Primary TTK and Excitement
This was a post I made on the Destiny subreddit. It was received fairly poorly, I think, because people can't swallow 0.5s TTK, on gut feeling, no matter how much you justify it, in spite of historical precedent of lower TTK not being a problem in House of Wolves. There's also just been a lot of circle jerking over balancing TTK to Vigilance Wing's 0.83s, which I mention in the post, and explain how it's not enough to solve game breaking problems. Maybe the 2 players left after they finish balancing to Vigilance Wing will see it in hindsight.
I started writing this a while ago, before the update, but some tricky math and a death in the family slowed me down.
I also strayed off topic, and wrote too much, so I'm forking off another post to kind of tie everything together, coming soon.
Bungie said:
Bungie conceded the game isn't exciting enough, and then posited more movement speed, abilities and power ammo, while leaving TTK alone, would fix that.
I respect that designers have to take their domain expertise and interpret user complaints and figure out what the right solution is, because the users don't always suggest the right fix, but you can't sidestep the problems of long TTK. It affects play on so many levels.
In my last post (Where the Destiny Sandbox Went Wrong), I just threw a number out there:
An average TTK around 0.7s seems about right for Destiny's movement.
I tried to justify the importance of potential 2 tap vs 3 tap kills, but I didn't really justify that TTK number, as I feel the specific number here is less important, but it was in a post that was all about justifying things, so let's talk about that, particularly in the scope of the goal of increasing excitement.
We'll start by defining excitement and its requirements. We'll look at how TTK affects it. And then how to approach finding a suitable TTK.
Why Isn't Destiny 2 Exciting?
PotaToss's Theory of Excitement in Games
Excitement increases with time spent under tension.
This is, unfortunately, more complicated than my theory of fun in games, so let's break it down.
What's tension?
Tension is a state where you and your opponent are under imminent, symmetric threat of losing.
Imminence
If there's no chance anyone is losing soon, there's no tension. So, if you're playing a tight match, and both teams are 1 kill away from winning, that's tense. If the match just started and both teams are 50 kills and 10 minutes away from winning, that's not tense.
If you're dueling, and you and your opponent are one shot away from dying, that's tense. If your guns did way less damage, and you're both 10 shots away from dying, that's not tense.
Symmetry
Odds that are too strong in one party's favor kill tension. If we're both hurt and one shot from death, there's tension. If I'm 3 shots from dying and you're 1 shot from dying, there's no tension.
Playing a game with an invincibility cheat may be good for a laugh, but it's not exciting, because the asymmetry is too large. Excitement isn't about power. Playing against someone invincible is also not exciting.
Look at Bungie's teaser footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfpDqS-G8Xk
Does anyone think that looks "exciting" or "intense" for anyone on either end of that sniper? To me, it looks boring for the guy with Power, and frustrating for the people who can't really fight back.
He trades shots with some scout rifle, and this is as far down as his health goes:
https://imgur.com/rQj9bkr
How many shots for free is that?
A disciplined player with a sniper will never lose against a primary with that many shots for free. The asymmetry is too large to create tension. One player's spike in power actually decreases excitement by ruining symmetry.
TTK Effects on Excitement
With definitions out of the way, let's think about how TTK affects tension and excitement.
Ratio of Time Under Tension
Long primary TTK diminishes excitement on both ends of a symmetric exchange by decreasing the ratio of time under tension to time not under tension.
Consider if we had 10 shots to kill with hand cannons. In the best case, if you're trading every time, the first 9 shots have no tension. Only that last shot, where it's the tipping point, and either one of you could go down with the next hit, has tension.
The rest of the fight is unexciting. It's just jockeying for position. It's the opening laps of an endurance race. There's gameplay value in the jockeying phase of a duel, in that it contributes to a shooting skill gap, but that phase isn't fun or exciting.
Even with just 1s+ TTK, most of the primary vs. primary duel is unexciting busy work. The longer the TTK is, the higher the percentage of time you'll spend not under tension, and the less exciting your time playing will be overall.
Futility
Long primary TTK makes many engagements a complete waste of time, because primaries are too weak to punish someone attempting to flee. In D2, if you really don't want to be in the fight anymore, it's hard to force it. This is only exaggerated by increased movement speed.
