I just watched video explaining new leveling system. bungie guy says " In year 1 this buried on your armor and you never really saw this, but it was the most important thing for getting into deeper endgame." However when you look at equipment and weapons which all have light they don't list a light value. Instead they have attack and defense values, and they are just taking all your equipment and averaging it out to spit out a light number, In video guy has 3 weapons at 190 and 4 pieces of armor at 190 but since his ghost is only 170 he ends up with light 186. He goes on to talk about you will not have to struggle to get raid boots cause your light will go up with every piece of equipment. What he doesn't point out is that if you are lacking just one piece of equipment you will be weighing yourself down. So You are still going to need those random hard to find boots. He says "Your not just doing raid for one of four spot, everything matters now."

You base level will now tick up with everything you do. Great makes sense but we will all be working our way to 40, that's the cap 40. Since most people playing destiny are already between 28-34, would guess, I don't think it will take long for people to reach 40. Which you will need to get to cause all the new great armor requires you to be level 40. How do they not see that this is the same stupid system has before. Max out to level 40, than hunt for greater gear with higher light levels. Aside from just need 3 pieces of armor they added ghost and badges with light so now there are 5 perfect items to reach top level.

HAs much as they have changed things they are still doing the same thing.

Which video was this? I'm thinking we'll just have to wait and see how it all works out, but yeah, if anything it sounds like it'll just make it harder to get to max level because there's not one stat that you can look at and say "oh ok this is the best I can get."

@catsakimbo: bungie had twitch show today talking about all kinds of things. Gamespot has cut that video into a 3 different videos, one of which is all about leveling (where I got quotes from).

They are just allowing people who don't have the best armor and weapons to still be able to have access to raids and end game content. The gear chase is there, but in a more meaningful way and it doesn't prevent you from seeing the full scope of the game.

@philosyfee: What end game content? if you haven't gotten into raid by now let me suggest you just don't even bother trying. I'm still questioning how much new content there is? One new area, one new raid, lots of quests that lead you back to where you've been before. Seems like they are doing more in the PvP but maybe that's just all they're talking about for now.

Having gear locked to the level cap isn't an uncommon thing at all and is totally fine imo

@bofooq: I don't really agree that they are doing the same things. One of the major things they have done is removed scaling based on light entirely. Because now scaling is XP based, up to the new level cap of 40. So there will be no more being locked out of end game activities like Raids or just unable to complete them because you haven't found the right gear to compete in them. They are also giving us a ton of new avenue's to get Legendary gear after you hit that max level. Buy gear from Vendors, buy Legendary Engrams from Crytarch, get gear drops, etc. In that video at the top of the stream and released yesterday we saw a level 30 guardian with 320 light level. So 280, is definitely not the max, and that level now slightly increases damage and damage reduction on armor, not the 30% reduction we saw previously for being one level under whatever activity we were participating in. All in all I think these changes drastically improve Destiny and I'm ready to learn more already.

My big problem isn't light or experience or drops...or how it all adds up.

The story is a muddled boring mess. They character you play is dull. The world they have made is threadbare and lifeless. We fall on this old crutch that, ' the shooting feels good', but does it matter when Wizards from the Moon are about as lifeless as mannequins? Does the shooting 'feeling good' make up for your character being characterless? Does the shooting 'feeling good make the world any less lifeless, constrained, and dull? NOPE! Sorry to be so negative, but I don't see this series going anywhere good.

All this constructive (yet hand-wringing) talk about mechanism of leveling should have been solved before even the first brick of story was layed. The next game isn't a year behind - It is five years behind. The Destiny we got last year was a pre-Alpha proof of concept at best, it needs YEARS more work.

My prediction is this: The second game will come out, it still won't be all that interesting or functional, and at that point the brand is irrecoverably damaged. If a third game ever comes is anyone's guess. I think this series sees three games and it over, Activation and Bungie agree the contract is null & void. At best Activision gets right of first refusal for their next game. No at worst, because someone will bankroll them for something at least another time or two more.

I wasn't saying that 280 was the light max, I was just trying to explain how they are figuring your light level now. Every gun and piece of equipment you have gets averaged together equaling your light level. So you can't find high level boots or ghost your light level will be dragged down even if the rest of your gear is top notch.

