Destiny’s latest patch notes are a disaster in terms of communication

Walter Peck was right: that’s some shady shit!

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Man, Bungie.

Now instead of a collective of the community being angry at Destiny‘s glitches and issues, you have pissed pretty much everyone off right before the launch of the expansion. It’s something that could have easily been avoided with better communication — a lesson a lot of other people in the online/MMO space have learned with experience.

So what went wrong?

A few days ago, Bungie doled out some patch notes regarding Exotic item changes. They were mostly all good ones. A ton of underpowered guns were buffed, and a new interesting Exotic upgrade system was proposed. From the moment of the patch, players could go in and start breaking down existing Exotic items for “Exotic Shards” — consumables that could be spent to fully upgrade their same-level weapons and armor.

Because of this announcement, players went in by the droves and naturally broke down duplicate items and leveled up some of their Exotics with the shards. After all, what could go wrong? This was right before the expansion, so Bungie couldn’t be planning anything else drastically different that would directly clash with these patch notes right?

As of last night, Bungie released some new notes, and they essentially undid all of the work everyone did the past few days. The gist is this: to upgrade Exotics for the expansion, you have to “turn them in” to Xur (a roaming merchant who arrives Fridays and Saturdays) when your item is available (it’s RNG based) and spend an Exotic Shard. After that, they reset their XP progress completely back to zero, and you lose all of the resources you spent previously upgrading it. It doesn’t matter if your Exotic is fully upgraded or untouched — it’s the same process and the same results.

It’s a two-pronged problem. For one, after the original notes dropped, players dismantled their existing duplicates into shards assuming it was safe. Next, they fully upgraded another weapon and put that shard in it — a completely useless endeavor since it will be re-written. All of that work is wasted because the original patch notes didn’t explain anything, and jumped the gun with the Exotic update. I’m lucky that I was too busy to log in and do this exact same thing.

Another issue entirely is the poor system involving Xur essentially “giving you permission” to upgrade your Exotic of choice. Before, Xur was a convenience. If you didn’t have a certain item in his RNG list, you could get it, if not, cool, you can wait. Now, you have to wait to use your favorite gun if it doesn’t pop up in the magical RNG backpack. Once again, Destiny is not a true MMO even if it uses bits and pieces of the genre, so it’s odd to see it adopt some choices that don’t mesh with the way the game actually works. To see your progress essentially wiped after just three months, waiting on RNG is a really odd design choice that will have a lot of people quitting the game.

After all, loot does reset in many MMOs after an expansion, but they usually don’t come so soon, and with the way Destiny works, guns are essentially your statline. Players have a certain way they like to play, and now their guns won’t be as good until Xur tells them it’s ok to upgrade. This whole system feels like an artificial way to extend the game, especially since the Hard Mode version of the new raid isn’t coming until January.

Some players are claiming that this was malicious, to get people to start over from square one essentially and waste some shards. Personally, I just think it’s a case of horrible communication. Pretty much every major game in this space has learned from their past mistakes and now employs a much better method of talking to their playerbase. For instance, Square Enix doesn’t put up full patch notes explaining intricacies like gear until the morning of the patch. That’s all Bungie had to do here — wait to implement Exotic Shards or maybe put in a little disclaimer in the first post like “hold off on dismantling anything or spending shards just yet.”

And I’m telling you now, hold off on dismantling anything or upgrading any of your Exotics just in case Bungie fixes the situation next week, and because it’s a good idea in general. Hopefully they’ll learn from this process and not do the exact same thing in the second expansion, due early next year.


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Chris Carter
Managing Editor - Chris has been enjoying Destructoid avidly since 2008. He finally decided to take the next step in January of 2009 blogging on the site. Now, he's staff!