If you're racing to a higher number of hits to kill, the losing player can just decide to bail if he gets hit a few times, knowing he can get away with no penalty because he moves too fast to be hit enough times to die while retreating, and when he does get away and heals up, the whole duel, which never got to the point where it could possibly be exciting, was just a waste of time.
In D1, you had to work for your escape. If they didn't miss you while you were running, you were probably dead.
The same thing happens when groups of players run into each other, and one player decides to just duck out for a while to recover. Grenades aren't strong enough to reliably finish someone in a known position, and team clusters can't be pushed through a choke to get an angle to finish with a gun.
Here's both sides of this (it loops, to highlight how pointless this time spent was, and how these standoffs could potentially last forever). I just eat a whole skip, because who cares about D2 grenades? That was almost a quarter of that 2 minute round, while we were like 20m away from each other, and everyone knew where everyone else was.
This is worse than just not being exciting. It's not just boredom. It makes a game actively infuriating.
I put in the work to get ahead in that duel, and learning and practicing so I could consistently get ahead in most duels. Getting into these long duels, or getting the jump on someone, just to have the guy I was beating casually, clumsily leave, or have his friends show up late and swing it so I have to leave makes the game straight up unpleasant to play.
Odds of Any Tension
If you're not trading shots every time, over a race to a high number of shots, one person probably pulls way ahead, or maintains a significant lead. Jockeying for the lead is a fair test of skill in a 1v1, but by the time you get to a high TTK, even on the last shot, there's probably no tension, because one player needs 1 more shot, and the other needs many times that. You've skipped tension entirely. The entire fight was unexciting.
Longer TTK duels are less likely to ever become exciting at all, even with a perfect skill match and if no one ever disengages.
Let's consider some duels between evenly skilled players. For simplicity, we'll assume they hit headshots or miss completely, and it's equally likely Player A will hit, Player B will hit, or they'll trade shots, and always fight to the death.
1 tap - Special weapon duel
The first shot could end it, on either side. The entire exchange is tense. 100% of these are tense, and consequently exciting. Instead of jockeying for shot count, you jockey for information, initiative and advantageous position, and play in a more 3D way, because every inch of range is a big factor with shotguns and fusions. Every movement is a meaningful risk, and with powerful grenades, no movement is also a risk.
2 tap - Thorn duel
This graph is presented as a dendrogram (duel start is on the left, all terminal nodes on the same level, on the right) to make it easy to focus on the conclusion states. Nodes are labeled with who landed a hit (A/B/T[rade]), a running tally of hits landed for A and B respectively, in parentheses, and the probability of hitting that node. Duels that have hit tension, where either player can go down on the next shot, are highlighted in red:
There are 13 ways that a 2 tap duel can play out, and only 4 of them never hit that exciting tipping point situation. Shorter paths are more likely than longer paths, however, so you end up with a total of a 55.56% chance of excitement.
There's a touch of jockeying for position, there's probably tension, and then it's over. The little bit of jockeying adds to the skill gap, makes it so that OHK special weapons have a special situational advantage, at the cost of some potential excitement, but it's the smallest possible reduction, and you get something for it. It makes the game richer.
It's a real advantage to use a OHK special against a 2 tap primary, but if you choke, you can pay for it, because primary is easier to use, and that's a good thing. A low TTK primary also makes the game more accessible to lower skill players. If a OHK weapon is harder to use, any sloppiness can be punished by anyone with a decent primary shot.
3 tap - Late Destiny 1 primary duel
39 exciting duels of 63 possible, with a 40.74% chance of excitement. This is a 14.82% reduction in chance of excitement by adding one shot. It's no longer probable that you'll have exciting duels, even in the best case.
This adds more jockeying to primary vs. primary, but also makes primaries unable to meaningfully compete against OHK weapons. If you have special ammo, it's basically always better. It's another tier of power weapon. I made the case for this in my last post.
4 tap - Destiny 2 hand cannons
189 exciting duels of 321 possible with a 33.61% chance of excitement. By adding 2 shots, you've dropped the chance of excitement by 21.95%, which players have really felt. This graph is huge and is impractical to display, but if you insist.
