Monday, November 27th 2017
Bungie's Destiny 2 Dynamically Scaled Earned XP - In Detriment of the Player
Bungie's Destiny 2 was one of the hottest PC releases of the year - and in most regards, it has delivered a tight, rewarding FPS experience. It has brought to the PC space the same satisfying FPS experience its developers have been honing ever since Halo. However, if there's one facet Bungie still has a lot to work on is its relationship to its player base, the way it chooses to communicate, and basically, how not to do things in order to increase attractiveness of its microtransactions, as some players have been putting it.
Case in point: the Destiny community has erupted over the past few days in regards to a (visually and mathematically proven) reduction in received XP as reward for some in-game actions (such as shooting bad moon wizards, completing public events, and so on). It was proven by users that earned XP during activities could be reduced by up to 95% (through activity repetition) over the base experience for that action. Yet nothing in the game ever pointed toward reduced experience in these scenarios. In fact, the XP numbers added to the XP bar with each action really didn't change at all - the XP scaler was working behind the scenes and oblivious to the player. Bungie confirmed the findings, saying it was "not performing the way we'd like it to" since the games' inception, and were "working on a fix".
Well, the "fix", released last Sunday, really did stop all XP scaling from occurring. However... the caveat is that it has also sneakily, non-transparently, and absent from the release notes, hiked the required XP for leveling up by 100% - from 80,000 points to 160,000 points. So yes, in fact, XP now decreases less than it did before, but I think Bungie might have missed the point there.
Sources:
user energiserX @ Reddit, Bungie, Bungie Twitter
Case in point: the Destiny community has erupted over the past few days in regards to a (visually and mathematically proven) reduction in received XP as reward for some in-game actions (such as shooting bad moon wizards, completing public events, and so on). It was proven by users that earned XP during activities could be reduced by up to 95% (through activity repetition) over the base experience for that action. Yet nothing in the game ever pointed toward reduced experience in these scenarios. In fact, the XP numbers added to the XP bar with each action really didn't change at all - the XP scaler was working behind the scenes and oblivious to the player. Bungie confirmed the findings, saying it was "not performing the way we'd like it to" since the games' inception, and were "working on a fix".
12 Comments on Bungie's Destiny 2 Dynamically Scaled Earned XP - In Detriment of the Player
Anyone who actually plays the game knows that hitting the max character level is a breeze and the game is designed fairly well around making sure you hit level 20 by the time you've completed the main story quests, provided you do a bit of side missions here and there.
I'd prefer some noise be made about providing more and better endgame content, rather than some boohoo about how Bungie nerfed a mechanic that players were exploiting and "lied" about it.
And what is this exploit? I hadn't heard of it, but I'm not a crucible player.
unless you mean light level (which is also easy to reach) it's 305 (my friend is 302 atm ) i am currently 211 atm and i got from 160 at lvl 19 (a bit low it seems ) to 211 just by reaching 20 and getting rewards from faction engrams mostly
and "unscientifically" or rather illogical matter ...
1. the Traveller
2. Io ecosystem and Nessus planetoid (well at last the colors of Io are 100% right, thought the fossiles and other things found on it ... are less ... hum we need more than orbit HD pictures then ... :laugh: )
3. Titan setup
well .... i guess that's why it's a science fiction type of game, right?