Players Catch Destiny 2 Developers Misrepresenting XP Gains

DooKey

DooKey

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Over the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend Destiny 2 players posted on Reddit that they had discovered XP gain depended on what mode you were playing or how long you played. According to the players there was no in-game notice letting you know this was happening. However, after Bungie was called out they released a patch to fix this and it worked. The only problem with the patch is they decided to double the XP to level up while they were at it. Once again greedy developers want to increase the grind as much as possible so you'll buy their loot boxes to speed things up. Totally crappy move if you ask me.

This revelation was promptly followed by the game's developer, Bungie, confirming the discovery as accurate and promising a fix. But this "fix" was coupled with another unannounced change - a flat, across-the-board reduction in XP gains for all Destiny 2 activities. Bungie only confirmed this decision after fans pointed it out.
 
People learned.
The Bungie decided to do something about it.

From what I read: It was shown on the screen to be the same XP, but the actual XP applied was less and everytime you leveled up, it got lower and lower. Guess what you get by leveling up? A loot box that you can pay money for or grind!


Starcitizen. You're one of my final hopes left in this world. Don't you fuck it up.
 
"...a flat, across-the-board reduction in XP gains for all Destiny 2 activities."

Wow. Et tu, Bungie?
 
I don't really think this is a big deal. Unless you feel particularly obsessed with getting to level 305, you can get pretty far by just playing the story missions and catching random public events.
Paying for loot boxes doesn't really matter that much since you can only rock one Epic gear piece at a time anyway.
There's a bit of a grind from level 270'ish to 280, but I don't know if most people throwing fits are specifically in that situation.
 
What people are lighting torches and getting pitchforks (bungie forums, Reddit, etc.) over are cosmetic lootboxes and comparing this debacle to BF2. This isn't the same situation as Battlefront at all. Yeah, the XP change is shitty and underhanded, and the devs should be more open. But its ONLY COSMETIC stuff you get out of the box. You DONT get legendary/exotics/etc. from the bright engrams, only shaders, ships, sparrows. It's totally designed to get you to buy the bright engrams but its not game breaking. It's not pay to win.

Make sure you're getting your torches out for the right reason. People should be upset at the lack of transparency from the Bungie, not the loot boxes. They simply were shitty in how they went about trying to get you to buy cosmetics. Take your pay to win lootbox hate to EA still.


You can get to 305 light without needing anything out of a bright engram.


Be an informed mob of angry internet people... not a bandwagon mob of angry internet people.
 
AndrewPr said:
What people are lighting torches and getting pitchforks (bungie forums, Reddit, etc.) over are cosmetic lootboxes and comparing this debacle to BF2. This isn't the same situation as Battlefront at all. Yeah, the XP change is shitty and underhanded, and the devs should be more open. But its ONLY COSMETIC stuff you get out of the box. You DONT get legendary/exotics/etc. from the bright engrams, only shaders, ships, sparrows. It's totally designed to get you to buy the bright engrams but its not game breaking. It's not pay to win.
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I just want to point out that looks and cosmetics used to be a core tenant of MMO's. Running quests or grinding something to help make yourself look unique was at one point considered gameplay and content and a large draw of the genre as a whole. Now suddenly we're supposed to accept said content removed and put behind a paywall and all look like look-alike-plebs unless we cough up for something we always had before. This slow erosion of game content we had for free that now we have to pay for, when they are making provably more money than ever before in -profit- (You know...after expenses) is frankly just as unacceptable and a slippery slope. So no....pitchforks and hell raising is absolutely warranted.
 
Wasn't it fairly recently that Bungie was one of the good developers? What happened?
 
