There is a certain routine that every dramatic Destiny incident follows, and it popped up yet again this weekend thanks to a visit from everyone’s favourite tentacle-faced alien.
The steps go as follows:
1) The game is opaque about a feature.
Last week, Destiny 2 re-introduced the Three of Coins, a consumable item from the original game that allows players to boost their rates of getting exotic items. You could now buy a Three of Coins from Xur, the weekly vendor.
This time, Bungie promised that the item would be simpler, with “no obscure stacking mechanics or need to re-apply before every boss”.
But the description offers no specifics on what kind of increase you’re actually getting. It simply says: “Increased chance to receive Exotic engrams from sources in the world. Effect lasts for 4 hours.”
2) Players wonder if something is wrong.
It started Saturday morning. Destiny 2 players started gathering on Reddit to announce that they didn’t seem to be getting that many exotics while using Three of Coins. One upvote followed another, and soon there were hundreds of players gathering to report the same results.
3) With no real information, players make up their own tests to calculate that something is indeed wrong.
Here’s Redditor Brknsymtry:
So I did something I hadn’t done in long time and played all day and all night yesterday. I went through 4 3oC timers with different buff combinations and each one yielded zero exotics.
1- I played the first one with the reset xp buff, a medallion and 3oC and got 0 exotics.
2- played the the second two with a medallion and a 3oC and got 0 exotics.
3- played one more time with just a 3oC and got zero exotics.
The only two exotics I received playing during this time were unbuffed and came from heroic strike chests. This is clearly bugged and there is no way the frequency would be this low or just flat out not there.
I tried heroic and non heroic strikes, all of crucibles playlists, trials, and public events. Not one.
Other intrepid testers saw similar results. Of course, if Destiny 2 actually offered specifics about what Three of Coins actually did, it might be easier for people to figure out whether it was working as intended. But alas.
4) Bungie promises to look into it.
Yesterday on Twitter, David “DeeJ” Dague wrote: “Our Player Support team is investigating feedback about Three of Coins. We’ll share some details on our findings on Monday.”
5) Bungie apologizes and promises to be more transparent in the future.
This one hasn’t happened yet. Stay tuned!
Comments
57 responses to “Destiny 2’s Lack Of Transparency Infuriates Players Yet Again”
Used one of these the other day an also noticed no difference what so ever, figured it was broken.
Oh Bungie, when will you learn.
I’m more in the camp that people should have learned. Bungie are getting the money, they don’t care otherwise.
Bungie just seem to slink from one screw up to the next these days.
Hope they just abandon Destiny and try something else. I can’t be bothered reading all this stuff again when Destiny 3 comes out.
I’d rather they pass the franchise off to more capable hands. Limitless potential; infinite disappointment.
I have made the mental note that you get an exotic drop every 12 hours of game play. 3 of coins reduces this to a 4 hour window. Every time I’ve played my coins, I get an exotic drop around the 3 hour mark.
Lucky. I wasted a couple with zero exotic drops. I kinda figured it would be worth it because one of my exotic quests involves getting an exotic engram to drop, but I’ve had that for the last couple weeks of milestone-clearing and no drops, so… RNG must be relying on some kind of hidden ‘luck’ stat, and some of us just got shafted on character creation.
Feeling more and more like I dodged a bullet by avoiding Destiny altogether. I might just avoid all Bungie games in general.
I expect this will get voted down, but its not the clusterfuck the stories make it out to be. Most of the problems are just that the icing has been scraped off. Theres still cake, they’ve just made it look worse.
The complaints are well deserved, don’t get me wrong, but theres still a good game in and around them that can entertain for a good hundred hours or so before the issues become significant.
Bungie’s tone-deaf arrogance is textbook ‘how not to manage a community’ bullshit, but it’s true, there’s an OK game under there.
It’s just that the entertainment value of that game kind of taps out for the solo player after the first couple hours (a dozen at a stretch if you enjoy the gear-treadmill til you’re capped and gated by group activities), and despite their ‘games as a service’ focus for Destiny as being an evolving world, it still ends up no more entertaining with friends than a game of darts and some drinks, or shared labour in a backyard project.
Without friends? Once you hit the solo wall, there’s no point to logging in at all.
Yup. That solo wall was what stopped me playing more than the other issues.
But I got plenty of entertainment before that point. I liked the campaign, and didn’t REALLY mind the grind to 305. Well, didn’t mind the grind to 300, the grind after that wore thin…
In the end, I found myself just grinding the weekly flashpoint and clan rewards across 3 characters, and that was generally enough to fill in the 2 or 3 nights I was filling in.
Which in the end did what I wanted – kept me entertained in an otherwise quiet part of the week when I wasn’t doing something else.
People complain (me included) about the lack of variety, but that’s because we’ve done the public events 1000 times by that point and are sick of doing the same thing. Which means we’ve gotten 100’s of hours of entertainment. Which isn’t bad for a $70 investment.
Yeah. I guess I just got there faster and got bored faster before hitting the point of even dozens of hours, let alone hundreds.
