Bungie Unfixes The Fixed Destiny 2 XP Scaling With A Faux Fix

Bungie acknowledged the XP scaling and, in the latest patch, fixed it by removing the scaling and doubling the XP required to advance.

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There are some practices that thrive in a really grey area when it comes to being profitable for the business but concerning for the consumer and Bungie quietly, and then loudly, engaged in a questionable method for extending the grind for Bright Engrams in Destiny 2. After players noticed XP scaling that essentially slowed your grind, Bungie acknowledged it and said a fix was incoming. Then, they slowed things down for everyone.

Unless you've been under a rock, you may have noticed a bubbling conversation about microtransactions, loot crates, and other elements that are muddying the relationship between devs, publishers, and consumers. EA is the most recent high-profile culprit with the egregious, gameplay influencing loot crates in Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and Bungie found themselves under the spotlight. Destiny 2 is a connected shooter with a progression system largely modeled after MMORPGs, albeit in a more condensed form.

ArsTechnica has the full breakdown, but essentially there's a plethora of content players can engage in to gain XP. The amount is supposed to be fixed, but fans started noticing they were getting less than they were supposed to as they repeated in-game missions. A user gathered enough data confirming the suspicion that Destiny 2 was hiding the decreased XP gain and posted to Reddit, which pushed Bungie to respond. The developers confirmed his findings and said there would be a change. 

That patch removed the XP-scaling the Reddit user has discovered, but Bungie doubled the amount of XP needed. You can alternatively spend real money on those Bright Engrams, by the way. At the time this was written, Bungie hasn't spoken on this new change but we will update as more information is made available. Bungie plans to do a Twitch stream today addressing endgame issues, so maybe they'll address the latest patch as well.

Charles Singletary Jr keeps the updates flowing as the News Editor, breaking stories while investigating the biggest topics in gaming and technology. He's pretty active on Twitter, so feel free to reach out to him @The_CSJR. Got a hot tip? Email him at Charles.Singletary@Shacknews.com.

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  • reply
    November 28, 2017 9:25 AM

    Charles Singletary posted a new article, Bungie Unfixes The Fixed Destiny 2 XP Scaling With A Feaux Fix

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      November 28, 2017 9:35 AM

      This is definitely one of the problems with bringing freemium mechanics into full-priced games.

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      November 28, 2017 9:43 AM

      I'd be curious to see a numerical comparison between the scaled XP requirements and the new flat doubling.

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        November 28, 2017 10:55 AM

        I play a couple hours of Destiny 2 per day (average), and I've not noticed much change. Once you hit level 20 the only benefit to leveling up is a Bright Engram, and those are next to useless for the most part. You get shaders, ornaments, ships and sparrows, but the only real game-changing thing is mods. I just don't feel that the extra grind pushes me to buy more Bright Engrams. I play enough that I get those on my own for free. However, I still recognize that it's rather shady how they've handled it all.

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        November 28, 2017 11:24 AM

        [deleted]

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      November 28, 2017 11:13 AM

      Faux?

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      November 28, 2017 11:13 AM

      Awww, that'll be there forever and ever.

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      November 28, 2017 11:27 AM

      Wait, this says there is a Twitch stream today. Where was this announced?

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      November 28, 2017 2:05 PM

      [deleted]

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      November 28, 2017 2:12 PM

      Jesus christ, what bullshit.

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      November 28, 2017 2:21 PM

      I wanted to like this game so much. The core gameplay is great, the graphics are beautiful, but THERE'S JUST NO GAME. It feels like a tech demo. The pve content is unbelievably repetitive, the loot system is asinine, and the P2P social features are straight up dysfunctional.

      The endgame content is basically non-existent and I only play pvp nowadays, but even in the Crucible there are so many horrible game design decisions that I get triggered every time I play.

      It could have been so much better. Instead it feels like a AAA engine with alpha content. And a DLC coming a month and a half after release.

      wat

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        November 28, 2017 3:02 PM

        DLC is actually three months after release

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          November 28, 2017 3:47 PM

          Which is ridiculous. The game at launch is incomplete. DLC after only three months after a launch of an incomplete game is unconscionable.

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              November 28, 2017 5:13 PM

              I agree. Still does not make his statement false. This is content they clearly pulled to sell separately later. And not much later.

