Bungie's Solution to Destiny 2's Endgame Complaints Is to Make It Rain With Tokens

The going's been rough for Destiny 2 post-launch. Players have taken to social media to point out problems at every turn. The endgame, in particular, has been a sore spot with its lackluster rewards and flawed upgrading system. Recently, after Bungie controversially tweaked XP gains that go mostly towards the also microtransaction-fused Bright Engrams, Bungie noted that they're listening to fans' feedback.

Today they published a blog post addressing the issues, in lieu of the original planned stream of content from the upcoming expansion Curse of Osiris. "Going forward, Destiny 2’s post-launch game systems, features, and updates are being designed specifically to focus on and support players who want Destiny to be their hobby – the game they return to, and a game where friendships are made," wrote directors Luke Smith and Chris Barrett in a Bungie blog post. "We want Destiny to be a game that fits into your life, providing you with reasons to log in and play with your friends, clans, and families. We want Destiny to be a world you want to be a part of."

Their first step in enabling that is by taking a step forward to fix some of the more often-complained about problems: the endgame as a whole. By implementing a new Weapon Tier, improved vendor rewards, armor ornaments, better Prestige and Strike activity rewards, reduced exotic duplications, and more, Bungie's tweaking a whole bunch ahead and during the Curse of Osiris expansion later in December. They also have other changes hitting the game eventually, including some notable Crucible (PvP) changes like adding private matchmaking for players with large groups.

First up is the new Weapon Tier: Masterworks, which will either be dropped with Legendary items or can be upgraded to. The Masterworks upgrades will add additional stats to the baseline legendary weapon, such as tracking the number of kills with that weapon, generating orbs for the player and allies on kill streaks, and other miscellaneous stat bonuses that happen to also be re-rollable, should the player want a different stat. Even then, it's just a single stat boost.

Additionally, Armor Ornaments are joining the fray, formerly only exotic weapons had ornaments to bedazzle the guns with and change their appearance. Armor Ornaments won't be the same as Weapon Ornaments though; players will still be able to use shader sets to change their color scheme. "These ornaments will be unlocked by completing objectives specific to each set, and are permanently unlocked account-wide, just like Exotic Weapon ornaments," Bungie described in the blog. The new ornaments add additional customization to Destiny 2 players' characters, something that was sorely needed.

Vendors, such as Xur and Banshee, will also have new items. Players will be able to spend legendary shards and reputation tokens to buy individual gear too, rather than funneling tokens into a grander meter for the chance of getting a random assortment of items. (In way, it was like a loot box but without the box.)

All in all, Bungie's making some drastic changes to Destiny 2, but even before the blog post, fans have expressed worries about how much longer they'll actually play the game with all the issues. The solution to players complaining about the existence of tokens at all (and their slow roll out when grinding for rewards) is seemingly to just add more, for better or worse. It's too soon to say what impact this will have on the community, but just glancing at Twitter and Reddit, it doesn't look rosy. But at least it's a start, which is something.

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