Destiny 2 developer Bungie has essentially confirmed recent player discoveries that the game has been throttling the amount of experience earned when completing activities. Bungie took to their
blog to explain the current experience system in place, while admitting it's not performing "the way we'd like it to."
Currently, XP will scale up when playing longer or fixed duration activities like Crucible competitive multiplayer matches and the Leviathan Raid, and XP will scale down when playing activities that can be quickly, repeatedly chained, like grinding Public Events. We are not happy with the results, and we’ve heard the same from the community.
Effective immediately, we are deactivating this system.
As a result, players will see XP earn rates change for all activities across the board, but with all values being displayed consistently in the user interface. Over the course of the next week, we will be watching and reviewing XP game data to ensure that these changes meet our expectations, as well as yours. Any additional updates to this system will be communicated to you via our official channels.
Players had begun to suspect something with
Destiny 2's experience system last week during the game's first "Clarion Call" event, which gave bonus XP to players completing activities with clanmates. Players had noticed that the longer they played, the slower they'd progress, despite repeating the same activities. The experience earned would remain the same, but the experience bar would fill in smaller and smaller portions each time.
The problem with this system is that it ties into
Destiny 2's Bright Engram (loot box) system which, in turn, is linked to the game's Eververse microtransactions. Basically, upon filling up an entire XP bar (leveling up), players would receive a Bright Engram that contains a random assortment of cosmetic items like emotes, ships, and ornaments for your gear. Alternatively, players can also purchase Bright Engrams with real money via the Eververse store. So it's easy to see how throttling experience to slow down player leveling could be viewed as shady practice on behalf of Bungie in attempt to encourage more players to spend money to get Bright Engrams faster.
While it's nice to see Bungie react quickly to the discovery, one has to wonder if they would've said something had players not discovered this system.