The loot table would be 3x as large as all the items in Eververse were earnable in the game. Of course I would like more content, everyone would, but I'm raiding 6 times a week now, I don't even have time for Trials which I really want to play too.

I have some gripes with the endgame, but Masterworks are a good step in the right direction towards fixing that. I don't have a ton of issues with the actual content of said endgame. My biggest and only real issue is the invasive nature of Eververse at the moment. After lots of people have paid for microtransactions for months, I purchased DLC for 20 bucks which was slim in content, then its first event used that DLC as a platform to attempt to sell me more stuff instead of using previous earned money to expand on the game.

It's truly gross.

@zevvion: The loot table would be 3x as large as all the items in Eververse were earnable in the game. Of course I would like more content, everyone would, but I'm raiding 6 times a week now, I don't even have time for Trials which I really want to play too.

I completely disagree. There is nothing of meaning, outside of mods, that comes from Eververse. Ships and Sparrows are basically cosmetic, taunts are cosmetic, you get no weapons (only ornaments for exotics), the armor you get has no special stats AND requires you to feed items into them to get their item levels up...

You're explaining why it isn't pay to win, not why it isn't bad for the game. Would you remove every piece of cosmetic from the game entirely since it is pointless for gameplay? Why have more than one armor suit, one shader, one ship, one everything if that is reasonable?

There isn't enough stuff to chase for in D2 which is the biggest problem. People kept playing Raids for Ghosts, Ships, Shaders and other cosmetic items in D1. It matters that all that stuff has been removed and placed in a digital storefront.

I just want to quickly point out that this whole statement is entirely inaccurate. Bungie is doing some BS right now, but this isn't true at all. 3 of Coins is the broken thing of which you are referring to, that doesn't work in Heroic Strikes (admitted to by Bungie here). And even more so than what you said, many people don't actually believe Bungie about the 50% increase in drop rate, as that doesn't seem to line up with personal accounts all over Reddit, and of all the people on our own Discord we've talked to, including @zevvion who did a Poll of everyone's drop rates. They honestly just don't appear to be working at all. Now, where you are wrong is that this is in any way attached to real money. That is as far from the truth as it could be. Xur is a weekly vendor who comes from Friday at reset (11am Central, 9am Pacific) to Tuesday at reset. All of his wares are purchasable via Legendary Shards, an in game currency gained from breaking down unneeded Legendaries (3 Shards) and Exotics (5 Shards). Of which, many players like myself have obtained thousands of over the course of a few hundred hours of play. Last weekend was the first time Xur sold both Fated Engrams (97 Shards, one time purchase) and 3 of Coins (31 Shards each). The other big thing that happened was that some players were receiving duplicate Exotics from Fated Engrams (the entire point is a Fated Engram is an Exotic you don't own), and Bungie said this was also a bug they intend to fix early next year.

Now I'm all for calling Bungie out on their BS right now, of which they've had plenty. Most recently is this as a part of The Dawning, which caused this pretty hilarious reaction from Destiny's most popular streamer Gothalion. The funniest part of this is that 7 Dust is basically nothing, even the absolute cheapest item in the store is 40 Dust, and all gets you is 1 other Shader. Most items of real value are 1-3k Dust. The real reason this is an issue is that Shader Space in inventory is very valuable right now, as we only have 50 slots, and about 100 different Shaders. I'm personally constantly destroying lower quality Shaders to keep room for the higher quality ones. So taking up two slots for 1 Shader is beyond obnoxious.

But Xur's broken 3 of Coins having anything to do with real money isn't a thing.

It is true that I suspected something to be wrong with Three of Coins and asked the active Giant Bomb community to give me statistics on their experience so that I could aggregate those and draw a conclusion. But I had several theories on what might be happening and it turns out that one of them was correct: Three of Coins does work, but the base drop chance for Exotics is too low to experience a noticeable buff in anything lower than 100 obtained sources of possible Exotic engrams. And even then the chance you personally, as a human being, notice it is pretty damn low.

To illustrate, here is how it works out: if we assume the base drop chance for Exotics is 5%, or 1 in 20 Strike completions, then Three of Coins should boost that chance by 50%, which is 7.5% or... still about 1 in 20 Strike completions. You will only notice this difference theoretically if you do 40 Strikes. Then, you get 2 Exotics without Three of Coins and 3 Exotics if you do use Three of Coins.

