It seems like one controversy after another seems to be plaguing the community of Destiny 2. The game just came off the highly controversial XP scaling scandal, and now some gamers have encountered an issue where the DLC is locking them out of content they already owned.
Polygon is reporting that with the Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris expansion now live, the gamers who are still rocking the plain old vanilla version of Destiny 2 are finding themselves ousted from some of the endgame; high-level content that they previously had access to.
The reason access has been cut off is because the power cap for the expansion has been raised above what the cap is in the vanilla version. So if you don't have the expansion and decide to play Prestige versions of the Leviathan, you'll be about 30 levels short of the requirement.
The Prestige versions of some of the activities was increased in order to give gamers more to do in Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris. In the process, however, players who already owned the game ended up finding themselves locked out of content they used to play.
It didn't end there, though. Nightfall strikes and other public activities were affected, including the Crucible playlists.
That's right, some of the playlists have excluded players due to some of the new maps being in the rotation.
Some of the exclusive playlists bar players who didn't pony up cash for the expansion from participating. However, the Competitive and Quickplay lists are still available for everyone.
According to the Polygon article, this little stunt isn't actually new for Bungie or Destiny. In fact, the article notes that the original game had a similar stunt take place when The Dark Below launched for the Xbox 360 and PS3 so many years ago. It turns out that raising the level cap and restricting playlists for those with the expansion also negatively affected those with the vanilla version of the game.
The only difference this time around is that Bungie was already on shaky ground due to coming off the scandal with the XP scaling, and so gamers were already keen to point out issues that would further negatively affect their gameplay experience in Destiny 2.
Compounding the two issues together has created a less-than-satisfactory response from the gaming public.
However, it seems quite obvious that in the same way that the XP scaler was designed to get gamers to purchase microtransactions for Destiny 2, the exclusionary playlists and level cap roadblocks might be used to entice players to spend money on Destiny 2's latest expansion. Of course, one would have to ask if gamers would actually fall for such a stunt? Bungie is still reeling from not only gamers finding out about the XP scaler, but also finding out that the initial fix didn't actually fix the problem. So I imagine the there might be some serious trust issues happening within the community at the moment, and it probably doesn't bode well for Bungie.
