Bungie Overhauling Destiny 2 Experience Gains After Fan Finds Major Issue

Bungie is making some tweaks to the way players earn experience in Destiny 2. Though the changes may sound like minor number changes, they should greatly speed up the rate at which players level up and (more importantly) earn Bright Engrams.

The change is likely in response to a thoroughly examination of how players earned experience in Destiny 2 user EnergiserX posted on Reddit. In their post, Energiser noticed how, the faster players earn XP by killing enemies, the more of that experience seems to disappear. While this has the largest effect on those who quickly grind repeatable activities like Public Events most (cutting around 95 percent of their experience gains), this also affected players who simply played the game as intended, cutting their experience in half.

Hours after the post went live, Bungie announced that it had reviewed the data on their end, found this to be the case, and is replacing that system entirely. The amount of experience players earn for all activities has changed, and players should see that the experience numbers they see when they defeat enemies and complete activities should match the experience they earn in the backend. Over the next week, Bungie "will be watching and reviewing XP game data to ensure that these changes meet our expectations, as well as yours."

 

Our Take
I'm very tempted to think this was Bungie getting caught doing something intentionally rather than an accident. Many of the changes in Destiny 2 seemed aimed to disincentivizing players to spend too many hours playing the game in a given week or grinding, and this experience scaling seems in line with that philosophy. Also consider that the thing players are grinding experience for in the endgame (Bright Engrams) is also the thing they can buy with actual money. Those two elements combined make me skeptical that this was a flaw in the system, but it's hard to know at this point. Either way, Bungie did respond to this backlash expediently, which is good.

from www.GameInformer.com - The Feed http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2017/11/24/bungie-overhauling-destiny-2-experience-gains-after-fan-finds-major-issue.aspx