Destiny 2 Is Changing How Players Earn Experience

If you've been a bit disappointed in diminishing experience returns depending on what activities you take part in while playing Destiny 2, Bungie has heard you loud and clear. They plan on changing the way XP works, removing the emphasis from more time-consuming activities.

Over on the Bungie blog, the developer has explained that fans are not the only ones unhappy with the way experience is distributed in Destiny 2. They've apparently been reviewing the data and "agree that the system is not performing the way" they would like.

If you've been playing a lot of Destiny 2 since launch, you may have noticed that experience rewards are kind of all over the place. As explained by Bungie, and decried by fans, players get more experience for taking part in longer or "fixed duration" activities such as the competitive multiplayer Crucible or the Leviathan raid. For players who don't want to dive into those specific activities, the experience gains were much less. So if you were trying to chain a bunch of quick Public Events together across the European Dead Zone, you might have noticed that your experience rewards weren't all that rewarding.

Bungie said they are unhappy with the results of this system, and they've heard the community shares those feelings. So, effective immediately, they've cut that system from the game. Some players might complain that their efforts in "more demanding activities" deserve higher rewards, but Bungie and the vocal majority of the community beg to differ.

So whether you boot up Destiny 2 now or wait for that first expansion to drop, you'll notice there's been a change to experience earn rates in all activities. More importantly, though, those rates will be properly displayed in the user interface. One of the biggest rubs, according to buzz around the internet, was that players did not realize they were getting different experience gains from what they anticipated.

The announcement wraps up explaining that Bungie will track stats over the next week and keep an eye on experience game data to determine whether or not additional adjustments need to be made. If they decide to change anything else, they'll apparently let the community know ASAP.

We've got to believe that what has been going on with Battlefront II and, more recently, FIFA 18 had something to do with this decision on the part of Bungie and Activision. Players are being extra (and deservedly) critical of progression systems these days, wary of anything that appears designed to aggressively push the player toward microtransactions.

Leveling up late game in Destiny 2 is the main way to earn loot boxes that grant things like weapon skins, emotes and other cosmetic rewards. So if those experience gains are quietly turned down for certain activities, it seems reasonable that players would respond as they have.

If nothing else, hopefully all of these recent events will make developers/publishers think twice about implementing these kinds of systems in the first place. Just turn down the knobs labeled "hostile," "gross," and "predatory" and we'll be off to a good start, yeah?