Vercinaigh said:
I just want to point out that looks and cosmetics used to be a core tenant of MMO's. Running quests or grinding something to help make yourself look unique was at one point considered gameplay and content and a large draw of the genre as a whole. Now suddenly we're supposed to accept said content removed and put behind a paywall and all look like look-alike-plebs unless we cough up for something we always had before. This slow erosion of game content we had for free that now we have to pay for, when they are making provably more money than ever before in -profit- (You know...after expenses) is frankly just as unacceptable and a slippery slope. So no....pitchforks and hell raising is absolutely warranted.
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I wholeheartedly agree with this in an MMORPG environment. If I'm staring at an avatar running around an open world (GW, WoW, etc.) it totally matters how it looks. I don't see my character enough to care (load screens and dropping in and out of crucible) in an FPS environment.
 
If they had just been open about it, it wouldn't have turned into a mini-drama since diminishing xp gains is hardly a new or even rare concept. Their mistake was hiding it, and also punishing people for grinding events when there's nothing else to do if you're trying to solo the mid levels. In regular MMOs the diminishing xp is more about preventing exploits and gold trading and bla bla bla, none of which applies in Destiny so I don't really understand why they thought it was a good idea in the first place. And their lame response which amounted to "yeah, we don't like it either [even though we intentionally designed and implemented it that way]" left a lot to be desired. But as people have said, bright engrams are hardly make or break unless you're desperate for that one particular shader or whatever.
 
Vercinaigh said:
I just want to point out that looks and cosmetics used to be a core tenant of MMO's. Running quests or grinding something to help make yourself look unique was at one point considered gameplay and content and a large draw of the genre as a whole. Now suddenly we're supposed to accept said content removed and put behind a paywall and all look like look-alike-plebs unless we cough up for something we always had before. This slow erosion of game content we had for free that now we have to pay for, when they are making provably more money than ever before in -profit- (You know...after expenses) is frankly just as unacceptable and a slippery slope. So no....pitchforks and hell raising is absolutely warranted.
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Yep, used to be if you saw someone looking badass you wondered what they did and maybe even asked them how they got the look of armor. Now it's cash shop fodder... It sucks.
 
AndrewPr said:
I wholeheartedly agree with this in an MMORPG environment. If I'm staring at an avatar running around an open world (GW, WoW, etc.) it totally matters how it looks. I don't see my character enough to care (load screens and dropping in and out of crucible) in an FPS environment.
Click to expand...

I agree completely I've spent 1000 hrs on Diablo 3 and being able to change the way my character looks is needed to help keeps things fresh and entertaining however in Destiny 2 while you're playing it is CLASSIC FPS VIEW you see a small portion of your hand and a gun you only see your armor in town and in a menu, cosmetic items are totally useless.
 
So Destiny lied to it's playerbase and got caught?
Did they apologize anywhere, or is it just the "we removed the system we don't like even though we designed it after we got called on our shit" press release?
 
EODetroit said:
Wasn't it fairly recently that Bungie was one of the good developers? What happened?
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No. Bungie were sellouts from Halo onwards. And Halo was a shitty series that got popular because it introduced console gamers to what "real" online multiplayer is like. Bah humbug.
 
MrSteel74 said:
I agree completely I've spent 1000 hrs on Diablo 3 and being able to change the way my character looks is needed to help keeps things fresh and entertaining however in Destiny 2 while you're playing it is CLASSIC FPS VIEW you see a small portion of your hand and a gun you only see your armor in town and in a menu, cosmetic items are totally useless.
Click to expand...

It's all about how cool you look to other people.
 
Montu said:
Over the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend Destiny 2 players posted on Reddit that they had discovered XP gain depended on what mode you were playing or how long you played. According to the players there was no in-game notice letting you know this was happening. However, after Bungie was called out they released a patch to fix this and it worked. The only problem with the patch is they decided to double the XP to level up while they were at it. Once again greedy developers want to increase the grind as much as possible so you'll buy their loot boxes to speed things up. Totally crappy move if you ask me.

This revelation was promptly followed by the game's developer, Bungie, confirming the discovery as accurate and promising a fix. But this "fix" was coupled with another unannounced change - a flat, across-the-board reduction in XP gains for all Destiny 2 activities. Bungie only confirmed this decision after fans pointed it out.
Click to expand...