@bofooq: That's how every MMO works though. Item level is a major part of all the big MMOs out there, and Destiny, whether it wants to or not, is an MMO, so I'm glad they are starting to embrace that. Levels going to 40 through experience is the correct move, and so is having gear past 40 being based on an average I-level style system, in this case L-Level. It's also a gear grinding game, looking for the best upgrades, so yes, if you don't have the best in all slots your Light Level will be averaged smaller then someone who did, but that's no different from what it was before, if someone was Light Level 33 in the old game and you needed them to be 34 for Skolas.

This will only matter to cutting edge players racing for world firsts or super early raid kills. If that doesn't apply to you (read: 99% of the other players of Destiny) then having that one Boot item that's not quite best in slot, won't make you pull hair.

Bungie doesn't want to fix the game, they don't think it's broken and they think they have a large enough player base that still likes it and plays it that they don't have to "fix" it at its core.

The game wasn't what a lot of people wanted and disappointed a lot of people, but there were a lot of people who either liked it well enough (Jeff sort of falls into this camp) or loved it (Brad) that they aren't doing a lot of soul-searching, just tweaking. Don't expect big changes, they aren't coming.

I say this as someone who felt profoundly let down by Destiny and hasn't even touched the last two expansions even though I bought the silly $100 pack that included them at launch.

@valjean9430: Bungie has said that they are going to make every character what ever level they are now with their gear. So my hunter and warlock will be level 33 when taken king comes out and I will be working my way to 40. I would wager most players hit new level cap before end of September.

The thing I found most interesting is they are saying that light leveling system didn't work, so they are changing it. However, they aren't really changing it. Leveling will work the on different scales but its still hit max level than chance light for "end game."

Well I think having the light and level separated is a step in the right direction, Destiny is an somewhat MMO not totally but even WoW has lvl and gear not tied together and people can pvp in WoW all the way up to the cap... I think it's fair to open up the level cap to people who can't or don't want to do a 6 man raid just to get the armor needed to cap out... I play solo or with one other friend, so daily, weekly, and strikes are pretty much all I'm able to do and maybe iron banner (but PVP isn't really that fun in destiny), I've played over 600hrs on XB1 maxin out all the subclasses and can only get one lvl 33 and two lvl 32 characters. I would like match making for the prison up to lvl 34 saving the 35 as and hardcore raid option, the nightfall could maybe use some matchmaking as well. I can understand gear being locked out because you didn't do the thing it's tied too but honestly I think that more paths to the top is needed if indeed they want a 10 years out of this game.

@bofooq: You're completely overlooking the key improvement of this system. With the previous light system, if one of your armor pieces didn't have max light, you'd be level 33 instead of level 34, thus taking a penalty of 30% to damage dealt and damage received against level 34 enemies. This was extremely punishing to players trying to play end game content that didn't have the gear to be max level.

With the new system, you are correct that any piece of gear with lower stats than the rest will lower your light stat, it won't be to such a punishing extent. If all your gear had 300 attack and defense except for 1 thing, your light value may be 295 instead of 300. We don't know the exact scaling numbers, but they've said that damage scaling is more granular and is based on any change in light, not just the amount that takes you over light level thresholds. So, whereas this gear setup would previously cost you an entire light level and penalize your damage by 30%, now you're taking a much smaller penalty, whatever 5 light equates to.

Whether you want to accept it or not, persistent end-game driven games like Destiny need a progression system for end-game players beyond standard leveling. There needs to be chase to keep playing invested once they've reached max level and entered the end-game. For most games, it's some sort of item level system, and Bungie moving the light concept more in line with an item level type system is absolutely the right way to go. If the progression completely stopped when players hit level 40, there would be very little reason for most people to keep playing.

Also, we have no idea what light level the end game is tuned for, but if it's anything like the past content the only thing that punish you for having less than whatever the light cap is will be the hardest difficulty of the raid. With everything else there will be a margin for error and you won't need to max level everything.

Unless you're someone like me, whose friends do not play Destiny, and since Bungie still refuses to add matchmaking support for raids, will very likely never see them.
Granted, this is partially my own choice, as I didn't find Vault of Glass all that interesting, nor was the first chunk of Crota's End that I saw. After playing WoW for any amount of time, the idea that Bungie thinks Destiny's raids are "too much" for pull up groups through matchmaking is insulting.

Not trying to sound rude, but I don't get how the "shooting feels good" is somehow a crutch. This is basically the gameplay part of the game. I will agree with you that the story / characters / setting all suck (barely there, more like it). But the people who are playing this game primarily care for the shooting "feeling good". It's fairly obvious, considering how many people are still playing it. Would it be a better game if the writing was better? Absolutely. However, that's nowhere near as big a flaw as you are claiming it is. At least to the people playing it.