After the criticism, Bungie tested it and claims it works, explaining the 50% boost. I am inclined to believe them since that would explain it. That doesn't mean that the community is wrong for being critical of the working of Three of Coins though, heck, I was so skeptical I started to do research. It is an inherently bad item. First, it doesn't tell you what it does, it merely says: increased chance. Second, once you realize what it actually does you can do some simple math and know that over 100 Strikes, you will get around 7 Exotics with Three of Coins, whereas you would get 5 without them. Third, you have to actually stop and think that in order for that to really work, you have to have Three of Coins active across all 100 Strikes. Since you complete around 3 Strikes an hour and Three of Coins lasts 4 hours, that is around 9 Three of Coins you need to use, provided you play all 4 hours while that buff is active (which no one does). So it would be closer to 12+ Three of Coins in order to make that. Which is 372 Legendary Shards for 2 additional Exotics.

Whoop!

I am not against the low drop rate of Exotics, I think it is a good thing. But the Three of Coins is a terrible item that just shouldn't be in the game.

@zevvion: Yeah, I completely agree. I saw all of your stuff. Maybe you are right and it is working correctly, and it's just that 50% is basically like it isn't working. I also honestly think a 5% droprate seems generous, but you did the poll so I'm sure you are pulling that from the data you collected. I've seen way too many reports of "I've used 3 of Coins all weekend for zero Exotics" though. The weirdest phenomenon was players reporting Exotic drops from Patrols, which I didn't even know dropped Exotics. Now if they boosted that to a 400% increase, and over those 100 Strikes, you obtained 20 Exotics rather than 5, now that's a worthwhile Item. It's still not the best value proposition, as 25 Legendary Shards for those extra 15 Exotics is still not a great value, but at least it wouldn't feel like you were being cheated, and you would get 1-2 Exotics each time you used a 3 of Coins. So unless they do something like that to them (which I agree I don't necessarily think they should), they should just remove them from the game like you said. Though all of this is far from the point I was trying to make that 3 of Coins have absolutely nothing to do with Real Money.

@hestilllives19: The data I received can't be used to know the exact droprate though, I had stuff from 21 people. And only over two days. 5% was an estimate on my part, could be lower.

@zevvion: Yeah, I've heard some people claim as low as 2-3% since the nerfs to Public Events which had the highest droprates before. And even likely being generous at 5%, it doesn't put Exotic Engram drop rates in that bright of a spot. Though I think they are fine if they ever get around to putting out the duplicates protection stuff. The fact that there are 19 Vanilla D2 Exotic Weapons, 5 Curse Exotic Weapons, 33 Vanilla Exotic Armors, 9 Curse Exotic Armors, and 1 Curse Exotic that drops for each Class (but is the same Exotic) for a total of 67 Exotics. At 216 hours, I've probably averaged obtaining almost 1 Exotic every other hour and I'm still missing 9 of them is a bit annoying, especially since I haven't missed a single Xur, so of the one's I'm missing he hasn't sold yet. A quick glance at http://www.destinyxur.com/ and I know I bought 6 of his Weapons, 7 Titan Armors, 5 Hunter Armors, and 6 Warlock Armors, and Shinobu's Vow came out of my Fated Engram this week, so that's 25 of my 58 Exotics coming from Xur. When you also take into account that 18 of the other Exotics I own were Quest or guaranteed rewards, it paints a really grim picture of Exotic Engrams unique drop rates. For me, only 15 of my Exotic Engrams out of roughly 100 Exotic Engram drops, were not in fact duplicates... That's unbelievably awful by any sort of standard, and it's no wonder it feels like I only get Duplicates from Exotic Engrams.

Note: I've gotten 6 Saint 14 Helmets since the Curse of Osiris launch. Pretty much every Exotic Engram on my Titan turns into a Saint 14, it's obnoxious.

Was exotic drop ever a problem? I got every exotics pre-Curse bar one just by playing the game. I know there may be some players getting screwed by RNG, but that surely can be fixed by changing the drop chance for that specific player, instead of 3oC.