The reason XP gains scaled down over large amount of play time is because they try to make the game attractive to both occasional players and die hard players. People who don't play a huge amount still need to be able to feel like they are accomplishing something, while people that play for many hours at a time need to have goals that are a bit harder to reach or they become trivial.

I do believe that they overdid how much XP gains scaled back over time. But you also don't want loot boxes raining from the sky every time you log on.

Arguing that they are just doing this to sell loot boxes requires ignoring their rather obvious efforts to keep purchased items from skewing the game.
First of all, you can't purchase anything with real world money until you reach level 20. Even the pre-order bonus exotic weapon requires you to finish the main story before you can collect it so it doesn't give an advantage early in the game.

The items that can give you advantages that can be acquired through loot boxes are already pretty common in the game by the time you hit level 20. You should already have a good selection of armor mods by then that can effect your abilities or things like recoil or weapon handling.

Fast spawning sparrows (vehicles) can help you get from place to place a bit quicker by saving a few seconds each time you spawn one, but it's not huge and they aren't exactly all that rare. I think I have 5 now between my characters and I've never bought a loot box.

Doubling the XP per level but making the amount gained linear will almost certainly mean that I personally get more loot boxes. It probably means that the people that I play with that play more occasionally and for shorter time periods will get less than they were getting. That sucks because it might decrease their enjoyment of the game and having fun people to play with is far more important than having more duplicate items from loot boxes or getting that one rare exotic emote that I don't happen to have yet.

End game XP and getting lot boxes for it is a pretty trivial issue in Destiny 2 because they have done a decent job of making it relatively trivial. The fact that people are focusing on the trivial does indicate that they don't have something better to do.

The expansion will add new content which will help, but the loot system needs some work to make the game have better longevity between expansions. Fix that and the complaints about XP will fade to the level of insignificance it deserves.
 
ChoGGi said:
So Destiny lied to it's playerbase and got caught?
Did they apologize anywhere, or is it just the "we removed the system we don't like even though we designed it after we got called on our shit" press release?
Click to expand...

The numeric amount of XP it took to reach the next level wasn't displayed. There was a slider that gave you a general idea of how close you were to the next level. There were some things where the amount of xp and the amount you needed were fixed numbers. For example you can contribute 5000 xp to your clan each week and you get loot for reaching that goal. You could see how much clan XP you got for completing specific tasks. What you couldn't see was how much XP you needed to get to the next level.

Every decently designed game is going to have some form of diminishing returns for large amounts of time spent because they need to design the game to appeal to both occasional players and those that play incessantly, and it's difficult to balance providing enough rewards for the occasional players without trivializing the rewards for extremely active players.

The diminishing returns were kind of obvious if you played a lot. But the bright engrams still came often enough that even the rarer items from them are pretty common among players.

Good equipment isn't hard to get. It doesn't seem like even getting the best set of equipment for PVP is all that difficult or that buying loot boxes is going to make a noticeable difference.

When I get owned in PvP it's not because they have better equipment than I have, it's because they are better than I am, and most often because they are better at fighting as a team than I and my team are. Buying loot boxes isn't going to change that. Playing more and learning from those that beat me can.

But Bungie needs to add content and tweak the loot system some to keep the game enjoyable so that learning to play better is more interesting and less of a chore.
 
EODetroit said:
Wasn't it fairly recently that Bungie was one of the good developers? What happened?
Click to expand...

They still are. You can't even buy loot boxes until you reach level 20, and what they contain is either cosmetic, or easy to get without the loot boxes.

The diminishing returns on XP is something to try to appeal to occasional and die hard players alike, and the loot boxes are a pretty trivial game mechanic.

The problem is that the game is thin on content at this point, players are getting bored, and bored people make mountains of minor issues. Add in the recent backlash against Battlefront II's loot boxes and it becomes a target for people who wouldn't be complaining about it if they had something better to do. Bungie needs to give them something better to do.
 
