I'm certain we all know by now that the shader system in Destiny 2 is problematic. On one hand, the D1 veterans are frustrated by losing their earned shaders when swapping them out with new ones. Given the frequency that some of us (including me) changed shaders, this means that every shader application is met with the fear of losing something precious to us. On the other hand, we have the design goals of Bungie. They want to incentivize late-game content by having the players hunt for rare shaders, but in its current form, the incentive arises from negative motivation instead of something positive for Guardians. This can be easily fixed so that everyone gets what they want, and the problem at large can be boiled down to one flaw in the shader economy. [b]The Problem: [/b] [i]Previous shaders are destroyed when applying a new one.[/i] If shaders were refunded when swapping them out, then the shader economy is essentially that of Destiny 1 and stockpiling them would be worthless. If shaders were full-blown permanent, Bungie would have to re-write the entire loot table of the game as well as lose out on money to be gained from players that simply want to buy shaders with real money. I'm not going to debate this aspect of the shader economy, and I encourage you not to do so either in this thread. It is not the place. [b]The Solution: [/b] [i]Make shaders permanent on a per-item basis.[/i] In the item details page of each item, there is a massive UI tab where the current shader lives. Currently, it holds all the shaders in the Guardian's inventory, but perhaps it could be repurposed. Whenever a shader gets applied to an item, it is stored in this tab permanently, and the shader item is consumed. When the guardian applies a few more shaders, those too are stored in this tab. Whenever the guardian chooses, they can swap between each of these applied shaders at will, and it will not require the shader item to be re-applied from their collection. Essentially, one drop of a shader item equals one item on which this shader can be used forever. There are multiple benefits to this system. First, with each shader applied to an item, the item itself becomes more valuable to the Guardian. I was only ever able to run the Vault of Glass once, and the shader that I received contained the entire story of getting my fireteam together to run a raid that was no longer desirable to be plundered now that Oryx had made his fury clear to the galaxy. These items would now be my trophies, and with each successive run of a raid in D2, I would be able to make even more trophies for Shaxx to salivate over. With Guided Games, these re-runs would be easier than they were in D1, so the grind would be less frustrating to get going, leading to more fun. [i]And grinding can be fun[/i]. The current implementation of shaders means that Guardians are motivated to grind for them out of fear of losing them. This is a pessimistic motivation. It makes grinding for shaders feel icky as if it were something you had to do in order to build up a large stash that will offset the loss of changing out a shader. Regardless of the size of this hoard, it will still feel bad every time to see one go. Under my system, Guardians can grind for shaders they like and receive a permanent reward for their efforts — making more trophies. This will work in harmony with Speaker Smith's goals of making us excited to obtain new shaders by seeking out events, and it will feel good for us knowing that our efforts were permanent. Years down the line, we may have swords that are colored by the shaders of a hundred victories, and no longer will we fear or be angered by the loss of our shaders when we want to look a different shade of beautiful. Every second spent shader-hunting builds towards a more colorful vault without the fear of losing them. Additionally, incentivizing shader use would improve the Glimmer economy by giving a large sink into which Glimmer can be funneled. Don't be like Gaul, Traveler Bungie. Guardians do not take kindly to their loot being stolen. [b]Design:[/b] The design of the game wouldn't have to change much. It would require an additional view in the Item Details screen where the applied shaders live. The loot tables can stay more or less the same with a few tweaks to keep the balance of the Bright Dust economy stable as there will be more shaders left over than before. In regards to incredibly rare PvP feats like going to the Lighthouse or hard mode raid events, these would be better rewarded with a seasonal emblem or exotic, permanent shaders rather than a pool of consumable shaders. Consumable shaders in these instances would be so rare that nobody would ever want to use them, which defeats the purpose of them existing in the first place. Consumable Trials shaders would be better off if they were distributed on a per-game basis to facilitate grinding. [b]Development:[/b] This is the big hurdle. If a shader is a pointer stored on the object representing an item, then my solution would require that single property to become an array of pointers. Code bloat would be a massive issue as this one line could now become 100x as long as it used to be per-item. Conversely, if shaders had an itemsAppliedTo prop on their objects, that would also be long array of pointers. While it would remove the duplicate shader pointers across hundreds of items in a Guardian's vault, I don't think that is a good place for this data to live. Also, if a shader is removed from the vault once it is consumed and the data is garbage collected, then this approach is dead in the water. Perhaps applied shaders could be stored as a vault-level record and trickled down to the items contained within. All I know is that it will add lots of code bloat, and memory allocation is going to be tight on such a large game. I'm no engineer, that's for sure. --- EDIT: As nighttrainez posted below, to reduce on code bloat, perhaps each item could only store 10-20 shaders. This is a great solution to the problem, and I believe that ~20 shaders per-item would be enough to hold all of our favorites while keeping a few slots open for willy-nilly rotation. Perhaps every item starts with 10 shader slots, and the rarer shaders like those from raids and time-specific events like Trials would add a shader slot to the items they are used on. This way, only the players that have earned and used the rarest shaders would be inflating the data size of their vault. This scarcity would help keep rapid database inflation down as opposed to everyone applying 100 shaders to every item in their vault at once. --- There is an upshot to storing these used shaders in large records. It would give developers a data structure from which to pull should they ever further alter permanency in the shader economy in the future and want to retain the collection that each Guardian has built. Implementing a change like this sooner rather than later would allow this data to be collected before Guardians start spending rarer raid and trials shaders that they will eventually be faced with losing should the current system continue. [b]Further Applications:[/b] Your friends at Blizzard have come up with a great system recently in Diablo 3. Five loadouts can be stored in a wardrobe that contain all the skills, items, and cosmetic changes applied to said items, and they can be swapped at will. Perhaps we could store a PvP loadout with our PvP shaders, a festival shader set for looking beautiful on the soccer pitch, a patrol set for hunting, and a raid set? The system in their game works very well. Perhaps they would be available to share it down the line? [b]Conclusion:[/b] I hope Bungie reads this proposal as it gets at the heart of why the current shader economy is undermined by negative incentives of loss and stress. It could be so positive. Let us Guardians have our trophies, and, as is Luke Smith's go-to joke, if you're hiring, yes I am currently looking for a job in the Seattle area. Godspeed Guardians, and thank you Bungie for an amazing game. I love it so much. Pure light is made up of every shade of color. Let your game shine with the light it deserves.