Beyond 4 taps - Some other D2 primaries
5 tap - 29.28%
6 tap - 26.29%
7 tap - 24.07%
8 tap - 22.33%
9 tap - 20.92%
Again, this is the best case scenario, where players have the exact same odds of hitting, and nobody disengages.
If you change the odds so that player A hits 50% of the time, player B hits 25% of the time, and they trade 25% of the time:
2 tap - 50%
3 tap - 34.38%
4 tap - 26.56%
5 tap - 21.63%
6 tap - 18.14%
7 tap - 15.50%
8 tap - 13.42%
9 tap - 11.74%
Dramatically worse, faster.
Beyond 4 taps to kill, you're getting rapidly diminishing returns on making your game less exciting.
It's as if the approach to making D2 was to say, "What's the smallest thing we can change to get the biggest bore for our buck?"
The inverse, of course, is, "What's the smallest thing we can change to get the most excitement back?"
The answer wasn't movement speed, power ammo, or decreasing cooldowns on ineffective grenades.
As an additional note, in D1, you always had a chance to turn a bad duel exciting by switching to special, which is why D1 didn't totally fall apart when they kept nerfing primaries.
Here's the code to calculate these, if you're curious: https://codepen.io/anon/pen/QmBOwJ?editors=0010
I have the graphing code in D3 if anyone really wants it, too.
But Why?
If you're going increase TTK, which makes your game less fun and less exciting, what are you gaining for it? Because not fun and not exciting is the cardinal sin of game design, as demonstrated by D2 player abandonment rates.
In going from a 2 tap kill to a 3 tap kill, you've also added 2 layers, i.e. 5 node deep paths to a conclusion, whereas with 2 tap duels, the deepest path was 3. 4 tap kills have paths that are 7 deep. These long, lost cause duels are what make people leave, or duck out for a reset, which wastes everyone's time.
Adding one more tap dramatically increases potential duel length, and dramatically decreases the likelihood that there will be tension.
The thing is, if there isn't going to be tension in a duel, you want that duel to be over as quickly as possible, because neither player in that duel is having fun. Bungie saw the value in this when they implemented the mercy rule to end badly lopsided matches early. Fast TTK is basically the same thing.
This is like changing the number of matches to win a set in a tournament. You want to make sure there are enough interactions that the better players will generally come out on top and advance, but you have to balance it against wasting time. Nobody wants to waste their time watching or playing drawn out blowouts.
Usually, a best of 3 (a race to 2 ...) will tell you everything you need to know about a matchup. Maybe you extend the sets as you approach the finals and you're looking at the best of the best, but that's just as much because that gameplay is the most entertaining to watch as it is to make sure the best team wins.
This is a clip from a private rumble with some of my clanmates:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzJQo_a16xQ
Note that we're using 0 TTK weapons, but this duel goes on for 11 seconds, and it's tense the whole time. We're hopping around, trying to surprise each other with our movement and use of the environment, trying to play at the edge of our OHK range and extending it with grenade and primary chips and stuff.
And then afterward, I short sniped my other clanmate who came around a corner flatfooted, exactly as I expected, and he died instantly for it. Both exchanges took only as long as they needed to for the relative skill on display.
In D2, I had to read and get the jump on this guy 4 different times to kill him. 3 times to even hit tension:
https://youtu.be/5zHyP64Gd8I
That's about 13 seconds dueling a guy I'd never lose a fair fight against. It was almost interrupted by his teammate coming in behind me. This is a terrible player experience. I was almost certainly going to lose, even though I was reading him like a book.
Compare to D1, when you could kill in 2 melees. I respawn in front of a golden gun. I have no grenades or special ammo. Just my skill and my wits. Two quick interactions, slide under his aim into his blind spot, then jump over and across his adjusted aim, and resolution that would free me up to fight one of his teammates, in about 2 seconds:
https://youtu.be/Jk-hYW-Arms
This D1 Golden Gun vs. TLW duel is over quickly, but it's long enough to meaningfully interact. I get on target first, and I change direction 3 times, making him miss, while fighting TLW's recoil and hitting him in the head 3 times, and then I'm ready for his flanking teammate:
https://youtu.be/kM0REei9rws
These are all similar interactions, in that I'm outplaying a Golden Gun with my neutral kit, with no special, but the one from D2 takes 6 times longer than the one where I just use my bare hands in D1. And for what?
