This article is taking the place of today's TWID - don't worry, it's not gone anywhere, it'll be out tomorrow instead!
Hi all! It's me again, ChaosCantrip! Festival of the Lost is just around the corner, and we've got our biggest update since the Guardian Record landing just ahead of it - so I thought I'd better sit down and talk you all through it before it arrives!
This one has been a long time coming. A lot of what's in here started life as a "wouldn't it be cool if..." in the Discord, and it's grown into something I'm genuinely really proud of. Hopefully you'll all have as much fun playing with it as I've had building it.
Before we get stuck in - did you see the trailer for this article? If you missed it, go and give it a watch below! It's a quick tour of everything in this update, and I'm a little bit proud of it.
PLACEHOLDER
A tiny bit for the nerds: the whole trailer is actually just a web page! Every scene is plain HTML and CSS - the same stuff this site is built out of - animated with a JavaScript library called GSAP, then played back in a browser one frame at a time and stitched together into a video. All the bits of the Event Hub flying about are real pieces of the site, too. Even the music and sound effects are made in code, which is either very cool or slightly unhinged, depending on how you look at it.
So! What's in this update?!
Up until now, an event on the site has been an event page and a handful of Triumphs in The Director. That's served us well, but we wanted events to feel like events - something you check in on every day, with things to chase, rewards to earn and somewhere to spend them.
A few weeks ago we ran Arms Week: Black Armory, and honestly, the response was brilliant - thank you to every single one of you who jumped in! It was also our first proper event on the new tracking, though, and we learned a lot from it.
The Community Challenge was simply "get kills with Black Armory weapons", and you lot, being Guardians, immediately found the most efficient way to do that: farming kills in the Thrallway. We genuinely loved seeing so many people throw themselves at it! But we also know it made for a pretty frustrating time if you didn't want to sit there AFK farming, or just didn't have the hours to put in to keep up.
That's a big part of where the Event Hub came from. For Festival of the Lost, you'll still earn Candy for every kill with a Festival weapon, but the missions are now where the real rewards are. They're built to be a much better use of your time, with the weapon kills as a nice bit of passive extra on the side, rather than the main event.
So every event can now have its very own Event Hub! It's the home for everything going on during that event: missions to complete, an Event Pass to work your way through, event currencies to earn, and a Store to spend them in. Our Festival of the Lost community event will be the very first to get one!
If it looks a little familiar, that's very much on purpose! The Event Hub is directly inspired by Destiny's own events - the Event Card with its challenges and rewards track, the event vendor, the big seasonal art splashed behind it all - right down to the tooltips and the buttons. We've tried to recreate as much of the feeling of the old Events as we possibly can, so that an event here feels like an event in the game used to.
Every day at reset, you'll be dealt a fresh set of Repeatable Missions. Finish one, claim it, and a brand new one drops straight into its place, so you can keep going for as long as you like. If you finish one and forget to claim it, don't panic - anything you completed is claimed for you at the next reset, so you'll never lose a reward to forgetting.
Missions come in three rarities - Common, Legendary and Exotic - and the rarer the mission, the better the rewards. Every mission you complete nudges up your odds of pulling a Legendary or an Exotic next time, until you land one. Those odds are right there on the page under Next Mission Odds, so you'll always know exactly where you stand!
Not feeling a mission you've been dealt? Spend a Reroll Chip to swap it for a different one of the same rarity. You can only hold a few at a time, but every Repeatable Mission gives you more when you complete it, so don't be shy about using them!
Alongside those, there are Event Missions. These are the same for everyone and last for the whole event - bigger challenges with bigger rewards, think of them as the event's own Triumphs. Some of them might only unlock part-way through an event, so keep an eye out!
And if you finish one and the event ends before you've claimed it, again, don't panic! Everything you've completed gets claimed for you automatically when the event closes.
Just to clear up any confusion before it starts - Event Missions are a brand new thing, not the old Missions from The Director with a new name. I killed those. They're gone now. I eated them.
Missions pay out in event currencies, and those come in two flavours. Collectible Currencies keep track of everything you've earned over the event and never get spent, while Spendable Currencies are the ones you take to the Store. Some events will also pay out a little currency just for playing - like Festival of the Lost's Candy for weapon kills - as a bit of passive progress on top of your missions. (That lovely Candy icon, by the way, is a recreation of the old candy from Destiny, made by our very own LokiXD - hey, that's my fiance!)
Your Collectible Currency fills up the Event Pass, a track of rewards that unlock as you go - and for the truly dedicated, there are Prestige ranks at the end with something a little extra in them.