@galerian: Likely in anticipation of the absolute nothingness 3 of Coins are Bunige dropped the Exotic Engram drop rates in Public Events, which before seemingly had the highest drop rates and were the easiest place to grind for Exotics. Though my problem isn't really with the drop rates themselves, heck, I got 3 Exotics tonight alone, but rather the fact that most often those drop tend to be duplicates of already owned Exotics, of which all 3 of mine tonight were after posting that earlier. 3 Exotics for finishing all of the Weekly Milestones on a single character is pretty good, it just sucks when none of them are useful other than for my 4th Shinobu's to be 335 which put my Hunter at 335 finally.

@galerian: They nerfed the Exotic engram droprate with the Curse of Osiris patch. Not counting Raid chests which still have 30% chance, I now get around 2-3 Exotic engrams each week. I play/played about 30-40 hours a week.

People complained the droprate for Exotics were too high as you got everything way too easily and too quick. So I am in agreement with the nerf, it's just that Three of Coins doesn't really impact your findings even at a hefty ingame price and claiming that it does but being very vague about it. They should just remove Three of Coins and alter the droprate to what they think it should be.

@hestilllives19 They specifically nerfed Exotic drops from Public Events and raised chances for Exotics from Strikes. I believe the 1% drop chance for Public Events, but I think it is closer to 5% for Strikes now. At least I myself get around 1 in 20.

I'm starting to feel like maybe Bungie isn't the problem. Maybe it's us? Maybe it's more specifically the uber hardcore fans who may feel entitled. I've never felt slighted by the inclusion of Eververse, but I also don't feel the need to acquire every item in the game. What if we weren't supposed to be able to acquire every item? What if we could just relax and enjoy the ride while thinking "at least this isn't Battlefront 2?" Maybe it's just me. I dunno.

@rooney281: don't let the nitpicks about exotic drop rates and loot boxes obfuscate the fact that the game is a mess and Bungie fucks up 2 things for every one thing they fix. This has been the trend for the last 3 years and we were fools to expect otherwise. We can get lost in a mountain of complaints but the bottom line is: they made Destiny 1.5, not Destiny 2. Hell, in some ways Destiny 2 is worse than any Destiny 1 expansion. It's a crying shame really.

Expectations certainly matter, but Bungie did nothing in their promotion of the game to let us know that the game was not going to appeal to fans of the first one. With that in mind, I think it is fair to say the problem is them, not us.

After criticism of D2 reached its peak a few weeks ago, Bungie came out with a blog post and a podcast to address community concerns about the game. In the podcast, they described three types of players that we commonly refer to as casual and hardcore crowds: the 'tourists' whom they say will play the story, maybe some other things and then they are moving on to the next game, never intending to play any one game for countless hours. The 'intermediate' who will log back in for several hours to a few days whenever there is a new event or major update, but otherwise also move on to different games. Lastly the 'hobbyist' who will log into the game nearly every day because they love the game so much.

It is in this podcast that they admitted they built D2 from the ground up for tourists and somewhat for intermediates, but they ignored hobbyists completely. They didn't say it with clear words, but they basically acknowledged that this was a mistake because they failed to meet the expectations they had set themselves.

As for Eververse, I don't really see how we could argue it isn't a problem. All the loot that was available from activities in D1 that is (mostly) cosmetic has now all been moved to the Eververse store and removed from activity reward pools. This means two things: you now have to get good RNG in a gigantic pool to hope you get what you want and no longer can grind the specific activity to get it, feeling rewarded once you do get it. Additionally, you can or will have to pay for what was bare bones loot before.

In a game that has a loot supply issues, had these exact rewards in its predecessor for no charge and for which you have already paid 85 bucks, having more than 50% of said loot behind a paywall is absolutely insane. This is not a free to play game. You paid 60 bucks for a game that had adequate content and no loot incentive to do any of it, then were charged more for getting additional loot you were starving for and then you paid another 25 bucks for woefully underdeveloped DLC for the most part and were told you had to spend even more additional funds in the first event they launched after that DLC.

I love Destiny 2, probably more than anyone on this board. But the value proposition here is terrible. Microtransactions were supposed to fund new content and updates. Instead, the only thing they seemingly get going is more opportunities to spend more money.

@zevvion: What you are saying makes sense and is also probably one of the first arguments I've heard that wasn't sounding like a rage fest. Especially since I would say that I fall into the intermediate category, I'm not feeling slighted at that level of play.

