Yeah, I've read about that. While it does help in some instances (mostly for Cayde's chests), it still isn't a guarantee. There are instances where I wait there for a whole minute while standing on the chest (as recommended by Reddit), but still no rewards. Hell, while we're talking about chests - even if I do get a reward from one of Cayde's chests, there's a good chance it'll be a few blue-quality items. So, why should I care about something that's both un-rewarding and occasionally buggy? Bungie still hasn't fixed this problem, btw. It's been three months now.

Coming from a Destiny fan - maybe get a used physical copy of "the D2 complete collection" in a couple years from now. And that's only if you think you'll like the gunplay / mechanics (still the best in the genre, IMO). As for the reward system - they never have and never will design a good reward system to save their lives.

Plus, they're just plain bad at communicating with their players; this incident is just one example of many (see : 0.04% buff.) I made the mistake of hoping that would change with D2, but nope - it appears that they'll never learn unless there are some serious shake-ups in upper management. They're actively gutting the goodwill they earned from the previous generation.

I almost never pre-order games unless I'm absolutely certain I'm gonna like the game (2 pre-orders in the past 3 years), but I messed up this time around. Learned my lesson; never gonna pre-order at all going forward.

At the end of the day - Bungie has a history of incompetence, lies, and arrogance that shouldn't be actively supported.

Would this stop you from having fun though? I can tell you Reddit hasn't been satisfied with Destiny for over 3 years, not counting the one or two weeks after new content releases. Yet they all still play it and buy all the DLC. I actually have a funny list going on of people who claim to not purchase the next DLC and then I see them complaining about it in the first week regardless.

Destiny 2 gets things wrong, but it's still a fun game. The biggest issue it has right now is that you can't really play it for more than 80-150 hours before running out of things to do (meaningfully). If you're not looking to invest more time into a game at once anyway, much of the criticism doesn't apply.

Its pretty fucked that the XP bar in-game can't be trusted. I don't care if they wanna scale it, just tell people its happening. Glad they changed it regardless of why. Sometimes I wish they'd get their head out of their asses and just trust that their playerbase can understand things but I guess Bungie will be Bungie.

It's hard to overstate how inconsequential Bright Engrams are in Destiny 2. They are basically premium cosmetic packs that you can earn by playing (in D1 you had to pay with real money for premium stuff). None of the progression in the game is tied to anything that Bright Engrams drop.

If you feel like you would be compelled to buy Bright Engrams (for example) to get an alternate skin for an exotic weapon, then maybe you should stay away from Destiny 2. Otherwise it doesn't really matter.

Hot dang, Bungie. You just can't do anything right, can you?

Shooting this space gun feels alright but good gosh does literally everything else surrounding it kind of suck.

After Destiny 1 I was really interested in seeing how they would fix it for Destiny 2. After Destiny 2 I have no interest in this franchise at all.

"After reviewing our data, we agree that the system is not performing the way we’d like it to."

The only way this statement can be remotely true is if they mean that the system was supposed to not be discovered, which sadly might be exactly what they mean. Activision Blizzard is literally patenting methods to exploit players, so it's crystal-clear what they'd like to do.

This is savage, hilarious, and true. Well put, duder.

@notnert427: I don't think that's true. Turning this system off has made XP grinding way, way worse. You are forced to do Public Events now because they can be completed by far the quickest. The system no longer adapts to the activity you're playing, it now invalidates playing any content other than PE's.

I used to be able to play for 6 hours and get roughly the same amount of Bright Engrams in that timeframe, give or take one, no matter what I chose to play. I now get exactly 100% less by playing anything other than a Public Event.

Believe it or not, the system was actually there for a reason other than greed and scheming. Games without monetization use these types of XP bottleneck systems as well.

From a design and balancing perspective I 100% agree, but from a PR perspective they dun' goofed. They should have been transparent about this from the beginning because they had to know people would find out sooner rather than later just by observation. They'd be putting themselves at risk for litigation if they had done this on purpose to drive sales of bright engrams (which makes me think they just plain fucked up here instead of doing this intentionally.)

Exactly. They "fixed it", and quietly tried to double the XP grind to keep similar bullshit in play. It's a laughable shell game of them trying to hide the purposeful bottleneck. Next, they'll probably "fix" the doubled XP grind and quietly try to devalue one or more of the in-game currencies or some shit until that gets discovered. And so on and so on...

@notnert427: Indeed. They shouldn't have said 'we agree the system isn't working as intended and we're turning it off'. It was maybe doing too much bottlenecking than intended, but that system was absolutely supposed to be there in some form. They should have just come out and said: 'Look, we can't allow you to grind XP in the most efficient way possible because that'll mean any activity other than 'the efficient one' will be abandoned and we don't want our game to be played like that. We're turning the bottleneck down a notch, but it will still be there to prevent you from wanting to play anything other than Public Events'.

Because that is closer to the truth than what they said. It just seemed like a knee-jerk reaction this way.

@wetracoon: Agreed.

@zevvion: I think the new system seems to be working alright but they probably do need to make some adjustments soon to XP kill values in Raid, Crucible, and Strikes. If they doubled those, I think this system would be working really well. Did they also change the "Rested" bonus of your first 3 levels being 3x XP? I heard someone say it was only 1.5x XP now but that may have been before people realized XP had jumped from 80k to 160k. Personally, I'm not playing enough right now to gain more than the first 3 Bright Engrams per week, if I even get those, because of completely other reasons such as a lack of anything to do, but this system seems like it would work much better for Clarion Call, which was the entire thing that basically brought this controversy to the forefront to begin with (I know there was a post or two about XP before Clarion Call, but this system wasn't really even noticeable until then unless you were just doing PE's for hours on end, and nobody does that).

I wasnt that affected by it, but its still shady. You just dont have promotions and Events that inspire grinding, if you bottleneck EXP. Not to mention selling Medallions in a cash shop, albeit it the system is incredibly easy to get Bright Dust even without spending a dime.

The game in general screams throttling. Farming chests? Nope, not too fast. Farming Exp? Nope, not too fast. I think its a great idea, but the way it was implemented is seriously lacking. I could see dong 3-4 PEs really quick and it throttles down, but after 1, its jusy silly.

"Hey Bungie, why you guys throttling XP without surfacing it?"

"We actually just concluded that it wasn't working out. Glad you guys are on the same page."

"Wait, now you've doubled the XP needed to level up?!"

@theht: I guess there might be 1 positive about the 160k XP vs 80k XP cap, next week when we have to go from Level 20 to Level 25. It will just actually last through most of the story rather us hitting the new Level Cap after our first 2 Story Missions. It will still be a joke of why did they even do this, but maybe not as much as it would have otherwise been. I do wonder if they will again increase that level cap of XP through those Levels and if not, wouldn't have been a better way of doing this: 21 90 XP, 22 100 XP, 23 120 XP, 24 140 XP, 25 160 XP (and you know, had an actual reason for the increased XP Cap). If they are really worried about lost income due to Bright Engrams, it only would have been 10 days.