Events can also have a Community Challenge tied to a currency, adding up everything the whole community has earned. Each one has its own Leaderboard, so you can see exactly who has been carrying the rest of us. On the test server that's currently me, which will put me at 5 first-place spots on leaderboards, because I am simply the best to ever do it.
Spendable Currency has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is the new Stores! Each event can have its own, laid out just like an in-game vendor and packed with Emblems, Banners and other bits for your profile. Some items can only be bought a few times a day, and the Store will tell you how many you've got left and when it resets.
Your new Inventory keeps all of your event currencies in one place, so you can see what you've got to spend at a glance. You'll find it in the Event Hub, and in the account menu up at the top of the page.
Both of them open as pop-ups right over the Event Hub, so you can nip into the Store, buy something shiny and be straight back where you were without the page reloading.
I know a lot of you check in from your phones, so the Event Hub, the Stores and The Director have all been built to work properly on a phone screen too. If you read the last one of these, you'll know that Mobile Responsiveness and I have history. Through persistence, Monster Mango Loco, and the friends I made along the way, I have beaten it into a vaguely working state. This one's for you, Grandma.
Look, I tried, okay? I'm a backend guy. Frontend work scares me.
When we first launched The Director, it had two kinds of challenge - Missions and Triumphs. But after the tracking overhaul last update, it turned out that a Mission and a Triumph were really the same thing: something to do, and your progress towards doing it. Two names for the same thing, and Noble telling me my Discord Bot is spamming them.
So the old Missions are going away, and Triumphs do everything they used to. The Trials of the Light Triumphs now track your clears directly, and nothing you've already earned is going anywhere - your completions and rewards all stay exactly where they are.
This one's mostly under the hood, so the short version for everyone: your progress should keep landing quickly and reliably, even as we keep adding more and more Triumphs to the site. And Quest stages, along with Triumphs that depend on other Triumphs, now complete at the same time as the thing they're waiting on, instead of a little while afterwards.
Right, for the nerds. To work out everyone's progress, the site takes every Triumph and objective we've set up and builds them into one big query over our copy of Destiny's match history. A couple of weeks back, I rewrote how that query gets put together, so it only reads the members and the stretch of history it actually needs. One run went from about 44 seconds, chewing through 3.2 billion rows, to about 4 seconds and 269 million - which meant we could stop waiting 5 minutes between runs and do it every single minute instead. This update goes a step further, because the query was still re-checking objectives whose events finished months ago, every minute, just in case. Now, once an objective's time window has been closed for a day, we stop checking it and keep its final values. On our test server, which runs a copy of the live site's challenges, that took the amount of data each run reads from about 87.6 million rows down to 1.1 million. The one catch is that a match which reaches us more than a day after an objective's window has closed won't count towards it, which should be a very rare edge case, and it's one I'm happy to live with for a site that doesn't melt.
The Director has had a complete makeover too, and just like the Event Hub, it's very much inspired by Destiny itself - this time, the in-game Triumphs screen! Every group of Triumphs is a tile you can open up to see everything inside it, with the full details of each Triumph when you hover over it. Any events with an Event Hub sit right at the top, so they're the first thing you see.
You might also notice the whole site looks a little different - we've got new fonts, designed to sit a little closer to Destiny's own.
Our Discord bot has been hanging around in the D2CommunityHub Discord Server for a while now, handing out roles - but now you can add it to your own server too!
Head to the new Discord Bot page, hit Add to Server, and once it's in, anyone who manages that server can sign in with Discord and choose which channels get what:
Completion Posts only happen for members who've linked their Discord account and switched them on for themselves in their Account Settings - they're off until you choose otherwise, so nobody's going to get their raid clears broadcast without asking. While you're there, you can also turn on a DM for whenever you finish an Event Mission.
There's also an /announcements command in Discord that takes your server's admins straight to their settings page, for anyone who'd rather not go digging for it.
A couple of smaller things that didn't quite earn a section of their own, but that I'm still very pleased with:
The update lands Monday, 12th October, a day ahead of our Festival of the Lost community event, which kicks off on Tuesday, 13th October at 17:00 UTC - so you'll have a chance to have a poke around the new Director before it all begins! Keep an eye on the Discord for updates on the day.
For anyone who made it this far, thank you once again for reading through my rambling. This has been the biggest thing I've built for the site since launch, and I'm so excited to finally get it into your hands. As always, if you find something broken, come and tell me in the Discord and I'll go and have a scrap with it. And remember - Guardians Make their own Fate
Yes, there's a new thumbnail! Topher is back from his holiday, so naturally I made this one myself anyway - and no, I'm still not learning Photoshop.
