Keen recently coined the phrase quit wall for the point in a game where "it’s a natural breaking point where [the developer] essentially gave players permission to quit their game if they couldn't climb over and reach the other side of the content.". In other words, players don't ask themselves the question whether they should quit a game when they are in the flow. If there is a break point in that flow, like a step-change in difficulty, or a big change in how the game plays, people are more likely to consider quitting.

I recently reached such a quit wall in Destiny. I did about 20 attempts to finish the last moon story mission, Chamber of Night, and failed every time. You get locked into a chamber where you have to withstand a constant barrage of waves and waves of monsters, and if you are alone a single mistake means you have to start from the beginning again. In a regular MMORPG there would be three possible solutions to that: Skip that piece of content to go elsewhere, find a group to help you with that content, or outlevel the content and come back. Skipping doesn't work because you need to finish Chamber of Night to open access to the next planet, Venus (I think). Finding a group didn't work because Destiny doesn't have decent group finding tools for story missions. If I join a strike mission (which are supposed to be harder than story missions), I get grouped with two random strangers, and up to now that always worked well (except if I get disconnected): Just by being present another player gives you the opportunity to respawn if you die, the scene only resets if ALL players are dead. But for the story missions there is no such automated group finder, and even by setting my fireteam option to public and waiting for an hour in front of the story mission dungeon I couldn't find a teammate. Story missions are solo or to play with already existing friends on your friends list. As I don't play console games very often, I didn't have any. And as there is no chat in Destiny, it is hard to meet people and make new friends.

I tried outleveling, but even at level 13 I still failed to finish Chamber of Night. So I considered quitting. But I do like playing Destiny, and I wondered what the alternatives to quitting were. If I could level up my character very quickly, and get good gear, then maybe I could finish that story mission and move on.

What I found was that because of how loot drops and death in Destiny are handled, it is in fact very easy to level very fast and get loot very fast as soon as you reach the moon. The first moon story mission, the Dark Beyond, has somewhere in the middle a scene where you find a dead guardian in front of the Temple of Crota. At that point the temple door opens, and about 30 mobs of the Hive pour out. The standard way to beat that encounter, and that is suggested by your ghost, is to move back. But you can also stand right in front of the door and kill a lot of monsters within a minute in a blaze of glory, which ends with your death. O death, where is thy sting? There isn't one in Destiny other than you being set back to the latest checkpoint. Which in this situation is the door of the temple opening and the Hive pouring out. Which means that you can stand in front of the door again and die in a blaze of glory again. And again. And again. Each time you gain xp. The loot drops (other than ammo) don't reset when you die, so after a number of waves you pick them all up. If you play the mission on hard the mobs are level 9 and drop more loot. But in Destiny the level of the loot drops depends on YOUR level, not the level of the mobs.

So after doing that for one evening, I am suddenly level 19, with a full set of nice uncommon and rare level 18ish gear. Plus I learned a lot about how the Hive mobs AI works, and there are nearly the same mobs in the Chamber of Night. I think tonight I should be able to beat that mission and move onwards from the moon. It does feel a bit like cheating, but if playing as intended only gets me to the quit wall, I'll play as not intended to circumvent that wall.