Destiny 2 Players Find Issues With XP Gain Not Entirely Fixed
Bungie has addressed one problem, but it may have another.
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It seems Destiny 2 players may have found another method in which Bungie is artificially limiting experience gain. If you missed the first time around, that's not surprising, as it happened over the Thanksgiving holiday. Four days ago, one Destiny 2 player reported their findings on Reddit: as you start to earn experience faster, the game scales the amount of actual experience you're getting, until you're only earning around 4 percent of what you're supposed to get.
This is at level cap, seemingly to prevent players from earning more Bright Engrams, which unlock special gear and cosmetic items. Bright Engrams are, of course, one of the things that can be purchased with real money in the game, thus limiting experience is incentivizing players to buy engrams.
A day later, Bungie responded to the information by publicly admitting the system existed and deactivating it.
"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," said Bungie in a blog post.
"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," the studio added. "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."
All's well, right? Well, not really. The system limiting experience gain is gone, but players have found that experience totals to level have been doubled. It once cost 80,000 XP to level. Now, that number is up to 160,000 XP. Players noticed the change, so Bungie itself responded again, this time on Twitter.
Destiny 2 director Luke Smith also stated that he and project lead Mark Noseworthy would be addressing community concerns over the matter some time this week. Can the pair can mollify fan complaints over the matter?