[Jim Sterling] Seriously? Destiny 2's Holiday Update Is Microtrantastic! - General

[video]https://youtu.be/zTsWd4M53JU[/video]

I agree that the dawning wasn't handled the best for exactly the reason you can't get the dawning lootboxes by level up. But for me personally. I tend to forget about the eververse unless I level up. I don't seem to notice them pushing it that heavily in game. But maybe I am just blind who knows. But I think at this point Jim Sterling is finding everything in the book to be mad about when Destiny 2 isn't even the worst case when it comes to lootboxes. Especially when comparing it to Battlefront 2 which is something different entirely.

You get the dawning lootboxes by doing the daily event quests. It's just more cosmetics so his anger is absolutely not deserved. He should find something else to be angry at instead of nitpicking Destiny 2 and it's cool to hate on it at the moment. It has it's flaws and ain't perfect but there are far worse examples of lootbox bullshittery. Also [QUOTE]Another problem is the Christmas event coming so close after the DLC release...[/QUOTE] It's Christmas though, when the hell are they supposed to do the event?

i don't get his anger, all of the eververse items are cosmetic, and any of the "buffs" you get on the ghosts can be found on regular ones

Honestly the entire event to me is throwing snowballs in strikes that 4 shot thresher's (flying armored assault ships) and mayhem crucible. Honestly the eververse/dawning stuff is a side thought to me. It's ok, but it's not flaunted in my face nor is it good enough for me to spend money on. I still do think you should get dawning engrams on level up though. I know some people care more about collecting than I do and gating a "gift-of-giving" holiday event behind a paywall is still lame. Edit: Just wanted to go ahead and change this post after reading a lot of the below. I didn't realize the disproportionate loot-tables between the daily quests and bought engrams. I also didn't realize anything 'given' to you wouldn't dismantle into bright dust. I really enjoy Destiny 2, I think it's a fantastic game, but these scenarios really speak volumes about Bungie's short and long-term objectives with the game.

[QUOTE=Charm6000;52995229]i don't get his anger, all of the eververse items are cosmetic, and any of the "buffs" you get on the ghosts can be found on regular ones[/QUOTE] I do. A new DLC comes out. It costs 20$(For me, 30$ as I'm canadian) 90% of the content in said DLC is locked behind the Eververse Paywall. Oh great. What the FUCK are you paying for? 90 minutes of more Destiny in a bland environment that's also tiny? Oh good. I actually don't get why more people aren't fucking livid.

[QUOTE=Charm6000;52995229]i don't get his anger, all of the eververse items are cosmetic, and any of the "buffs" you get on the ghosts can be found on regular ones[/QUOTE] See this is the problem. "It's just cosmetic." No. NOOOOOOO. This shit was rewarded to you in-game in Destiny 1. In Destiny 1, sure it was RNG but you had the chance to get literally every item in the game by just playing. Most items even had guaranteed drops in certain sections (I.E the Fatebringer by killing the Templar) Now in D2 if you want that cool cloak for your hunter, you have to fucking BUY IT. That is bullshit. Fuck Destiny 2.

20usd for grinding DLC or 20usd for a good game :thinking: Even more money towards Destiny or that money for many good games :thinking:

It'd be lovely if the money actually went anywhere. It doesn't fund future content even remotely, and the expansions are hardly even worth $5, let alone the fucking $25 they're asking for it

[QUOTE=Charm6000;52995229]i don't get his anger, all of the eververse items are cosmetic, and any of the "buffs" you get on the ghosts can be found on regular ones[/QUOTE] And I play The Sims for it's ultra-realistic life simulation and its take on society. Seriously can we just stop denying that customization isn't part of these experiences. People like me will happily buy skins, hats or any form of good looking cosmetics because I say so and I likely have the money to splurge on it. There's no shame in admitting that, I spend my money in such a way because there's some form of value I see in developing a character or customizing them into a set persona ( or the fancy way of saying " I just wanna look cool! " ). It doesn't affect gameplay, these companies don't place these systems in for you to not buy them, thats not how capitalism works. Why present a system so open for interpretation like, customization if you're not going to do anything with it?

