[quote][b]3) Exotic Acquisition[/b][/quote]First and foremost, in order to create a satisfying experience, the dynamic between the competing factors of accessibillity and difficulty will need to be addressed. On one hand, if exotics are too accessible, then the experience will become watered down and the exotic tier will lose much of its impact and mystique. On the other hand, if exotics are too difficult or asinine to obtain, then players will become frustrated and will move on, missing out on what would otherwise be a game changing experience. I believe that the best way to strike a balance between accessibillity and difficulty is to design exotic acquisition in a way that is both intuitive and measurable. In other words, players should be able to easily understand the criteria for unlocking a certain exotic, and they need to have a clear metric with which they can measure their progress towards obtaining their goal. If all the challenges in Destiny match these prerequisites, then you should be able make those challenges very difficult without making them unapproachable, allowing players to transcend their limitations until they finally qualify for their prize. To elaborate with some examples, obtaining an exotic should be nothing like unlocking the Cross-Mappin' achievement from Halo Reach. This achievement required the player to kill a player at long range with the DMR in a matchmade Slayer game, and many players found that task to be very frustrating, and when it is evaluated through the lens of intuitiveness and measurabillity, it's clear to see why. Cross-Mappin' simply wasn't intuitive, "long range" was an incredibly ambiguous term which made it very difficult to evaluate which shots would successfully unlock the achievement and which ones would not. In addition, because the achievement offered no feedback on how close you were to scoring a long range kill, players ended up spending many matches in a constant state of uncertainty over when they would accomplish their goal. Avoiding this kind of nebulous experience with Destiny's exotics seems entirely prudent. In comparison, a stronger example to look at would be something akin to the Vidmaster Challenge: Endure achievement from Halo 3 ODST. Not only were there clear prerequisites for unlocking the achievement (In Firefight, on any mission, pass the 4th Set on 4-player Heroic LIVE co-op), it was also very clear when you failed to meet those prerequisites, there really wasn't any inherent ambiguity like there was with the Cross-Mappin' achievement. Not to mention, it was also very easy to measure your progress towards obtaining your goal because the game kept track of what set, round, and wave you were on. While there was some criticism about how long the challenge took to complete, I feel that in general the Endure achievement was very approachable and successful because of how intuitive and measurable it was. I should mention that one of the side effects of this entire design philosophy is that random drops become an unattractive method of distributing exotics to players because the randomness directly conflicts with this notion of measurabillity that we've discussed. Once a player has developed to a point where he can routinely complete the challenge that triggers the random drop, he has no way to measure how close he is to obtaining his reward because there is no way to anticipate a random event. At that point, the only thing that random drops accomplish is preventing the spread of exotics in a way that is very frustrating for the average player, it doesn't increase the difficulty of the task, it just makes the entire ordeal very arduous. Mind you, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any random drops at all in Destiny. On the contrary, random drops work out quite well for the sub-exotic items because of their quantity and variety, it's nice to be surprised every so often by something new and different. However, when the item in question is something that is highly coveted and sought after like an exotic, the frustration that comes from hiding that item behind randomness overpowers any novelty that is generated by its pleasant discovery. It seems better to create an appropriately challenging experience that will reward the player with an exotic on completion without fail than it is to force players to blindly grind the same challenge over and over long after they've proven themselves worthy. Players should be rewarded for skill and cunning, not arbitrary luck. This being said, if you are looking for ways to reduce the spread of exotics through the player base, there are numerous methods that you can use that will slow down the acquisition process while adding a lot of variety to the experience without being nearly as frustrating as random drops. For example, what if players had to purchase an exotic that they would have otherwise earned for free upon completing a challenge? This idea of an "uncharitable merchant" is used commonly in games like Runescape where quests like Dragon Slayer or Monkey Madness unlock the abillity to purchase items like Rune Plate or Dragon Scimitars, but neglect to give you a complimentary one for your service. A mechanic like this invites players to put their money where their mouth is; unless you plan on using that particular exotic regularly in the near future, you're better off saving your money for something more appealing. Another good way to slow the distribution of exotics is to create specific windows of time where players can attempt to earn an exotic before being shut out for a while. Imagine a boss that you can challenge only once a day, or a PvP tournament that happens weekly on Fridays, or a dungeon that is only open for exploration on the third weekend of every month. A time constraint puts pressure on players to perform well in the moment instead of giving them unlimited tries, though hopefully these events would be both predictable and cyclical so that even if you mess up on your first try, you can spend your downtime training up for when the event next becomes availible. Also, don't forget that at its core Destiny is very much a social game, I would be shocked if there were no exotics that were unlocked by completing a team oriented task. These sorts of challenges can be split into two sub-groups: challenges that are too much for an individual to handle, like the Vidmaster Challenge: Endure, or challenges that would honestly be easier to complete solo but you're going to force multiple people to complete it anyways because it tests team unity, like the Vidmaster Challenge: Annual. Of course, you'll need to make sure to design both types of challenges in a way so that everyone on the team has to pull their weight in order to be rewarded, but I feel overall these sorts of tasks would be a beneficial addition to Destiny's experience. Finally, much like the entire Vidmaster Challenge series itself, if you feel that any one challenge is not worthy enough to reward a particular exotic, you can always bundle several very different challenges together in a list that must be completed to unlock the exotic. I first suggested this idea with my [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=63605619]Exotic Ascension[/url] thread (which is incidentally another good method of slowing the spread of exotics) in the form of collecting pieces of an exotic blueprint, but the idea works just as well for collecting actual fragments of an exotic that must be reforged together to obtain the item. It could be particularly thematic, depending on what exotic you choose to implement it on. There are no doubt many more creative methods one could implement to lengthen out the exotic acquisition process, but again, with anything we implement, we need to make sure it is both intuitive to players, and measurable with regards to progress, qualities which I feel these four methods possess. Let's start bringing this thread to a close. [b]Destiny's Design: Exotic Exclusivity continues on the next post. [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64293434&path=1]Please click this Hyperlink to continue reading![/url][/b] [spoiler][b]Table of Contents 1) [url=http://www.bungie.net/7_Destiny39s-Design-Exotic-Exclusivity/en/Forum/Post?id=64293430]Introduction / Original Post[/url] 2) [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64293439&path=1]Analogues, Exclusivity, and the Exotic Experience[/url] 3) >> Exotic Acquisition << 4) [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64293434&path=1]Epilogue[/url][/b][/spoiler]