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                November 28, 2017 5:58 PM

                I know, I'm agreeing.

                And this is the same argument we had three years ago.

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            November 28, 2017 4:23 PM

            No. I am sorry but no.

            This isn’t the 90s, games are developed by multiple teams in house at a game studio now.

            You have your core team who releases the game, while other teams are busy working on DLC. Very few resources are shared between the teams, and even if they are they don’t interfere with the development since they are managed at the right stages to not interfere. There isn’t some evil plan to cut content and ship it later, they just built DLC content with the extra resources they had.

            You can be mad all you want at the state of the game, but to imply that Bungie cut content to save for the DLC is just bullshit, and so is implying it stretched resources from making a better game.

            There was always going to be DLC, so how about we wait for it to come out and then we can see how much of a money grab it is.

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              November 28, 2017 5:16 PM

              It's not 'extra' resources if it's during the vanilla game's development.

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              November 28, 2017 5:27 PM

              Isn't that what caused issues with Destiny 1, also bleeding into the reasons Destiny 2 has the same problems? Main dev team for Destiny 1 has their vision and executes on it, and it is a mess. DLC team fix the problems over time. Destiny 2 main devs ignore the improvements from the previous DLCs and we're back doing the same thing all over again with the DLC team having to salvage the mess. It feels like such a waste.

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                November 28, 2017 5:34 PM

                That's the yearly release cycle for you. Battlefield and COD franchise fans know your pain. The number of times we saw the same exact bug from an earlier game pop up in the next one because the studio didn't know what the patching studio did was/is amazing.

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            November 28, 2017 4:40 PM

            Game design decisions trigger you and dlc is unconscionable. It's been lovely but lol.

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            November 28, 2017 4:47 PM

            [deleted]

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            November 28, 2017 5:06 PM

            How is the game incomplete ? I’ve been playing for countless hours a week since day 1 (on console) and I’ve still got a few things I need to accomplish . I would agree if you are saying that the endgame loot / progression system is shitty and could be refined , especially after it worked so well in D1 ROI , it feels like a step backwards . But incomplete? GTFO .

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              November 28, 2017 5:33 PM

              Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck I really liked where Destiny 1 finally ended up at, especially with the stuff from Rise of Iron.

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                November 28, 2017 6:23 PM

                Which is why some of us are so disappointed in D2. I played D1 up until 2 weeks before the PS4 release of D2, so its still fairly fresh for me how much is missing from D2. I am not going to comment further so the people who are tired of reading salt over at /r/dtg don't have to read it here too.

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              November 28, 2017 6:52 PM

              triggers:

              You hit endgame after like 3 days of grinding (hit 270 softcap), and then after that, basically all of the content is basically:

              -Repetitive public events where you can't interact with anyone, no zone chat, no voice. The rewards for these are two tokens and a blue
              -One raid a week where everybody runs through the underbelly dungeon filled with mario puzzles, except poorly designed. It was fun the first time through, though.
              -Crucible. I like crucible, it's the only thing i play now. but, the peer-to-peer queuing system takes forever, usually >2 minutes to match 8 people. Especially for a system with no matchmaking/mmr, this is silly. Pubg can queue 100 people in-game within 60 seconds.
              -Nightfall, which is literally just a recycle of the in-game strikes, all 5 of them?

              Also, can we talk about the social system? For a game that's supposed to be an online social shooter, the game provides you basically nothing to facilitate that. You can literally stand next to someone in a public event and how no way of communicating except charades.

              triggered indeed

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                November 28, 2017 6:55 PM

                Welcome to Destiny you clearly didn’t play the first game lol .

                That’s more of less what the base game of Destiny 1 had as well .

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                  November 28, 2017 6:57 PM

                  I agree with the reward system though . They struggled with this in D1 .

                  They finally got it right after 3 expansions .

                  It is disappointing that they have reverted back to a broken system and didn’t seem to bring any lessons learned over to D2 .

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                  November 28, 2017 7:01 PM

                  Yeah, I didn't. My buddy suckered me into playing D2 with him.

                  nobody told me the game was going to suck!

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            November 28, 2017 5:54 PM

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        November 29, 2017 1:47 AM

        [deleted]

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      November 28, 2017 6:21 PM

      [deleted]

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