Following on from today's earlier story, Bungie has deactivated the experience point scaling system in Destiny 2. Long story short, the system made it so that the more efficiently you killed enemies or completed objectives, the less experience you'd get. Essentially, this stopped players from grinding for Bright Engrams -- loot boxes that are dealt out every time that you level up. These Bright Engrams can also be bought with real money from the game's microtransaction store.
Recently, the community started to investigate the system and found evidence of it reducing experience point gains over time. The whole thing was set to blow up, but developer Bungie has acted quickly and issued the following statement:
"We’ve seen community discussion around XP gain in Destiny. After reviewing our data, we agree that the system is not performing the way we’d like it to. Today, we’d like to describe what’s going on under the hood, and talk about what you can expect going forward when it comes to earning XP in Destiny 2.
"Currently, XP will scale up when playing longer or fixed duration activities like Crucible competitive multiplayer matches and the Leviathan Raid, and XP will scale down when playing activities that can be quickly, repeatedly chained, like grinding Public Events. We are not happy with the results, and we’ve heard the same from the community.
"Effective immediately, we are deactivating this system.
"As a result, players will see XP earn rates change for all activities across the board, but with all values being displayed consistently in the user interface. Over the course of the next week, we will be watching and reviewing XP game data to ensure that these changes meet our expectations, as well as yours. Any additional updates to this system will be communicated to you via our official channels."
Hopefully the changes go over well with both the community and the studio.
[source bungie.net]
Comments 18
Wow. That really did escalate quickly.
''we agree'', '' We are not happy with the results,''
Yeah, sure...
At least they fixed it, but I doubt they would've done anything if this wasn't discovered. And I can't help but feel that their quick response has something to do with Battlefront II, the last thing they want is a Battlefront II of their own.
This is the result from a higher up in Activision calling the Bungie lead and saying "Fix it and spin a good PR statement so we don't look like EA did the past couple weeks."
Not really immediate since the game has been out 3 months now.
(yes, i get what you mean)
Again, why was this even an issue? Bright Engrams really only provide cosmetics and little else. Besides, according to every article in the internet, no one is playing Destiny 2 anymore, so who benefits?
So basically, if you stuck to 'just' public events or crucible for example to maximise XP, the XP gains dropped over time but if you played 'everything', the XP remained consistent. To me that sounds like Bungie attempted to fix 'the loot cave' - some activity that someone exploits for engrams. Its the equivalent to getting fewer and fewer engram drops from 'enemies' if you just stay in one place and keep killing the same respawning enemies so you actually have to go off and play the game rather than exploit something for personal gain.
Maybe because I haven't constantly repeated the same 'activity' over and over again, that I never noticed my XP to drop off.
I bet this wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t have lost so much of their player base, and sales in general were higher
But micro-transaction is just cosmetic
I guess they've been watching the Battlefront 2 situation.
Fix it before it gains traction, I bet EA wish they had just done that.
Evidence big publishers are running scared at the moment after what happened to EA. Still plenty of room for improvement but at least they don't just laugh in players faces now and do nothing when we say their system is unethical.
@shafedog247 I think it's the fact that people who spend more time grinding for EXP got rewarded with relatively less. Especially since there's also real life money involved, you can argue they are nudging players into buying the cosmetics, rather than earning them through playing, since "grinding" is discouraged. It's comparable to the daily credit cap in Battlefront II. And most importantly, there was no transparency. People didn't know they were earning less, one gamer actually had to do the research to discover this, that's a bit shady.
This is all because I bought the game in the black Friday sales.
Everyone’s running scared after the Battlefront 2 fiasco, lmao! 😂😂😂
@Octane I can see how people may think this was nudging people towards spending real money for cosmetic items, but in reality, people that are chasing certain cosmetic items buy the bright engrams whether they grind or not. Clearly though, one certain gamer has too much time on their hands if they sat and figured all this out😂
We got caught but thank you to our wonderful community for being so vigilant. They say with gritted teeth.
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi Yet you supported them by buying their game and putting in hours upon hours playing it. It’s been said before and I’ll say it again, refusing to buy the game will hurt them and should make them think the next time they release a game... they won’t though they never do, they just see how far they can push before gamers and website articles react.
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi I think “force” is a bit of a stretch. That’s like saying there is no other choice. I have no idea how many public events I’ve completed...probably don’t wanna know either. After nearly 250 hours in the game I find myself doing less and less of the public events. You’re supposed to be grinding away in Iron Banner this week anyway lol.
I LOVED LOVED Destiny 1 but all of the sneaky things happening behind the scenes (they still haven't fixed the chest cooldown timer) makes me NOT want to continue playing the game. Plus it's no fun having to get powerful items randomly. I've been stuck at 304 on 3 characters for weeks since I can't get certain armor pieces to pop up. I'm going to hold off on getting the expansion until a few weeks after it releases after everyone reviews it.
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