There are two problems with the community outrage over this:
1. The system actually makes sense. The way XP works is that it is awarded to you for doing anything and everything, with the purpose of awarding you XP for playing how you choose to play and what you choose to play, instead of forcing you to play something specific or in a specific way. With the way the game is built, Public Events are by far the easiest to complete if you know how to manipulate the system. You can do the same Public Event in one location as many as four times within 60 to 120 seconds. Then, because of randomness, there might be another Public Event happening in 10 seconds, which you can proceed to also do four times. By contrast, doing Public Events 'legit' means you only do them once and it seems fair to assume casual players don't know how to manipulate them. Then, the next Public Event could also be as much as 5 minutes out.
The problem with all this is that it is highly random. You can't simply decrease the XP for Public Events because if you happen to be playing at a time where the latter is the case, you'll feel like you're getting barely any XP at all. So they created a bottleneck. If you somehow manage to complete many Public Events in a row, you earn less XP. If you complete a lot of Crucible matches you earn more XP. This prevented you from being forced to play and manipulate Public Events in order to gain XP. Because why would you grind something for longer than you have to? You could just play Crucible for XP. With the system turned off, you cannot anymore. Crucible doesn't award shit compared to stacking Public Events.
2. XP doesn't even matter. All these people on Reddit who claim to have 500+ hours in D2 and are grinding XP for what exactly? Bright Engrams? I had everything there was to own from Eververse after 300 hours, before I even completed my Exotic weapon collection without paying a cent. You get them by the truckloads. If you honestly have been playing consistently, you never need to buy any Bright Engrams. You can just cash the ones you get and turn anything you don't want into Bright Dust and literally buy the specific items you want with that ingame currency.
It was still an unoptimized system, but the blowback reaction to it on Reddit is absurd. The people claiming they need the XP are the same ones that simultaneously claim to have 500+ hours in the game and also that they stopped playing weeks ago after less than 80 hours because the game is bad and everything within it is meaningless. Which would of course explain why they'd need the Bright Engrams... ugh.
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