And it seems like my opinions on stories in games is the opposite. Games like TLOU, Gone Home, Bioshock Infinite, that had mediocre to awful controls and meh gameplay, but told great stories just don't interest me. My main issue is that if I watch the YouTube playthrough of any of these titles, I get to experience the best parts of the story without having to slog through the game. That's not the sign of a good game to me.

They should maybe offer the option for matchmaking for the older raids at this point, ive done VoG HM twice now with a LFG group where none talked a single word during the raid.

@monkeyking1969 There is one major problem with your theory. Millions of people are still playing Destiny and loving it. That's something I want to yell at Jeff when he would go off on one of his unhinged anti-Destiny tirades. He acts as if everyone is angry at Bungie and hate the game.

To be clear though, I COMPLETELY get why someone wouldn't be into Destiny. It's a very unique experience. But the rabid hate that we see so much is a bit much.

Are there, though? Have we seen any actual stats on stuff like this come out of Bungie?

Do you have to spend more money for this?

The 'people who have never played an MMO yelling about MMO-style systems in Destiny, an MMO'-train is still going strong, I see

This sounds like the same system WoW has used for years now. They call it item level. Your ilvl is dependent on your gear and until you reach a certain ilvl end game content is locked away from you. It's not particularly hard to get that gear to get into the content and you can raise your ilvl much higher than you'll ever need (at which point it's just sort of an epeen thing).

@Mike Fair point. I didn't mean it in the literal sense of millions and millions of players. I meant the community is still huge.

What I find funny is that people are so puzzled that Destiny is enjoyable and successful to a larger group of players then the very vocal minority of the internet who root for it to die, all the hit pieces on gamer blog sites and negative sentiment some people have and are willing to share don't really make the game any less fun... it's in the top 10 viewed games on twitch since launch for a reason, same reason LoL, DOTA, and Minecraft have been there its fun.... Millions, Thousands, Hundreds, would stats really matter to making it more or less fun?? The walking simulators and QTE heavy story driven games critically do well & become the darling of the vocal minority internet community but stat wise don't do well at all but that doesn't make those games any less enjoyable to the people who've play them??

Destiny has its flaws but IMO Bungie has addressed some of them and the positives outweigh the others...

@Mike: I'm not sure where this skepticism is coming from. Why do you think big sites like polygon still post xur's inventory every friday? Why did kotaku report on their competitor's cover story? Did you look at the number of people watching the Bungie streams? From the admission of everyone involved all that content pulls in insane numbers.

Even in the low period between DLCs I can get in any type off content right away. The destiny community is still huge. People put an embarrassing number of hours in this game every day.

@maddman60620: I'm not talking about how fun the game is or isn't. It's great that you like Destiny and all, but I'm talking about how many people are still actually playing it regularly.

They should just hire a people of folks from Blizzard and call it a day.

To experience the new content, yes. If you just want to see the improvements they've made to the game, like the new leveling system, bounties, etc. you won't need to pay to get that.

@maddman60620 And people can say what they will about Bungie but they have really listened to their community and some of the changes they are making show a willingness to not only listen but truthfully examine their game. The first TTK stream showed a ton of that and it is only the first of three info-drop streams. I'm excited.

The leveling system sounds similar enough that I font even consider it much. I just wish they would produce more content at a fairer price.

As a person who has played MMO's for years Ive come to expect more than Destiny gives in that regard especially since they want £40 at the start of a year and then £20 every 3 months (which basically equates to an MMO that charges £8 a month so £24 for 3 months) but only providing a series of pretty looking enviroments but basic trash mobs and a boss with a single or no mechanic (in the Strikes) and then having Raids with only 4 or so bosses. The Raid bosses are really solid and I enjoyed playing, and replaying them, a few times but there is not enough of an end-game to warrant that compared to other MMO's.

Having gotten to the "End-game" in Destiny it just felt barren of content. I could repeat basic missions again and again, perhaps this time the enemies are weak to one element or have stronger melee, but getting to end-game never felt like a reward to me (as something like WoW or FF14 ARR did recently) since it was the same content again with my only goal being a Raid that while extremely fun felt short.

