Paul Tassi, Bungie apologist?

First let me say I like reading Forbes writer Paul Tassi's articles about video games. But if you read his stuff, you get this feeling that he writes from a prospective of supporting video game companies rather than looking how those businesses treat the gamer. Of course, he writes for the pro-business Forbes.

This week, he freaked out over an item sold by Xur in the game Destiny. Here's his article. The item is called "The Three of Coins." You get five chances for an Exotic weapon or armor engram with the cost seven strange coins. That's the can be some of the best stuff in the game. Now to get it, you have to defeat an Ultra boss. That's a yellow bar boss with a name and symbol. What upsets Tassi is that people are farming by doing mission "The Scourge of Winter" over and over again. Gamers would kill the boss and themselves and respawn the boss quickly. Oh, the humanity.

But here's Tassi shows his pro-Bungie bias. He frets it could break the game. Really? Tassi doesn't get it. Gamers getting to where they want to at a faster rate doesn't break the game unless the goal is to stretch the game out till Destiny 3 comes out and milk every cent from gamer with DLC. Second, you don't get an Exotic engram everytime you kill an Ultra. How do I know that? After using fifteen of the items, I got only three engrams. So you see it works the way it was designed. And get this, I'm still stuck at a light rating of 244, well below the number needed to try The Taken King's raid. Tassi should also realize that a gamer cannot equip more than one Exotic item at a time. The Three of Coins and quickly farming it does not break the game or turn players into super Guardians overnight.

Tassi is a good writer but his big business bias is showing.