reddit Community Investigates Bungie Throttling Experience to Promote Eververse

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

This is going to be three separate Reddit posts researched by users. 

 

tl;dr: In Destiny 2, there appears to be an experience cool down if you earn it too quickly, which slows your ability to earn bright engrams in game. Furthermore, this cool down isn't immediately apparent to the player, since the number that shows is a much higher amount than what is actually being earned.

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

 

In light of my recent post questioning whether there was something fishy about our EXP gains I decided to test how many public events i would need to level up with a 3x exp buff from the weekly reset. Luck would have it that one of my characters had near 0 exp on his current bar.

 

We all know that one heroic event grants 7500 exp with the buff.

 

My goal was to see how much exp i had after doing 10 in a row without ever going to orbit or doing any other activity aside from the occassional high value target since that along with side exp from adds should grant way and well over a level.

 

After just finishing the 10th event (All of them being heroic) I find myself at about 80% of the bar and according to Destinytracker I'm at 61.077 EXP. After 10 events I should have been on 75.000 with no add exp.

 

As a bonus for all those 10 events I didn't account for side exp given from monsters which everyone playing by now knows gives thousands of EXP per event. At this point I'm fully content of something being really fishy BUT I can't determine which or whose end it is on.

 

As I'm seeing it there's a few options as to why this doesn't turn out as we would want it to:

1. Wrong indicators. I can completely remove the possibility of this simply being a visual bug on the bar since my 10 events didn't give a full level, the chunks are very uneven even though the numbers are equal so theres still a bug to be found here, the displayed numbers however might be a problem since they might not be what we're actually getting.
2. 3rd parties being wrong. DIM / Destiny tracker is lying (unknowingly) about 80.000 being the amount of exp needed to level up. See edit2.

Bungie is hiding something. Bungie has put a cap / cooldown on farming exp without telling or showing us since the numbers shown were the same throughout all events.

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

We've all seen and talked about the cooldown with regards to chests and planetary materials. If you open them too quickly in rapid succession, you get nothing.

 

Well recently when trying to grind out my last few bright engrams before reset, I've experienced the same thing with XP. I've experienced it several times over the course of several days, so I'm convinced its not a fluke. But I hadn't taken the time to capture it and create video proof until just now.

In both of these cases, the following things were true:

• I had the well rested buff for 3x XP
• I had the fireteam medallion buff
• I was wearing a +10% EDZ ghost
• I was playing solo

 

This is the first public event I did after flying into EDZ. It was a heroic public event in Winding Cove. Note how I get a bit over 9000 XP for the event completion, and the bar seems to move in an amount proportionate to that.

• https://i.imgur.com/5ghl5H8.gifv

 

This is the second public event I did on the EDZ. It was a heroic public event in Firebase Hades. I sparrowed there (no fast travel) and completed it in a little less than 5 minutes after the prior heroic public even ended. Note how I, again, get a bit over 9000 XP for the event completion. Or so it seems. The numbers don't agree with the bar. Look how little the bar moves upon completion.

• https://i.imgur.com/ggSbr2A.gifv

 

I confirmed the discrepancy above in DIM, which estimates we need about 80k xp per bright engram. On the first event completion, the amount needed for my next bright engram went down correctly according to DIM. On the second public event completion, I again checked DIM and received barely any XP.

 

If bungie wants a cooldown on this to stop us from spaming public events to get XP, that's a different discussion, but we should at least have this communicated to us appropriately in the UI. Don't show us +9k if we're not getting +9k.

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

I just ran some tests. I did some Cabal Excavation public events, so that I could stand far away, shoot the ship down, and attempt to not get any XP aside from the completion bonus.

 

I had already exhausted my Well Rested bonus for the week.

 

Outright, without any short-term cooldown, my XP had a 0.5x multiplier. After hours of not playing, my first public event would say 2500 XP on the screen, but both DTR and DIM reported an increase of 1250/80000 XP. With a Ghost providing 10% bonus XP, I would see 2750 XP on screen, with a recorded increase of 1375/80000 XP.

 

I had initially considered that there was no limit to the amount of XP required per level, that it increased each subsequent level, but that the API was reporting it as a fraction of 80K. However, the multiplier was consistent between my level 52 Hunter and level 38 Titan, which means that this is not the case. It is possible that there is a cap at 160K, hit before level 38, and the system will simply continue to report as a fraction of 80K, but I cannot test this without deleting and re-leveling a character.

 

I also tested waiting for completion of the public event, and immediately fast-traveling back to the same location and completing it again. My testing showed that the XP completion bonus for those events was subject to an additional 0.8x multiplier, resulting in the event yielding only 40% of the XP shown on the screen.
In one test, in order to enter the public event after fast-traveling back to the same location, I was forced to shoot the boss in order to enter the event. That XP was subject to the 0.5x multiplier but not the 0.8x additional multiplier; so the short-term multiplier applies only to the completion bonus.

 

TL;DR: I'm getting only 50% of the XP it says I'm getting at the bottom of the screen, and there is some sort of additional factor - be it an amount of time, or completing the same public event (with the same location and start time) - that gives only 80% of the bonus XP for completion. I haven't figured out yet what triggers that short-term cooldown.

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

Some community comments:

 

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 I don't get upset by a lot of the "bad" things about Destiny. Obviously I wish there was more content, cooler weapons, etc. but I get that this game was designed by other human beings and they have restrictions/budgets/timelines and they have to make hard decisions at every turn.

 

That being said - this is shady as fuck. Bungie throttles our XP gain (the ONLY thing left to grind for in D2 these days) limiting our earning of bright engrams. Then they go and try to sell us bright engrams through Eververse. Changing the Eververse items with new seasons only puts further impetus on earning as much of the bright engram gear as possible each season. I should be able to grind for it if I want to, but Bungie wants to "incentivize" us to spend more money on something we should be earning for free.

 

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The lack of response from Bungie is the most worrying thing. There was some "we'll look into it" regarding the chest cooldown timer but since then, silence from bungie and the chests still have the cooldown. I have yet to see any response from Bungie even acknowledging they are even aware the XP cooldown is an issue.

 

It seems that this is all working as intended for them and that fixing the XP number displayed will only fuel more anger from the community for Bungie nerfing the grind. So they probably have no reason to act on this at all unless it gets enough visibility.
The lack of transparency is disappointing.

 

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Xp cooldowns have no reason to exist if they occor while just casually playing.

 

Chest cooldowns make sense to counter exploitation (see faction rally token farming this week), but XP cooldowns and showing false numbers seems much more insidious due to their link to Eververse and by extension, our wallets.

 

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So there’s a non-transparent mechanism in place that affects the player’s ability to earn something by playing that could otherwise be purchased with real money. It’s almost like they are willing to make sacrifices of the player’s experience in order to incentive Eververse purchases. Surely this is not intentional though.