Forget chasing loot for once
I’ve been playing a lot ofDestinylately — late to the party, I know — and going deep into the rabbit hole almost requires players to frequentr/DestinyTheGameor some other similar community site. Without it, I’d never know about a lot of exotic gear, or the Hung Jury with an insane roll this week, or where to find Calcified Fragments, or that the spark runner can backflip into the rift for extra points. I would be blissfully ignorant without it.
One thing really strikes me about the community there. Sure, the denizens are helpful to their fellow Guardians, but holy cow do they complain about loot drops a lot. Every day there’s a new post about how loot drops for X activity need to be “fixed.” For those people, I have this advice: stop, take a deep breath, and ask yourself, “Why am I playing this game?”
There are a lot of possible answers to that question, but the most common among the hardcore players is because they are not at the maximum light level, or don’t have every piece of exotic gear. Basically, they’re in it for the stuff.
This isn’t some mindblowing revelation. Bungie has employedspecific knowledge of human psychologyin order to hook people into the loop. It’s a classic Skinner box through and through, and Bungie wants players to keep hitting that lever for the chance at getting a food pellet.
This is even more apparent now that Bungie has shifted to its limited-time events. I reada sentimentabout the Sparrow Racing League from late last year that paraphrases to “I play SRL because the loot drops are high and frequent.” More recently, Iron Banner Rift has seen players manipulating the Mercy Rule tointentionally throw matchesand get to the end-of-game rewards more quickly.
The problem with this mindset is that it treats the game like work. As players, we should be saying “I want to engage with this content because it is entertaining,” not “I want to get to the end of this content as quickly as possible because my number might go up.” I played a decent bit of SRL when it was around because the racing was a nice change of pace to the usual shooting. I played the most recent Iron Banner because Rift is my strongest game type and I knew I’d enjoy the process. I run King’s Fall because it’s a great feeling coordinating six Guardians into a well-oiled machine. Heck, I will still run the old raids, Vault of Glass and Crota’s End, despite that they drop useless rewards. I playDestinyfor the intrinsic value. I playDestinybecause it is entertaining.
When you treat a game like it’s a job, then the saltiness comes out.Farming materials for the exotic sword questis a good example. If you view it as an item on a checklist and attempt to power through it as quickly as possible, you’re in for a bad time. Sure, you can mainline material routes for four hours straight to get it, but it’ll be a boring four hours. Instead, I would go on Patrol, grab a few materials, participate in public events, kill some Taken champions, and head back to orbit when I felt like doing something else. It probably took me twice as long over multiple days to finish farming, but that was eight hours of enjoying myself instead of four hours of hating the world. The economics here are clear: if you play only for the reward at the end, you rob yourself of the enjoyment throughout.
I implore players: divorce yourself from the reptilian part of your brain that is so susceptible toDestiny‘s operant conditioning. If you ever find yourself playing because you feel you have to rather than because you want to, ask yourself, “Am I enjoying this?” If you find yourself more interested in the reward at the end than the content in which you use the reward, ask yourself, “Is this worth it?” If your answers to those questions are no, there’s no shame in finding something else to do, inside the world ofDestinyor outside of it. Never forget the reason we play in the first place: to have fun.
