Bungie released the 8.0.5 patch for Destiny 2 along with yesterday's weekly reset. This patch comes in the wake of the mass layoffs of many of the Bungie staff who's efforts have gone into making this game possible and promoted it though ten years of success. Unfortunately, many of the changes in this patch are not sitting well with a playing community already tensed with trepidation over the franchise's future.
One of the major talking points about the game even before the layoffs centered around issues with obtaining exotic class items. These items were a major selling point of the latest expansion, The Final Shape, and a sign of Bungie finally leaning in to the power fantasy of Destiny over some misguided, and impossible dream of "balance," as I noted in my review of the expansion. At the time of publishing that review I had yet to even unlock a class item yet but have since found a partner through LFG to unlock the items and have extensively farmed for additional rolls and while they are not absolutely required for end game fun (there are plenty of regular exotic armors that dial Prismatic builds to 11) they do unlock some pretty awesome builds and are a step above. Unfortunately getting additional rolls requires an insane grind and there is no duplicate protection or knockout system around a loot pool of 64 unique rolls per each of the three character types. Content creator Mactics has one of the better breakdowns of the issue here:
Bungie responded to this widespread criticism by claiming to buff the routes to obtain these items offering a bonus item on first completion each week of the specific exotic mission that guarantees a drop and also changing the way chest rewards work to promote playing the Overthrow activity over mindless random chest farming. But the results of these buffs are, in fact, having the opposite effect. Exotic items are now harder than ever to obtain.
Sure the double drops works for a one-time run per week. But in the past bugs have been exploited to grab double drops on every completion so this isn't really much of a buff at all. And the chest changes have made the time it takes to get a new item significantly longer. Mindless chest farming used to reward a new item every 30 minutes or so, about 45 chests into a session. Chances would start astronomically low but each chest would offer an increasingly likely chance of the next one being successful. That increase has been eliminated entirely from the current system making the Overflow event the only path to items now. But players are reporting doing 3, 4 and 5 runs with no success of a new item, sinking an hour and a half to two hours into an event with no reward that in the old mindless chest farm would have netted them 6 or more rewards in that same time commitment. And it's not like veteran players haven't already farmed Overflow to death for red borders and exotic swords already so there is nothing significantly more interesting about the event than the chest farm at this point anyway.
In reality, the only reason the drops were changed at all is because of AFK farming. The community had discovered a way through PC and scripts to run loops over virtual controller inputs and auto key recorders and playback to farm a single chest over and over for the drop chances. It was significantly slower, taking two to four times as long as the mindless chest farm, but could be done with the game just running in the background and was keyed in on the increased drop rate chances per chest. With that eliminated, AFK farming is now officially dead, but in its collateral every other method is now significantly worse as well.
But that's not all the latest patch has ushered in:
It's a shame to see the game take this step back after the two steps forward taken with The Final Shape expansion. It's even worse for this gut punch to come when community spirit is already so low after the layoffs with legitimate concerns about whether the game will have a future in the near or long term. We just want to be unstoppable space wizards. Stop holding back that fantasy just to artificially boost player retention through grinds that have no respect for a player's time. That is how the game finally does die, by a thousand cuts for the sake of milking the last goodwill out of the dedicated fanbase while providing no coherent path to welcome in new players.
