In an interesting move, Bungie has announced that it’s changing the way Destiny 2 handles XP gain. Over the last few weeks, the Destiny 2 player base have noticed a few interesting points that led them to believe the whole XP gain system was rigged.
Experience points (XP) are earned in-game in order to gain levels, gain new abilities, and the likes. Once you reach level 20 in, the soft cap, XP takes a completely different role. After you get to level 20, you are introduced to something called Bright Engrams.
Bright Engrams are essentially Destiny 2‘s loot boxes. Each Bright Engrams contains cosmetic items that you can obtain, such as ornaments, ships, and emotes. You can also purchase Bright Engrams for real money in the game’s Eververse micro transaction store. This entire situation is what rigged the entire Destiny 2 community.
It all started in Destiny 2‘s first “Clarion Call” event, which gave players bonus XP when they were joined by at least one other clanmate. In the event, several players started noticing that the longer they played, the slower their progression got, despite running the same activities over and over. The first event would net a player 5,000 XP, and they would seek a huge chunk of the XP bar fill. But after the first time, the same number appeared, but the bar would barely move.
Players stared to share their experiences on the game’s Reddit page suggesting that something was off about the game’s XP gain system. Yesterday, Reddit user EnergiserX posted a full in-depth analysis of XP gains. His finding concluded that the game was invisibly throttling XP progress but at the same time was telling players they were earning the same level of XP. This is where the bar wouldn’t move a lot, but the in-game notification showed higher XP gains.
In an interesting turn of events, Bungie posted on their official blog, confirming the players’ findings were correct, and further stated that they were immediately suspending the XP throttling system in Destiny 2.
Here’s their full statement:
We’ve seen community discussion around XP gain in Destiny. After reviewing our data, we agree that the system is not performing the way we’d like it to. Today, we’d like to describe what’s going on under the hood, and talk about what you can expect going forward when it comes to earning XP in Destiny 2.
Currently, XP will scale up when playing longer or fixed duration activities like Crucible competitive multiplayer matches and the Leviathan Raid, and XP will scale down when playing activities that can be quickly, repeatedly chained, like grinding Public Events. We are not happy with the results, and we’ve heard the same from the community.
Effective immediately, we are deactivating this system.
As a result, players will see XP earn rates change for all activities across the board, but with all values being displayed consistently in the user interface. Over the course of the next week, we will be watching and reviewing XP game data to ensure that these changes meet our expectations, as well as yours. Any additional updates to this system will be communicated to you via our official channels.
This whole situation is tied to XP gains and Destiny 2‘s Eververse micro transaction store, also known as Bungie’s on-going cash machine. Bungie has previously assured players that in-game micro transactions would not impact their experience but this in fact was directly changing their XP earning experience. It all basically comes down to this: Bungie wants players to feel like they’re making some sort of progress but at a slower pace, thus, they want to encourage players to spend real money on Bright Engrams to obtain them faster. If a player were to just grind out strikes, public events, or any other method to gain XP, it would allow players to have so many Bright Engrams that they would run out of cosmetic items to go for. Bungie rigged their entire XP system for Destiny 2 to turn players towards Eververse micro transactions.
