That being said, Joey is a super nice guy. Also, He keeps the sheet music to "Hangin' Tough" on his piano at all times. Gotta appreciate a good sense of humor there. Plus his wife made me a quesadilla. So good people all around.

(Not insinuating you as a fibber. Totally joking, hopefully its not 'too soon')

Come on. Joey looks like if Fred Savage was a girl.

I think you've nailed the whole thing right on the head here. From Bungie's process and communication to the community reactions. Very well said.

Not quite a perfect match like I thought. One has Cascade and Close and/or Personal, the other has Performance Bonus and Rangefinder. The other two perks are the same, though.

Good enough IMO. None of the non-matching perks are anything that would affect ADS speed. For the purposes of this test, I think they can be considered identical.

You ADS 30% faster with rangefinder in your example.

Cascade & Close and/or Personal

Performance Bonus & Rangefinder

-Disciple

All up in here with your "he said / they said" squabble gobble like a bunch of teenage girls reading Tiger Beat "Donnie's the cutest! No Joey is!" - That's you guys.

You know what ol' Jack Burton says in a time like this?

------------

All you jabronies just woke up the Village Idiot, ManKitten's back and I aim to misbehave.

So, I think it is reasonable to assume that the designers' intention was to have ADS take a tiny bit longer with the rangefinder perk activated. Meaning the change that actually shipped in the game is a mistake.

Yes, of course it is. It seems really obvious to me that this is exactly what was intended, and I'm super weirded out that everyone's debating it. It's like that dress picture all over again.

That being said, I think we really need to wait until the test results from two otherwise-identical shotguns are posted so we can be sure that a mistake even occurred.

The community in general is quick to overreact to this kind of thing, but that's what happens when the trust between community and developer isn't as strong as it maybe could be. Bungie's communication has been hit and miss, as has their balancing efforts with the game itself. I think that is the bigger issue. It takes them months to release balance tweaks (not a criticism, just a fact), so Destiny players get a bit steamed when an update finally does come out, only to introduce new problems, sometimes through changes that weren't even intentional.

Moving forward, they very much need to try to start doing smaller fixes more frequently. It's much easier to get things right when you make small changes to get to where you need to go progressively, than to make large ones and overshoot, only to overshoot on the way back staring the pendulum going.

Hopefully their tool set for Des2ny will make this a possibility.

In my brain, that makes the most sense... but I know virtually nothing about Bungie's internal development process, or why updates are spaced out as they are.

I can't help but think of Respawn's approach to balance updates: say as little as possible.

Bungie gives us all this information, some of which ends up being contradictory and causes all this confusion and speculation, none of which is based on the actual gameplay experience of playing Destiny post-patch. Respawn would have said "we tweaked shotguns" and released the patch the next day. Nobody would be freaking out about miscommunications, and everyone would just be playing the game and getting a feel for it with a relatively open mind.

The community in general is quick to overreact to this kind of thing, but that's what happens when the trust between community and developer isn't as strong as it maybe could be. Bungie's communication has been hit and miss, as has their balancing efforts with the game itself. I think that is the bigger issue. It takes them months to release balance tweaks (not a criticism, just a fact), so Destiny players get a bit steamed when an update finally does come out, only to introduce new problems, sometimes through changes that weren't even intentional.

Moving forward, they very much need to try to start doing smaller fixes more frequently. It's much easier to get things right when you make small changes to get to where you need to go progressively, than to make large ones and overshoot, only to overshoot on the way back staring the pendulum going.

Hopefully their tool set for Des2ny will make this a possibility.

During the livestream, Bungie said 2 contradictory things about Rangefinder's new ADS stat. They said:

"We have decreased ADS time... by 25%".

They then went on to say:

"we are pushing you into a position where you WANT to aim that gun, now rangefinder still boosts your range but you pay for it a little bit by having to slowly move into ADS."

The first statement lines up with what actually happens in the game since the patch. The second statement matches what was released in the patch notes. Also, the second statement makes sense from a logical point of view, within the context of the discussion. They were saying that they wanted to add a slight trade-off to the rangefinder perk. Speeding up the ADS time certainly wouldn't do that. Slowing down the ADS time does.

So, I think it is reasonable to assume that the designers' intention was to have ADS take a tiny bit longer with the rangefinder perk activated. Meaning the change that actually shipped in the game is a mistake.