[QUOTE=DrarrkS52;52995219]You get the dawning lootboxes by doing the daily event quests. It's just more cosmetics so his anger is absolutely not deserved. He should find something else to be angry at instead of nitpicking Destiny 2 and it's cool to hate on it at the moment. It has it's flaws and ain't perfect but there are far worse examples of lootbox bullshittery. Also It's Christmas though, when the hell are they supposed to do the event?[/QUOTE] Can we stop this attitude of "well it's not as bad as this other thing so it's more acceptable/it's fine," please? This attitude is part of the problem, it's part of why they keep getting away with shit. Just because it's LESS of a problem doesn't mean it ISN'T a problem that should have attention drawn to it and be solved. Not to mention the "it's just cosmetics" chicanery that's already been addressed. Besides, this is exactly why people get pissed at Blizzard that all of their events so far have been almost entirely loot box focused, why should it be any different for Bungie? And as far as the event being close to DLC thing, he means that they're pulling this shill of an event so close to a shitshow of a DLC launch, not that they're just too close together.

[QUOTE=DrarrkS52;52995219]You get the dawning lootboxes by doing the daily event quests.[/QUOTE] The Event quests are a different lootpool. You can't get the armor set or exotic things from daily event quests. You can get a sword and the cosmetic class item Mark/cloak/etc. from it exclusively. and if you want to double the scumminess, The Shaders you get from the Different lootpool do not stack with the ones you get from the paid lootboxes, because bungie/activision doesn't want you to get 7 bright dust per shader for dismantling them. In a game where your constantly concerned about vault space this is a huge issue. [IMG]https://i.imgur.com/CsidtBD.png[/IMG] i am probably the most hardcore destiny fan but bungie/activisions recent shittiness twoards the community is insane. The Art/Music team and Gameplay Movement/gunplay mechanics team are absolute godtier devs who know what the fuck they are doing but higher ups who control microtransactions and endgame content are basically shitting on this game hardcore thus making everyone seem like horrible people. tl;dr [twitch]FaithfulMistyClipzOSfrog[/twitch] Kill Tess and the eververse with 3 Reloads of a [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsS87Bh56LA"]Sweet Buisness with acrium war rig[/URL], Distribute her wealth among the proletariat, Bring the game back to normal. It's killing the entire fanbase that used to be one of the best game communities i ever seen.

it'd be one thing if this were the only form of monetization the game had but having this in the game [I]on top[/I] of paid expansions that are arguably a little bit overpriced is pretty dicey i can live without easy to get shaders but only if i'm actually getting something in return like expansions that aren't [I]20 bucks [/I]for what they are

