Out of the frying pan and into the furnace. That’s out Destiny 2 players feel right now. Many are too stubborn to see the writing on the wall and are willing to believe that the game’s in-game XP gauge is broken instead of realizing that Bungie is artificially stuffing experience gains in order to punish XP-farmers and diehard-grinders because they have items to sell on the cash shop.
The short of the story is that some intrepid Destiny 2 players discovered that post-game XP gains to unlock Bright Engrams weren’t relative to what players should have been earning based on their actual grinding performance. It was also discovered that a scaler was implemented so that the harder you grinded the less XP you earned.
Reddit user EnergiserX discovered that normal grinding earned you 50% less experience than what you should have earned, while power-grinding earned you up to 95% less experience than what you should have been earning. A scaler kicks in that basically punishes hardcore players attempting to power-grind, so that the more you grind the more experience points you lose.
EnergiserX charted a flow graph to showcase all the XP he lost during a three hour session, thanks in part to a Destiny tracker API called DIM.
Caught red-handed, Bungie decided to make a post about EnergiserX’s findings on November 24th, 2017 and explained that…
“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.”
After making the post and supposedly changing the XP scales for post-game activities, gamers later found out that even with Bungie’s change, players were still being shortchanged by up to half of all the experience they were supposed to gain from public events, patrols, and other side-activities. Bungie claimed that this was due to a discrepancy in the API and that post-game leveling, or leveling beyond level 20, should consistently require 160,000 experience points.
The Destiny 2 API has yet to be adjusted to reflect the recent in game change to earned XP. We are working on an API update to address the discrepancy. The correct value to earn an additional level is 160,000 XP.
— Bungie Help (@BungieHelp) November 27, 2017
Reddit user Aercus did a detailed breakdown, revealing that this still doesn’t fix the problem, though, because what the bar shows and what you actually earn is still half of what you’re supposed to be earning, writing…
“This post still applies, all experience gains are the same, which means that a 50% nerf has been applied to the system post-removal of scaling.”
Eurogamer nailed it the first time around when they suspected that Bungie had the scaler in place to frustrate and penalize the most hardcore players to convince them to either buy XP pots to help them further boost their level gains to earn Bright Engrams, or to dispense real cash for the in-game currency known as Silver, which in turn can be used to purchase Bright Engrams.
Some fanboys are still in denial, thinking that Bungie just messed up the in-game XP tracker and that the API isn’t set straight. However, the scaling was deliberately implemented and Bungie acknowledged it. Hence, the only reason you would punish grinders for playing your game non-stop is to sell them something to help remove the XP yoke from around their neck.