Other people obviously love it, and its absolutely their right to, and it looks like Bungie's plan is to keep going on the same path for the same fans but thats not enough for me. When they begin to add more content at a fairer price (especially when the $20 stops being sold for £20/20 Euro's) and including more interesting bosses in non-Raids then I would love to come back and completely invest but Destiny is just barren to me.

i'm not sure if that can be really be head counted, 4 platforms psn/xbl and destiny servers up and down, random times any given month, I read an article saying that 16million hrs of Destiny had been played http://gamerant.com/destiny-average-daily-play-time/ and ign article claimed 2 billion hrs http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/08/04/gamers-have-played-2-billion-hours-of-destiny I've personal played only 600hrs on XB1 myself so about 26,666.66 to 3,333,333.33 people give or take I guess if all the people players have played 600hrs like me..... it's more than just a handful of people thats for sure, how many are playing enter the rapture or until dawn and does it really matter.... there people still playing Gears 3 online, Helldivers still has players, should current headcount be added to the wiki of a game to determine if its good or not???

I don't know Bungie is doing something right with that amount of time spent in game, I don't think headcount should factor into whether or not a game in good or not.....

@Mike: Like Pyro mentioned, how can you be skeptical that millions still play Destiny? That's clear just based purely on the fact that over 250,000 people hopped on last Wednesday just to check out their Twitch stream live, not to mention how many people checked it out after the fact (at least 197,309 on Twitch, 271,921 on Youtube, and over 280k people have already watched the preview for todays reveal). If you somehow think the Destiny player base isn't in the millions, and an extremely active millions, you have your head buried deep in the sand my good friend.

@hestilllives19: You can be skeptical because Activision won't put out the numbers of active players. They put out sales figures (think to date it's shipped 20 million units) but they won't put out active day to day player numbers or even an idea of it. Everything we use for guessing the active player base is just that, guess work.

Those are just PC game expectations. Steam always displays the active user base so if you're not displaying your active user base you must be doing poorly right? Or what if bragging about how many players still play the game was bad PR because pretty much everyone agrees you should be focusing on fixing the game instead of patting yourself in the back.

Signs of a huge active player base are all there. They just stopped bragging because it makes them look like oblivious assholes.

I don't necessarily see how the numbers are indicative of the game's quality, but maybe cool it on the condescension towards people just curious about said numbers. The popularity of a sub group could be very surprising to someone far removed from that sub group; to say someone's head is "buried deep in the sand" for not knowing that information is a bit (needlessly) aggressive.

That said, I don't know what Destiny's population is, but, just from playing, I know it isn't wont for a greater one. Or, rather, it doesn't need it. Matchmaking is fast for pretty much every activity. There's always someone looking to do what you want to do. It actually surprises me given the general (maybe "apparent" is a better word) consensus surrounding the game.

Having a 'gear reset' every year is just how every loot-based MMO works. But they also make sure you don't have to try and beg people to run you through old content that nobody does anymore by having a soloable fast track from level cap to the loot needed to survive the newest raid/endgame thing that is currently popular.

If they can pull it off, and players coming back to the game aren't stuck behind a wall or an absurd grind just to catch up, good on them and congrats. But until then I will remain wary.

@pyrodactyl: Bungie used to prominently display the current number of players playing Halo 3 every time you went to play online which was an Xbox 360 only game.

Numbers are good indication of how a game is doing - not how good a game is objectively. A few of us are just interested in what the active player base actually is.

If we're only going to look at player count, the fact that millions of players play certain games isn't necessarily an endorsement of its quality or merit. Millions of players have flocked to games of dubious depth or quality many times before for a number of reasons. Likewise for great games and so on. However talking around the issue in terms of player count looking for validation one way or another misses the deeper point about why that many players come back to a clearly flawed game, in the progression, content, and certainly the story department.

I suspect it has to do with the MMO nature of the game and where it landed on that relative to making a focused game in either direction, MMO or linear shooter. By having the semi-MMO trappings, it has a lot of grind but by having Bungie make it, it has a lot of polish and good feeling shooting. What we're left in the middle is a pretty game that shoots good with a lackluster story and world, a lot of grind and weird arbitrary leveling systems that try to make the most out of the fact that it's not an MMO but tries to be one anyway. That last bit is where the millions of players and the criticism comes from.

@jesus_phish: I'll be the first to tell you Destiny has huge problems but a low player base is not one of them. You're arguing not that many people play the game because if they were, Bungie would display that number even though there's a wide variety of explanation as to why they don't brag about their user base.