Now, please correct me if I'm wrong bit isn't everything that's sold at Eververse available in bright engrams? Again, I may be wrong but I was under impression that this was the case. If it is, then those cosmetics aren't behind a mandatory paywall, and I've had no problem earning plenty of those through my play time. I'm aware they have had some issues with scaling back xp earned the more you play but they fixed that right?

I'm not trying to start any fights here, so to everyone here, please don't think that. I'm just trying to understand why a game I enjoy is angering the universe.

@rooney281: Relax, it didn't seem like you were 'starting a fight'.

Yes, everything in Eververse is obtainable from Bright Engrams. But it is all a random chance, with the most wanted items having lower drop rates. All that stuff is seasonal, which means you have 3 months to grind enough XP to obtain what you want, otherwise it is unobtainable forever. This is an incentive to buy Bright Engrams because it is realistically impossible to grind as much that you can actually get all the things you want.

Now, even if all the stuff was easy to get though, that doesn't fix the biggest issue which is that putting such content behind an XP grinder is just super boring, because the most efficient way to grind XP is to do mundane tasks and do them repeatedly. Whereas you used to have incentive to do the Raid 3x a week to get a chance at that cool looking ship or amazingly fast sparrow, you now just grind XP mindlessly and have no real reason to do the Raid or other things other than having fun with your friends.

Which to be clear is obviously the most important thing and the reason why I still do Raids every week, but I would have liked it better if there were good rewards on top of that. They had that in the past and now that is gone.

Ever since they introduced Masterworks that issue has been alleviated somewhat though, I will admit. Besides fun, I now also do raids for the high chance of Masterworks which is quite nice.

@zevvion: thanks for explaining it. Makes more sense now. I usually stay away from posting on most forums due to instant hostility in some communities but it's been nice having this mini dialog within the giantbomb community!

@rooney281: When talking specifically about Eververse, I think a video xHoundishx put out yesterday most eloquently describes the issues currently with Eververse, and it's pretty much exactly how I feel. I'll link it below.

• Eververse items being exclusively lootboxes, even if given for Leveling up and free, are unfun and feel unrewarding. Destiny 1's Eververse had Emotes that had specific prices in Silver, and in my opinion this is a very fair system. Having them as options out of loot boxes is fine, but they need to have a direct $ value in Silver to guarantee purchase. And their Silver prices are quite ludicrous at over 3k Bright Dust each. This means that even avid players like myself and Zevvion are only able to purchase 1 or maybe two items per Season depending on if we got lucky 1k Bright Dust drops or not from packages, and RNG deciding if we obtain the Ships/Ghosts/Emotes we want is not ok.
• Some Eververse items should have never been Eververse items to begin with. Emotes belong in Eververse, I don't think many would argue that those belong as in game rewards, and even the Seasonal Armors and Shaders (though the Shader System is an entire different topic) are fine. But it's very clear many of the Ships/Ghosts/Sparrows have been pulled out of Destiny 2 like they were in Destiny 1's Raids, Unique Quests, Hidden Story Missions, etc to be included in Destiny 2's Eververse. Many of which currently include lore based items which have zero business in Eververse and not just included in the base game such as Sails of Osiris, Saint 14's Gray Pigeon, Kabr's Glass Aegis, Ikora's Resolve, etc. These are the type of items that were Quest rewards in Destiny 1 that now don't exist in Destiny 2. See examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. And Mods have no business being in Eververse either, while I have no problem with them being pay to win, they are just there to water down the loot pool and make it harder to obtain the good items, and that isn't ok.
• Extending from the last point, with these items in Eververse that arguable don't belong, it subtracts from the End Game. This being one of the biggest problems with Destiny 2 since launch, a rather lack luster End Game, and more specifically, zero real incentive to tackle Prestige Activities. Bungie is spending development time on Eververse that should be being spent on their core game and not their lootbox sideshow. Putting that time and energy into developing the loot system for End Game and Prestige End Game activities would drastically improve the overall game in ways that it has sorely been lacking in comparison to it's own predecessor Destiny 1. The End Game feels really neglected right now, and putting these type of items as rewards for End Game completions, like they were in Destiny 1, is the direction Bungie needs to go back towards.

These are far from Destiny's only problems, and according to Christopher Barrett Bungie is already working on some of this so hopefully they solve the Eververse problems soon. It's just really sad as a Destiny fan to see the shape Destiny 2 is in right now, I honestly never thought we would be here as far as Destiny 1 came by the early part of this year, it's sequel shouldn't be having so many problems they solved in their previous game years ago, it's pretty mind blowing.