I guess it depends on your definition of ‘entertainment’. 🙂
For the same investment I picked up Persona 5 and have had around ten times the amount of entertainment value per hour, for more hours… but everyone’s mileage is going to vary on that. I just expected… more, I guess.
It came at a good time for me, I was looking for a shooter to entertain me. Which it did.
Not saying there aren’t issues, there definitely are, the least of which isn’t the lack of variety. But whats there is still a solid foundation, and wouldn’t take much to correct into a far better experience.
Still to play Persona 5. Maybe in the New Year.
See, everything you’re saying makes me want to play the game even less, hence why I’m happy I dodged it. I spend a lot of time playing WoW, a bunch of my guildies bought the game, played for 3-4 weeks max and haven’t touched it since. The group content wasn’t even a wall for them, they had enough people to run it.
To me the bigger problem is the “games as a service”…their payment scheme is not something I agree with and they’re also offering very poor service in terms of customer relations.
It’s enough to turn me away from Destiny and any other Bungie titles. I already have too many games to play than I know what to do with, skipping some isn’t a big deal.
That’s fair. The WoW example is a good comparison. If you didn’t raid, you hit an advancement wall somewhere around 850ish ilvl, after which it just became hard to advance. At least, that was my experience.
But the game up to that point was still fun and worth the money, which is the same with Destiny 2. That’s usually my gauge on value – how long have I gotten out of the game. And if its more than ~40 hours gameplay (easily with Legion), its done its job. I’ve certainly gotten that out of Destiny 2.
If you see it on sale at some point, you’ll get enough entertainment out of it though, which is the main thing I’m trying to get across. You’ll get that 20-30 hours out of it.
Games as a service is something I don’t like as well. Its justification to squeeze as much money out of players as possible, nothing else. I don’t buy into it, and if its something that becomes pay to win, usually means I walk away sooner rather than later.
It’s true that both have a “group content wall” which is fair because they’re multiplayer games – but even with a group of friends set to play Destiny my guildies still couldn’t stick with it beyond a couple weeks. I was considering buying it to join them but they’d already given up.
That more than anything tells me there’s something off about Destiny and even in group content it ceases to be fun or engaging.
Combine that with the whole games as a service idea that Bungie subscribe to…without providing actual customer service and it ends up leaving a sour taste for everyone involved and blowing up every other week with the latest drama that they’ve mismanaged.
I’m actually really looking forward to our annual Christmas eve dart game with the fam.
I have zero interest in Destiny as an ongoing experience, but I have heard that the shooting mechanics are pretty top notch. Will I get much out of the trail they have set up for free? Or is it all tease for when you shell out the cash? Apparently I can play the campaign missions on EDZ and Titan ( I have no idea what that means).
Its a bit of both. The campaign is short, but well put together, and I personally think its one of the highlights of the game. EDZ and Titan are the first two zones of the game (EDZ is the biggest, Titan ends up feeling the smallest), so you get to see a fair chunk of that campaign, without seeing all of it.
You wont see a lot of the fun stuff in the campaign though, which happen elsewhere or after other triggers.
Its not the core of the game though, but essentially the tutorial, and the game proper once you’ve done the campaign is a fairly different experience. Its no longer story driven, but results driven.
Eventually the results wont be worth doing, its a matter of when you hit that point. If you’re not interested in the game as a long term prospect though, it really comes down to whether you want to run the three classes through the campaign, then grind.
I did, and got a good couple of months out of it. Others might get ~20 hours out of it before they hit that wall. It depends on the person.
hmmmmmm, thanks, sounds like it’s not made to give me what I’m looking for in a shooter. I’ll keep it in mind when I look at my giant pile of unplayed games and dismiss them all. For now, I’ll keep on working on my pile of shame.
Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself…………
Surprise surprise.
Ahhh Bungie. Shit is just sad at this point.
Yeah that some of the community is this nuts, that is the thing I find really sad
Nut hows that something doesnt work and they’re being pulled up on it? Again.
Nuts how an always online game could possibly have a bug after a patch, upon the launch of an new item. Nah that can’t be it must be a grand conspiracy. That’s far more likely.
Its the multiple bugs that people are having issues with.
There has never been an online game EVER that has won the fight against bugs. It’s a living environment the more stuff they add, the more new chances for new bugs
Yeah right, if only they had a department whos only job was to test their work to see if it worked the way it was meant to work.
Once again we all know (well all gamers who remember game to game) bugs get through on patch day on every MMO that has ever been, to say nothing of all online games. IF it is a bug (notice the word IF) it is hardly unique in the gaming world.
Maybe your standards are just set too low.
Maybe they are set to: Reality.
Mate, you gotta stop blaming the community. Yes the backlash is shit, but quite frankly it’s well placed. Bungie have shown a history of being knobs about this, oh we’re just gonna lie about how our XP system works. Welp looks like we got caught, better say sorry. They keep promising to do better, and they aren’t.