I really have no idea. The community needs to know exactly why they thought it was justified to put us through this, so we can have a meaningful discussion about their goals. Please nag them.
Destiny has its special sauce that makes gunplay feel distinctive. Dueling with Destiny hand cannons will just never feel like Call of Duty. When people dueled Thorn vs. Thorn, those fights weren't just instantly over trades. People would jump and slide and do anything to avoid those headshots.
It was exciting and fun to fight someone at your level, and even though it could be over in 2 headshots, you only got that minimum TTK when there was a huge skill mismatch, somebody choked, or you caught someone asleep, and it's good that those end quickly, because dragging it out just makes the game boring or prone to infuriating team interference upsets.
Bungie needs to let go of its fear of low TTK.
Getting to the Right TTK Number
I want to talk about this in more general terms, like, how to think about getting to the right number, rather than just saying what the right number is, because it can change, like when you change movement speed.
A Golden Rule of Balance
When thinking about getting the right number, and about balancing the sandbox in general, try to think about it in terms of risk and reward. You want to have something, you pay with your safety. A player's actions should come with risk commensurate with what they stand to gain from them. When everything is a risk, everything can be punished by a smart opponent. It makes everything and everyone possible to outplay, so there's always hope for a hero moment.
e.g.
- Holding a position lets you maintain map control, but lethal grenades make it risky to stay put in a known position.
- Throwing a grenade lets you hit an entrenched target, or soften a group, but it uses it up and leaves you temporarily weaker to certain kinds of pushes, especially if you miss.
- Non-lethal grenades break the risk:reward of sitting in one spot.
- e.g. Even if you know someone's around the corner with Acrius, what can you do about it? Even if you nail them with a full damage incendiary, they still have an advantage when you come around at them.
When applied to a game's systems in a disciplined way, it creates a fair foundation, on top of which you can layer rule breakers, as interesting perks. Without that foundation, it can be harder to reason about perk strength.
Looking through this lens, we can avoid the trap of trying to balance by making everything equally strong, which makes a game bland. It's okay if something is stronger than something else, but it also has to be riskier. Think of squishy instant hitscan Golden Gun, vs. tanky slow thrown hammers. Players will pick their favorites that suit their preference for risk.
How High is Too High for TTK?:
Probably the most important consideration here is repositioning. Controlling more territory and more angles is a huge deal in any FPS, and taking it should involve a lot of risk.
Consider the B to A transition on Rusted Lands.
Reward: Moving from the outer wall into the A control point room gives you like 4 strong angles connected by cover, and a safe retreat out the back towards A heavy. If you still have teammates at B, you can set up a pincer on about a quarter of the map, and have angles on about half of it.
Risk: Getting killed while attempting to make the transition will deny your team all of your angles, and create a temporary weakness that opens your teammates up to getting collapsed on, and allows the other team to take up more uncontested territory.
Getting the TTK ceiling right is a function of player speed and map design.
At 60 fps, a player making this transition has their head exposed for about 70 frames. It takes me around 20 frames to acquire a target, and about another 56 to land 3 accurate shots.
70 frames (exposure) - 20 frames (acquiring target) = 50 frames (to kill the target)
50 frames / 60 fps = 0.83s (to kill the target)
For context, an Eyasluna kills in 0.87 seconds, ideally.
So, if you have 20 frames to get on target initially, and use an Eyaluna, you have negative 0.04s to line up your second and third shot, or you need to cut 3-4 frames off the initial target acquisition, and then be frame perfect tracking the target and shooting it 3 times.
This makes stopping this push for territory just barely possible with D1 primary, but if you cut about 28 frames off (somehow ...), it would be comfortable, and you'd have to work for your flank by dealing with the person watching it, either by dueling, or forcing them to move with a grenade or whatever.
D2's long TTK and fast movement is like if baseball players could run faster than the ball. It breaks the risk:reward on stealing bases. When there's nothing stopping you from stealing bases, a lot of baseball's structure becomes meaningless.
Your only real option is to allow the flank, and withdraw into your team, unless you have Power ammo or a teamshot ready. And then after you withdraw into your team, you can maybe try to team push the flanker, or the other team's main ball, to protect from a pincer.