Then there is the question of "how did this happen?". There are a few possible explanations I can think of, all of them pure speculation, none of them fully satisfying. And on a certain level, none of that matters. It appears to be a mistake. If that is the case, it will get fixed. The community in general is quick to overreact to this kind of thing, but that's what happens when the trust between community and developer isn't as strong as it maybe could be. Bungie's communication has been hit and miss, as has their balancing efforts with the game itself. I think that is the bigger issue. It takes them months to release balance tweaks (not a criticism, just a fact), so Destiny players get a bit steamed when an update finally does come out, only to introduce new problems, sometimes through changes that weren't even intentional.

I just think this whole attitude is baked into the culture of the larger Destiny community at this point in time. Some players love the game as it is. Others decided it wasn't for them and stopped playing a long time ago. But there is a very large chunk of players that lie somewhere in the middle. Players that love parts of the game and/or see a larger, greater potential in what the game could be... and they're waiting. They had problems with vanilla Destiny, but The Dark Below was coming soon, and that would fix all their problems... ok, that didn't pan out. TDB was rushed too, but that's ok because House of Wolves won't be out for a long time so Bungie will have time to make it everything we hope it will be... ok, that didn't pan out either. Etc, etc, etc.

15:39

"For rangefinder on shotguns, which is a key perk (I would say) for the Matador 64, we have decreased your ADS time... uh, so the time that it takes to go from hip into ADS by 25% on that perk. Uh, and so, that just gives you a reason that you, ya know, rangefinder isn't necessarily always the best, and again, because you- we are pushing you into a position where you WANT to aim that gun, now rangefinder still boosts your range but you pay for it a little bit by having to slowly move into ADS."

I promise I'm not taking the quote out of context. I just really find it amusing that the product that was delivered (faster ADS speed w/ rangefinder) is what they stated in the first part of that segment. It should by all accounts be slower according to the second part of their statement and the patch notes.

I just find this entire situation funny.

Okay. I don't know which one is wrong (though from CyberKN's followup, it seems like maybe the patch notes are right and the stream was wrong) - i was just suggesting that before you start shouting about ineptitude, maybe you get all the facts first. (If you turn out to be right, THEN you can shout.) That was all.

They still applied the health regen to everything instead of one thing. Inept.

"Buffed! They made Truth more powerful."

"No, they nerfed truth."

"They didn't nerf low-RoF Pulse rifles though. Buffed! I was right!"

Hence the reason you would want to ADS with a shotgun, because it grants you improved aim assist.

"We have decreased ADS time...by 25%"

Patch notes say the opposite.

exactly lol. not sure how they messed this up.

Or... maybe... it does exactly what it's supposed to do, they accidentally typed 'increases' instead of 'decreases'. It's a typo - sort of like 'innept'.

(In other words - it's not inept, it's a small, 2-letter mistake.)

Judging by the spirit of the nerfs to the shotguns, there is no way that they intended for a perk that adds range to shotguns to be able to speed up aim down sights. Increasing the time to aim with rangefinder makes the most sense. Patch notes are ostensibly proofread. People talking on the fly aren't.

And well, in this case two letters mean all the difference don't they? Big difference between the two possibilities. Adding one 'n' doesn't confuse the meaning :-)

Okay. I don't know which one is wrong (though from CyberKN's followup, it seems like maybe the patch notes are right and the stream was wrong) - i was just suggesting that before you start shouting about ineptitude, maybe you get all the facts first. (If you turn out to be right, THEN you can shout.) That was all.

They still applied the health regen to everything instead of one thing. Inept.

15:39

"For rangefinder on shotguns, which is a key perk (I would say) for the Matador 64, we have decreased your ADS time... uh, so the time that it takes to go from hip into ADS by 25% on that perk. Uh, and so, that just gives you a reason that you, ya know, rangefinder isn't necessarily always the best, and again, because you- we are pushing you into a position where you WANT to aim that gun, now rangefinder still boosts your range but you pay for it a little bit by having to slowly move into ADS."

So they said something and the game works like they said (assuming that no other perk is affecting handling).

But they also said something else (although a decreased ADS time would indeed make you want to aim that gun as they say), and the patch notes (written up by someone else) line up with what they said then.

Sounds like the issue is communication.