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Bungie's Destiny 2 is the latest game defenseless up past controversy afterward players discovered the game was blatantly misreporting XP gains and lying to them about how long it would take to earn rewards. Like Battlefront ii, Destiny uses a loot crate mechanism (purchasable with real money) to reward various items. Dissimilar EA, withal, Destiny 2 doesn't implement the various weapon and armor mods in a solely pay-to-win organization. Polygon reports that you tin buy mods directly in-game with Blink (the in-game currency) every bit opposed to ownership argent with real-world money. Despite this divergence, players are just as furious.

In Destiny 2, once yous hit level twenty, you cease gaining levels and instead gain a new loot crate (Bright Engram) every fourth dimension you lot would've leveled up. Last week, during an effect known equally a "Blaring Telephone call," in which players earn additional XP from teaming up with clanmates, gamers started noticing that the initially quick XP reward time dropped very quickly, despite this never existence communicated in-game. Reddit user EnergiserX found that he'd lost up to 95 per centum of his earned XP in one effect, even though the game claimed he'd earned the normal amount. Because the XP the game said he was earning had no relation to the XP the game was actually recording, he wound up earning i.v fewer Brilliant Engrams than he should have during a three-hour gaming session. The graph below shows the divergence between how much XP he should've earned and the total amount of lost XP (bottom xanthous line). It fluctuates depending on how quickly he played the game — at lengthy intervals betwixt events, he earned the amount of XP that the game reported he had earned:

Bungie admitted to this organization and its existence up until Friday in a blog postal service, and said it would immediately change its own practices:

Every bit a effect, players volition run into XP earn rates change for all activities across the board, but with all values beingness displayed consistently in the user interface. Over the form of the side by side week, we volition be watching and reviewing XP game data to ensure that these changes meet our expectations, equally well as yours.

But Bungie, despite claiming to listen to players and accept their feedback into account, seems to take lost any impact with what players would consider an acceptable solution. The visitor merely doubled the amount of XP required to earn an additional Engram, from fourscore,000 XP to 160,000 XP. And over again, for a second time, Bungie did nothing to communicate this change to its own players, who confirmed it themselves and and then hit the company with the news. The lack of transparency has been a persistent and major frustration for Destiny fans, and it's a trouble Bungie is apparently unwilling to address.

I'm once again reminded of a tweet storm game developer Damion Schubert published during the ongonig EA/Battlefront Two crisis. Y'all can read his total remarks starting here; I've excerpted two tweets below:

This simple betoken can't be made strongly enough. Once yous starting time linking in-game progression to boodle crates, even if they aren't strictly required for buy, you've created an surroundings in which players will question your every aligning and motive. Bungie has gotten hammered for offering a promotion in partnership with Pop-Tarts, giving players a 25 percent XP heave if they bought the food in-game — but what was that heave actually worth if the game was secretly degrading how much XP you earned per hour?

Destiny 2 may not be pay-to-win, but players clearly resent having their XP gains gutted with no notification this is taking place, followed past a decision to double the amount of XP required to gain a level. Developers who intend to deploy loot crates need to pay far closer attending to how gamers perceive these changes. If enough players start believing they're being nickel-and-dimed and quit every bit a outcome, it won't matter how much money the handful of 'whales' bring in.

Some will debate that this is an example of an 'entitled' gamer mentality, only I couldn't disagree more. AAA companies are building real-money systems into their games in ways that harm the underlying championship and make it far less fun to play. No one is under whatsoever obligation to commit to ownership $100, $l, or even $5 of in-game currency to spend on loot crates after paying $60 to $80 for a game. The design of these systems conspicuously creates an incentive to pay-to-play, and they're just as clearly intended to push the thespian towards paying for items. A system that throws abroad up to 95 percentage of the XP you lot earn without telling players it ever happened, followed by an level requirement doubling? That's garbage, and gamers have every correct to characterization it such. Destiny ii's Vivid Engrams are likewise quite expensive, at $i.40 to $2, compared with 80 cents for an Overwatch loot crate, and the emotes, weapon skins, and other items don't comport over from one game to the next. Come up Destiny 3, you'll exist expected to pay to unlock a new gear up of capabilities.

If the developers and studios that build these titles desire to create games that don't depict such controversy, they already know the solution. Information technology's not the job of gamers to scroll over and accept such blatantly skewed, turn a profit-driven game play so a game publisher can enjoy another round of record quarterly profits.