This week, Bungie rolled out two pieces of information meant to reassure Destiny 2 players that all their grinding for six months is not in vain.
First, Bungie said they were reversing course, and in Destiny 2’s Renegades expansion this December, it would not knock players back down to 200 power after a climb to 550 by the end of this season.
Then, in news that essentially had to happen after this, Bungie said it is also not raising the power cap which…would have done the exact same thing, but with different numbers. So we should have known that was coming.
This is good news in a few ways. Namely, that all current grinding will carry over, which may motivate players to return more now that they know it’s not all being thrown out the window. Second, it stands to reason that players who have gone at least a little ways up the power chain are going to instantly get Tier 4-5 gear, rather than climbing through the first three ranks again. If you’re over 400, that’s where you should be, and Bungie is about to instantly boost everyone to 300 soon. Bridging that distance is not hard with recent power gain changes.
The bad news is that these changes make it clear Bungie’s entire progression and reward system is broken, and they are now freestyling in desperate ways to retain players, even though none of this makes sense with the way this model was originally designed.
It seems pretty clear that when new gear is introduced in a large-scale event like a new expansion, players were not supposed to instantly get the top tiers right off the bat. The entire point of tiers in the first place was a way to make the power grind mean something. All but erasing Tiers 1-3 and throwing everyone 4s and 5s from moment one is pretty goofy. Not that it’s bad given the current, quite bad state of the game, but it’s obviously not what this system was designed for.
The point of The Portal is to grind out power and raise your power to get better gear. If the power climb ends quickly, the reasons for playing the Portal become almost non-existent. Yes, most people hate The Portal, but The Portal is about 80% of Destiny 2 now, so where does that leave the game? And there isn’t even going to be a raid in Renegades, just a dungeon (and judging by recent events, probably a small one).
It is good these changes are happening. Cutting everyone down to 200 or raising the cap to 1000 or something would have been awful. But now we have changes in a system that was not remotely designed for this, and it’s clear that most of it needs to be gutted at this point and the entire reward/progression loop has to be changed. Again. And maybe it should look backward rather than forward, where the game had mostly figured it out already.
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