As I can’t reply to your comment below – Yes bugs get in the game. But very obvious bugs such as that of the Prometheus Lens, should have been picked up. This is simply sloppy work from a studio that’s capable of so much more.
This isn’t about “entitled gamers” that I’ve seen you spout on quite a few posts, this is about getting what we pay for, in a working condition. You wouldn’t go buy a brand new car and not complain that your steering wheel doesn’t work.
The community is well within their right to be ticked off by their actions, especially if I just spent $80 on your game, after waiting for it longer, and only have access to the base content for a few weeks before you decide to lock me out because I don’t own your – quite frankly shitty – DLC.
I suggest you take a look at WoW at some point then. Yes it’s an old game with plenty of time to work on things but they still release new content every few months and that comes with the possibility of bugs.
Do they get bugs? Yes, they do. Are they game breaking? No..not really, those happen but they are extremely rare. When bugs are found they’re fixed and patched within 1-2 days at most times. Whilst doing this they also highlight any of the biggest problems with an open post to the community saying they’re working on it.
Just knowing that something isn’t working as intended and getting filled in is enough for people to give them plenty of leeway and put down the pitch forks. Bungie’s biggest issue seems to be how to deal with customers rather than how they’re making the game.
Nah, people just can’t believe the complete and utter incompetence and baffling decisions that continues to spew forth from this studio. And I say this as someone who actually likes Destiny.
Keep lapping up Bungie’s garbage though @blakeavon.
Chucking a sook about the community yet again. Want some tissues?
dropping in for another personal attack without adding something to discussion, we all have own our ‘thing’ I guess. At least i was talking about the article itself.
Love you too blakeavon 🙂
Given that the article was about the piss-poor Dev communication, and you’re blaming fan expectations; you don’t seem to be talking about the article.
the article is about how fans are reacting to something they THINK developers have done, its not proven either way, just a theory.
Anyone who has ever been around Destiny will know this happens every time fans THINK something has happened. Sometimes it is true like the recent XP thing,and other times, more times than one cant count, the fans have lost all kinds of sanity on something that wasnt true. Or more currently, they take a quote out of context and try and make it a huge gaming crime.
the item in question says “increases the chance of receiving an exotic” it doesn’t say there is any guarantee of getting one. The four times i used one. 1&2 no exotic, 3 two exotics, 4 one exotic.
This apparent lack of communication (on the odds of items) was never ever there for D1 so why is it suddenly now an issue? So yes my comment WAS related to the article.
So they have come out and say its working as intended…it gives you a 50% boost to … whatever screwy RNG is in place in the first place. So in other words they don’t fucking care.
And now they have just tweeted that Fated Engrams are also being looked at as people are getting duplicates…
c:\del *.*
start again…
I assume the next announcement from Bungie will be, hey so we fixed the drop rate at which exotics drop. Making the 3 of coins useless because every third drop will be exotic, then that will be followed by a quick tweet about how they may have over tweaked the drop rates and going back to do testing. Followed by radio silence.
Testing? Ha!
Some of the shit they release in broken states, even in the first game, would be caught in minutes if it was actually tested.
Hahahaha yeah I was giving them a little bit too much credit 😛
At this stage it is just lazy journalism reporting on every little issue the vocal minority has with Destiny.
But….. it is journalism none the less
At this stage it is just lazy commenting posting on every kotaku article to complain about the article author.
I like what you did there 🙂
According to these articles complaining is the only way they’ll take notice and actually strive for good journalism instead of sub par blogging.
So there could be a bug… Destiny fan’s jump straight to conspiracy.
For as much as there are things I don’t like about D2 right at the top of the list (and taking up the whole top three) is the community.
Let’s put it this way even if they were doing a dodgy with them, no real money is involved with them, so there is no ‘motive’ to have a scam with them and furthermore if they were doing a dodgy they would want to make them at least look like they aren’t dodgy, surely?!
Scams only work if people think they are benefiting.
You’re kidding, right? There’s micro-transactions that people buy because they aren’t getting the XP and rewards because it’s rigged against you.
this article is about the ‘three of coins’, the only way to get three of coins is from Xur. No real money is involved with Xur. Hence my comment ‘no real money is involved with them’ because you cant get them for real money.
Ah I see. I misread your comment. My bad, sorry mate.
Well it looks like its going to be inevitable at this rate… Activision will merge Bungie into Blizzard relegating Budgie staff to game engine development and giving game design, content and community management over the company with 14 years of experience in MMO, looters and now FPS. A lot of their mistakes are decade old lessons learnt at Blizzard that they are basic conclusions.
That would actually be awesome if Blizzard took over.
Don’t forget to mention “MOVING FORWARD” in your fake ass apology Bungee! Lol
Remember that other Developer called Bungie that used to make epic FPS game with great story, lore and PvP that was really fun? They were also really good with their community.
What happened to those guys? Who is this new Bungie?
As someone who actually likes short bursts of Destiny 2 the handling of this whole release has been a ride. Please get it together Bungie.