Vercinaigh said:
I just want to point out that looks and cosmetics used to be a core tenant of MMO's. Running quests or grinding something to help make yourself look unique was at one point considered gameplay and content and a large draw of the genre as a whole. Now suddenly we're supposed to accept said content removed and put behind a paywall and all look like look-alike-plebs unless we cough up for something we always had before. This slow erosion of game content we had for free that now we have to pay for, when they are making provably more money than ever before in -profit- (You know...after expenses) is frankly just as unacceptable and a slippery slope. So no....pitchforks and hell raising is absolutely warranted.
Click to expand...

Ummmm... the better looking gear wasn't/isn't just about looks in WoW. The higher level the gear the better it usually looks. That has pretty much been the same for even single player games such as the Elder Scrolls games and every other RPG game going back to 8 and 16-bit consoles.

Same goes for FPS games.

Better gear generally looks like better gear.
 
cyclone3d said:
Ummmm... the better looking gear wasn't/isn't just about looks in WoW. The higher level the gear the better it usually looks. That has pretty much been the same for even single player games such as the Elder Scrolls games and every other RPG game going back to 8 and 16-bit consoles.

Same goes for FPS games.

Better gear generally looks like better gear.
Click to expand...

In Destiny 2 that is NOT the case. There is only 1 unique looking armor set for each class (there are only 3 classes) available from Bright Engrams and the stats are the same for any other armor drops you get from playing the game normally. Bright Engrams do not drop Exotic items which is top tier gear but you can only have 1 Exotic weapon and 1 Exotic armor piece equipped at any given time.
 
This reminds me of the old EQ Hybrid class penalty that was for years hidden until it after a certain individual left the company. If you don't recall it Hybrid classes (eg Ranger, Paladin) leveled up more slowly and the theory, later proven to be fact, was that the devs imposed an XP penalty on those classes.
 
cyclone3d said:
Ummmm... the better looking gear wasn't/isn't just about looks in WoW. The higher level the gear the better it usually looks. That has pretty much been the same for even single player games such as the Elder Scrolls games and every other RPG game going back to 8 and 16-bit consoles.

Same goes for FPS games.

Better gear generally looks like better gear.
Click to expand...

That is outright false. Plenty of MMO's had cosmetic overlays you straight earned through the game, just no, stop.
 
Vercinaigh said:
That is outright false. Plenty of MMO's had cosmetic overlays you straight earned through the game, just no, stop.
Click to expand...

I didn't say that there wasn't any cosmetic gear. That is why I used the terms "usually" and "generally".

When I was playing WoW years ago or any other game for that matter, I never cared about how the gear looked. Sure it was somewhat amusing to play around with cosmetic stuff when in town... but out in the wild, the highest rank gear got equipped even if it didn't all match.

People only playing to get the best looking gear need to drop video games and go play with Barbie dolls.
 
cyclone3d said:
I didn't say that there wasn't any cosmetic gear. That is why I used the terms "usually" and "generally".

When I was playing WoW years ago or any other game for that matter, I never cared about how the gear looked. Sure it was somewhat amusing to play around with cosmetic stuff when in town... but out in the wild, the highest rank gear got equipped even if it didn't all match.

People only playing to get the best looking gear need to drop video games and go play with Barbie dolls.
Click to expand...
Many MMO's have cosmetic slots and dyes, dating long before wow. You can spin it all you want but it used to be no Stat sacrifice anyway.
 
cyclone3d said:
I didn't say that there wasn't any cosmetic gear. That is why I used the terms "usually" and "generally".

When I was playing WoW years ago or any other game for that matter, I never cared about how the gear looked. Sure it was somewhat amusing to play around with cosmetic stuff when in town... but out in the wild, the highest rank gear got equipped even if it didn't all match.

People only playing to get the best looking gear need to drop video games and go play with Barbie dolls.
Click to expand...
WoW does not = the entire MMO Genre, nor was there no MMO's before it, please, just....stop.
 
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