I'm arguing people play this game in huge numbers base on actual data. Every news story or article on destiny pulls in insane numbers. It's constantly in the top games played on twitch. Bungie streams do stupidly well. They pull in numbers unheard off outside of game tournaments. Just watch that stream in 90 minutes and see for yourself. It will top the twitch streams immediately.

@pyrodactyl: I'm not arguing anything. You've got that mixed up. I'm saying that we don't have an actual number on active players because that information isn't available.

I'm not saying nobody is playing this game, that's stupid. People are obviously playing the game. Nobody here is saying that nobody is playing it. We're just wondering what the actual active player count is - a figure that isn't available.

That Twitch stream isn't an indicator of actual player base. For all we know, half the viewers could be people who are thinking of going back to playing the game and haven't actually touched it in months.

Yeah, i was looking this up the other day and couldn't find any. My guess there have to be a lot still playing for them to charge so much for the dlc though , either that or they just have no sense of value on there content. I can see a lot playing, but not a million or even close to that? I still play the nba 2k mobile app and it's some of the most boring shit ever, the pricing on the f2p content is appalling and i'd never spend a dime on it, but i still play the shit of it because of the semi-loot system that got me hooked. I guess if enough people drop the money they will continue the shitty business practices.

There's apparently some item to fast-level a character from 1-25 per account - which means I'll level my Hunter instantly.

My question, however, is this: will my 33 titan and 32 warlock revert to 20 since light doesn't gauge player level anymore?

No your current characters will be their level with the new stat numbers, they will look at ALL your gear even stuff in your vault and come up with your new stat numbers. So don't dismantle stuff you have.

@bofooq: I played Destiny and that sounds like complete gibberish to me.

You Destiny players are a tad touchy. From what I know of the game anecdotally, I would guess the player base is somewhere in the low millions, say 1-3. That's just a guess though; we can only make inferences since Activision hasn't really hard numbers. And at this point what the game is is no longer a surprise and everyone has chosen their side (except Jeff): either you are a story-driven gamer and dislike it or a gameplay-first gamer (who doesn't mind grinding monotonous tasks) and like it. If indeed they have sold 20 million copies then perhaps their player base would've been even higher had they managed to capture the imagination of those story-driven people.

@jesus_phish Reading comprehension, am I right?

@oursin_360: Or you can believe people like Game Informer who have gotten their hands on it and say it is easily over double the content of past expansions. Sounds good to me.

@bacongames:I completely agree on the point you made that player base does not in any way attest to the quality of a game. For Destiny specifically, I think the thing that has polarized the game to so many goes much deeper than just the MMO grinding loot system, because lets face it, if that's all there was most of us would have put it to bed right after release. The Destiny community has grown so strong simply because it's one of the first console games that, like PC MMO's, have allowed small subsets of fireteams, clans, communities, organizations, websites, etc to spring up and come together in new ways. I know without Lincoln Force NA Central I probably wouldn't have put more than 40 hours into Destiny, and that is now obviously not the case.

@jesus_phish: Honestly, I think the reason Bungie and Activision won't release concurrent users on a regular basis for Destiny is because of the fluctuation, not where those numbers are. At least on my list of 50 Destiny players or so, after content drops, everyone is on for a month, then like yesterday you only have 10 or so friends on at a time at the most, and that was a Tuesday. On Wednesdays/Thursdays, before the Taken King info Destiny was pretty much dead. I think Bungie with their current DLC model is completely fine with that too. That doesn't mean they don't have a couple million monthly users (something their Twitch numbers pretty clearly reflect, even if we don't have static numbers to look at), it just means there are many days during parts of the year that showing regular numbers to stockholders of active daily users wouldn't be beneficial to Destiny at all, for us or them. (Also, that 20 million was Guardians, kinda deceptive on Activision's part, actual sales according to VGChartz are around 10.85 million, 4.9 PS4, 2.8 XOne, other 360/PS3)

@oursin_360: They will probably post those numbers next month so we will know for sure, but I'm pretty sure you are going to be surprised at the numbers. A little over 10.85 million people bought Destiny to date, at least according to VGChartz. Just assuming that only 25% of those remain and purchase The Taken King means that 2.7 million people will buy it. And considering the current interest in it in the gaming community, I'd say that may be a pretty modest estimate.

@nonused: I am so sorry I offended your delicate sensibilities with my "deep in the sand" comment. I didn't realize that phrase had become such a deeply condescending one when I wasn't looking. My bad.

Q.F.T.