@pyrodactyl: If we had only gotten Destiny 1.5, can you imagine how much better of a place Destiny 2 would be in right now. I saw this image on Reddit the other day and I kinda wish Destiny 2 was just a massive expansion to Destiny right now. The Crucible wouldn't be as broken. Likely Eververse wouldn't be as pervasive. And we would have so much more to do, especially for players who didn't play through D1 content.

Yep, the more I think about it the more it's clear to me they totally failed to justify scrapping Destiny 1 to make Destiny 2. They did nothing with this new clean slate and failed to address any of the core problems I had with the first game. From where they are now I'm not sure they can get to something I would consider worthwhile before Destiny 3 and even then, I'll be much more skeptical of any claim they make about that game. This is probably my last post about Destiny for quite a while. I'm hopeful other games like Monster Hunter, Red Dead or Athem can fill the void Destiny is leaving behind in 2018.

@pyrodactyl: After playing Monster Hunter Beta, while fun, it's not something in the realm of a Destiny killer. And Red Dead Redemption 2 is going to be amazing as well as The Last of Us 2, as sequels to 2 of my favorite games of all time, but neither really fill that void Destiny does. Anthem though, with both Casey Hudson as Bioware General Manager and Drew Karpyshyn as the head writer, I have extremely high hopes for that game. Casey was instrumental in what Mass Effect was and Drew is one of the best writers in all of video games. Having read all of Drew's Mass Effect books, seeing how far that book series fell when he didn't write the final one (it was a complete dumpster fire), how much worse the story arc's in Mass Effect 3 were without his touch on them (Mass Effect 3's ending would have surely ended up very different if he was still on that project rather than working on SWTOR), and having been told by many friends how amazing the writing and story were on The Old Republic, it's clear Drew is up there in the same league as both Amy Henning and Neil Druckmann as the top writers in video games. Anthem is looking very promising, especially if that demo they showed last year is for real. Not that I hope it's a Destiny killer, but I hope that it's amazing and finally somebody puts pressure on Bungie to start putting their best foot forward with the Destiny franchise. It really feels like they are half a**ing it right now and milking the Eververse gravy train because nothing is stopping them from it currently.

@hestilllives19: While I agree Monster Hunter probably won't have the legs to completely replace Destiny, I wouldn't make too many assumption based on the beta. Those games are built on a solid loop that was barely hinted at in the beta. Hunts are on timer of 50-60 minutes, not 20. Monsters have more health and you can't hope to take down the toughest of them with beginner weapons like you could in the beta. Hunts involve gathering materials all across the different zones, crafting traps and support items. I don't expect the game to have a fully fleshed out end game at launch but I bet it will be added over time so it could turn into a real contender in the long run.

I fully expect Red Dead to have a big online mode. I never got into GTA online but it does seem like there is a lot to it so the evolution of that concept could totally give Destiny a run for its money.

As for Anthem I'm excited but we'll have to wait and see. A lot can go wrong when you make a loot shooter *cough* the Division *cough* but that studio has made some of my favorite games of all time. Hopefully EA keeps its grubby hands off of the project so it doesn't turn into some lootbox treadmill. There's no way it comes out before 2019 so I would look at the other 2 in the short term.

Trials is in a very sorry state at the moment. The difference between now and the week before The Dawning launched is insane. In that time, LFG had 5+ pages of posts, the entire first page completely consisting of 'less than a minute ago' and '2 minutes ago' posts. Today, two weeks later, there are exactly 6 posts. Less than a quarter of a page. The third one says 'about an hour ago'.

It's insane. I could find groups to play with without trying a few weeks ago. Now I would have to be on LFG all day and maybe I would find a group to play with eventually that would be in the 0.8 K/D range. In short, impossible to find a group. I'm completely reliant on friends now. Which is unfortunate since my best bud just had a second child so he's not on much, one other guy plays a ton so he's usually already in a group and Hesti is in a different timezone so that doesn't work well either.

As one of the few people on these boards that likes D2 PvP, this really sucks. I would rather they lowered ttk and made it less fun so at least I could play.

This tbh. I can't believe I spent £500 on MAG last week to be betrayed.

@zevvion: Same with twitch it seems. Hovering around 2k yesterday for a Trials is kinda bad.