doesn't motivate players or sell the product to new players. Even from a business standpoint, if I invested in hiring a team to design content, and then said after a year we will remove it from the game and that's it, that seems like such a wasted endeavor on resources just for creating an experience short lived an exclusive. Sure, you still get people buying it in the moment, but you are cutting off all the potential of making more money from future players who simply aren't playing in the moment to buy and play in this fabricated time limit. It seems like a colossal waste of resources making these seasons and expansions if they go away after a set time. If we knew that this was what Destiny would become, how many day 1 veterans would have never bothered creating their Guardian? I know I wouldn't. FOMO doesn't create a good look for your product Now, I'm aware of why they had to sunset content. The bloated file size, bugs and stability, old content not being played by veteran players. But often people I talk to on this matter are selfish and don't think about how this game will look in 10+ years from now. They aren't thinking about new lights, or even having their children grow up and having the same experiences they had with the game. I get so many responses like "too bad, should've been playing" or "I got to play it so it doesn't matter to me". In real life, that makes sense, but this is a game we are talking about. I can look at any game I've bought and have the security of knowing that whenever I play the game, be it on launch or 30 years later, I can experience the content without missing anything vital. Not talking about season passes, or skins, or sandbox changes or patches, though I don't think cosmetics should be so time exclusive either. I personally do not waste my time with any MMOs because they are the only games that cut major content after some time, and that is a design flaw that keeps me from wanting to play. I simply impose the question "how can we fix game design so when players buy content, they have it forever thus honoring their money and time, while still being able to keep adding new content indefinitely?". Longevity may not yield mass revenue as time goes on from launch, but look at games as simple as Super Mario Bros. How many people still buy that game today? Not at full price, but money is still money. And the experience is pristine. Why shouldn't modern games offer the same? I think imo the best vision for Destiny being a successful franchise, is having Veteran players helping New Light friends and family by taking them through the whole game, Veterans reliving fond memories while making new ones with the content they played long ago. Going back recently to D1 and seeing a full Tower of new players looking at my shiny raid armor they could get and taking my friend through the first missions of the Cosmodrome, was so invigorating. With the current state of D2, there's a wall when new players can only start with Shadowkeep, then jump to Beyond Light, then Witch Queen. So much plot gets lost on them and it stops becoming fun. When did the Traveler heal itself? Who is Osiris and when did Savathûn impersonate him? Where are the factions and why is Lakshmi dead? The list piles up. It's one thing to take players thru old content, but to have to tell them what they missed, or read this lore to catch up, it just doesn't intice players the same to want to stay motivated. Normally I wouldn't care about the seasonal content but those have become so integral to the overall story that only playing the expansions leaves the player lost on how we got from point A to B. I don't know what Bungie plans to do. They said they are no longer sunsetting expansions which is promising but leaves me worried about what they intend to do to bring back the Red War thru Forsaken. And even then the seasonal plots are too vital to just leave out and call it a day. If Bungie doesn't do something on the matter, I can guarantee that after the Final Shape, they are gonna lose most of the player count drastically. I want to believe they will find a way, but no transparency or communication is a buzz kill. That's my rant, at least you were able to confirm it is possible, even if unlikely they would. I can only hope for the future and voice my thoughts on the matter