It shouldn't require a teamshot to stop the movement action of one player. If it does, the movement risk is too low, and the incentive to ball up with your team to teamshoot in all situations is too high. When TTK is inappropriately high, all roads lead to teamshot.
This is still gameplay, if everyone is up and together, but it makes it so that a single player can't do anything to stop himself from getting hit from multiple angles if he's outnumbered without retreating, but he frequently won't have the territory for that, and they'll just do it again after he retreats. It's a slippery slope, which is the opposite of the always hopeful excitement of D1.
A common strategy is to kill one player, and then use a temporary numbers advantage to roll over the remaining players into their spawn, splitting the new spawns, and you just keep rotating to keep the cycle going. When numbers are such a big advantage, and individual players respawning can't make big plays with strong primary, OHKs and strong grenades, the cycle is too hard to break.
A sandbox tuned for excitement gives everyone the tools they need to have a chance to come out ahead as much as possible if they make the right choices (e.g. having a missed grenade cooldown be long enough to leave you vulnerable to a push -- but not that much longer). You make one good read, you get a kill. You make one dumb mistake, they get a kill. Not even bothering to look at someone shooting at you while you try to steal territory should be a dumb mistake, but it's smart in D2, because primary TTK is too high, and we don't have special to compensate.
Bungie's mentioned that they intend to bring average TTK down a bit, but so long as taking territory can be done for free, it's still going to be too high, and problematic. It's been too high since D1 Y2, but you could at least protect yourself from territory grabs with special, or clean them up after the fact with lethal grenades.
How Low is Too Low?
The high bound of ideal TTK determines whether your game works as a game, or if it funnels everything into teamshooting. The low bound determines the flavor of your game.
Extremely low without requiring precision, and the game is all about information and initiative. Getting the best positioning and the strongest cover to head glitch over. People characterize CoD as a twitch shooter, but to do really well, it was all about information management. I'd kill you from anywhere on the map with a grenade if you shot your gun and didn't move afterward.
But if it requires precision, and precision is sufficiently difficult to obtain, via recoil and evasive options, I think you almost can't go too low. People generally favored Thorn, even though you could kill about twice as fast with TLW, because getting that minimum TTK with TLW was super improbable. There are a lot of knobs to tweak to keep guns feeling different and interesting, even if they all had identical TTK.
Bottom Line
Last time I said that a 0.7s TTK seemed about right for D2's movement. Now that movement is faster, 0.7s is decidedly too slow. Aiming to balance around Vigilance Wing's 0.83s isn't going far enough. Certainly not with grenades remaining the same power and with long cooldowns.
Weak primaries and abilities, and not spawning in with OHK options, leaves us with no recourse a lot of the time besides having to play in a ball with our team. We're going to get bad spawns, and we're going to fight people who are holding 0s TTK power weapons. That's just a fact. We need to be able to keep them honest. Power ammo should be a modest, outplayable advantage, not just points at the expense of everyone's enjoyment of the game.
At D1's worst, you could still spawn with sidearm ammo that would let you get 0.53s TTK, which can hold off a sloppy shotgun push. 0 TTK weapons aren't any less 0 TTK in D2. How does it make any sense to make us fight them with weapons that are twice as slow to kill as our worst case D1 option?
Triage recommendations:
- TTK around 0.5s,
- 2 tap all crits on semi autos
- all body shot 3 tap on lower rate of fire.
- 1 head 2 body on mid rate.
- 4 body on high.
- TTK on automatics a little bit lower to compensate for not being able to peek shoot.
- Grenade damage and charge times back to D1 levels to punish camping and general predictability and clumping.
- Keep power ammo on death, as a stand in for special, or keep what you kill. Teammate pickup of power ammo promotes clumping even when you have power, which is nuts.
- More super energy per kill.
This should buy you some time to iron out system level problems, like weapon slots and mods.
Bungie, there are profound problems with D2, and in the cases where you're lucky, the players are furious. In most cases, they've just given up, and the franchise needs you to be brave and drop TTK lower than you think is reasonable, to bring it back to life. If what you thought was reasonable were reasonable, we wouldn't be where we are now. You're giving Destiny aspirin, when it needs a defibrillator.
Thanks for reading.
Next post probably on Thursday, focusing on hero moments and the character of the game.