I’ve been meaning to write in detail about Destiny 2 for a while now – I’ve been playing the game pretty regularly and heavily the past month or so and have been enjoying myself quite a bit. One thing that I noticed but didn’t think about is that at the end of the game, once your character has reached the level cap of 20, you gain experience at lower rates than normal. I noticed this was happening, sure, but I didn’t notice the numbers being presented were, well, wrong.
The game was straight up lying to players about how much experience was being gained based on whatever event happened. While the game would say you got, let’s say, 5000 xp, the actual amount you would earn might be a tiny percentage of that.
This experience gain is tied to items known as “Bright Engrams”, which contain various cosmetic items which are normally available as, you already probably know, micro-transactions – paying real money on top of purchasing the game so you can have these fancy looking emotes, shaders, or cosmetic changes to a special gun.
So, while Destiny 2 would give you a free set of random items each time you filled the experience meter, the more you played the less you would fill this meter up, and thus more effort would result in less reward over time meaning if you really wanted that nice shiny gun skin, you would be better off forking over a few dollars to it. Forget grinding for the chance to win it when you only get maybe 5% of the experience an event should be worth.
Hiding the XP scaling… that’s low. Damn low.
The way this was all figured out is amazing, by the way. I won’t begin to go into it here, the videos below go into it in good detail. While diminishing XP gains are common in these kinds of games, to be lied to about these gains? That’s fucking low. Bungie has since apologized for what I’m sure is Activisions idea, and things have been changed – I’ve noticed better XP gains as I’ve been playing the past few nights since this news broke, but still, the point remains – you’re seriously going to do this, and only change it once you get caught? That’s fucking low. I’ll still play Destinty 2, but I’m not going to pump any more money in it beyond the expansion content… not that I was planning on buying Bright Engrams anyway but you never know!
The hilarious thing, to me, is that this isn’t even content that matters in practice – nothing you get from Bright Engrams changes how the game plays or makes your character more powerful.
It’s literally just to get your money. This doesn’t affect actual gameplay at all! No powerful items or anything are gained via this, so, damn.. that’s just pathetic.
Anyway, for what it’s worth I’ll leave a couple of video’s here. One by YouTuber YongYea, which is how I learned about this initially, and another by our good friend Jim Sterling. Oh yes, it’s 2 for 1 day here at Xadara. Let em have it guys!