[QUOTE=DrarrkS52;52995219]You get the dawning lootboxes by doing the daily event quests. It's just more cosmetics so his anger is absolutely not deserved. He should find something else to be angry at instead of nitpicking Destiny 2 and it's cool to hate on it at the moment. It has it's flaws and ain't perfect but there are far worse examples of lootbox bullshittery. Also It's Christmas though, when the hell are they supposed to do the event?[/QUOTE] [img]https://i.imgur.com/HfR0EYf.png[/img] except those daily event quests you get actually give you a different type of box, that has a seperate, reduced pool of items (that of course, excludes the new exotic ships, and the armor); and also fucks over your inventory space because the items they drop are different from the eververse versions. see those duplicate shaders there? bungie made a seperate version of each of the shaders; specifically to put into the daily giftboxes. why? because normal shaders dismantle into 7 bright dust. these dismantle into a couple legendary shards. in bungie's pathetically cramped inventory system, they're actively choosing to screw players over by hamfisting these shitty alternate version shaders that only exist so we can't earn tiny amounts of premium currency to put towards buying lootbox items. (it takes 1200 to buy the chestpiece of the event exclusive armor, and possibly 800 to buy the rest of the pieces that make up the 5 piece set). because (real) dawning boxes only drop ingame through the weekly challenges, and the 1 per account freebies that they might give out weekly- this event will only drop maybe 8 or so real dawning boxes per account. [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/7kxxb0/the_dawning_eververse_breakdown_and_why_this/]someone did the math[/url] on how much bright dust, and and an approximate of how much money it would cost to buy every item in this limited time event. [quote=Plummyr] 15 Legendary Armor pieces, 5 per class, at approximately 1200 Bright Dust per piece. All pieces are exclusive to this event. Approximate total = 18,000 bright dust Edit (If non chest piece armor will be sold for 800 dust, approximate total for all armor changes to approximately 6,800 dust) Grand totals. 81 Eververse items can drop from Dawning Engrams. 61 of those items are exclusive to the Dawning, 20 of them are a combination from Curse of Osiris and the vanilla game. Approximate Dawning Eververse total if you were to buy (1) of each item = 32,900 Bright Dust. (If armor values change, the total will be reduced to a still obscenely high, approximate, 22,000 Bright Dust) Edit 4: Some people have asked what it would cost to purchase enough engrams to amass a ballpark figure of dust required. Again, not exact amounts. These are as close as I could get, given what we know as of today. Using min/max dust drops, and if you got either all max or min in each engram, anywhere between $80 (given you would receive the max amount of dust each time) to $600 (given you would receive the smallest amount of dust each time) US currency.[/quote] extrapolating backwards from these estimates by averaging the cost to buy everything, creating a bright dust to $ estimate, and assuming the cheapest bright dust cost for the armor set; if you wanted to buy [B]one[/B] set of the event armor, assuming best case scenarios you'd have to pay on average [B]~$35[/B] for again- just [B]one[/B] set of armor. lets go even further. lets say you want one particular item from the dawning. if we assume that every item from eververse has the same drop rate (which, spoiler alert they definitely-do-fucking-not). there are 81 items that drop from the event boxes. if you wanted one specific item, with the ~8 free boxes youll get over the course of this event you have a [B]~9.8%[/B] of getting that particular item. this of course is way higher than the actual odds probably are- because this assumes that exotic, and legendary items have the same drop rate as the rest of the items that drop from the boxes. so no, it's not at all likely that "you can earn them ingame". but hey, they're "just cosmetic" so why should we care right? why should we, the players of the game that's entirely based around loot- where a decent chunk of the appeal is looking cool with your freshly looted looty loot- care about these things if they're "just cosmetic"? next i'm going to hear "they dont affect gameplay"- and oh hey, look at that [QUOTE=Charm6000;52995229]i don't get his anger, all of the eververse items are cosmetic, and any of the "buffs" you get on the ghosts can be found on regular ones[/QUOTE] except all of the sparrows and ghost shells have passive effects- which abso-fucking-lutely do affect gameplay. [t]https://i.imgur.com/A2QRKl3.png[/t] in this event, currently there is one exotic ghost shell that drops from the dawning loot boxes. but what makes it so exotic? well- gee i dont know, probably the perk that it has where it [B]literally gives you 'increased loot from all public events'[/B], and gives you gunsmith telemetry on all types of elemental weapon kills. Neither of these perks can be found on any of the non-eververse ghost shells, and not even on most of the eververse shells that aren't exotic. the only thing that comes close is telemetry, but that's only for one random element out of the 3 so it's literally 3x worse. but arguably this isn't even the worst offender, because the normal eververse boxes that drop right now have ghosts that give even more egregious advantages over players that don't have them. none of the legendary ghosts on [url=https://lowlidev.com.au/destiny/ghosts]this page[/url] have anything that comes even remotely close to the advantage that you get from the exotic ones. the best perks you might get are "detects caches in a 30 meter range on [B]one planet[/B]", or "increased xp gains on [B]one planet[/B]", or "chance to generate gunsmith telemetry on kills with [B]one element[/B]. seeing a pattern here? now just look at the rest of this shit [t]https://i.imgur.com/zBlONZQ.png[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/Cyw5vS0.png[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/V23QdDa.png[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/eBoEb5L.png[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/AkGrDKE.png[/t] in my opinion, it's players like you two that are exactly the problem with the games industry right now. spouting off things like "it's just cosmetic" and "you can earn them ingame" in defense of the poor poor indie dev AAA games studios; trying to vapidly shout down any criticism of these issues just because they're saying mean things about the game you like. i love destiny too, i've clocked way more hours than i care to admit playing destiny 1, and 2 (moreso 2 because it's on pc so i can actually play it with my friends). this game has so much potential that's being dumped down the drain with all this bullshit bungie is trying to pull over our heads to make a quick buck. instead of defending them when they do these things, fans need to actually stand with the criticism and let bungie take a few hits. the direction the game is going right now is an utter goddamn trainwreck and it's a shame to see a game with such great potential to be a fun, coop, loot grinder- utterly wasted because of all this hamfisted microtransaction nonsense. if you truly enjoy this game you can't be standing up and defending it when it pulls shit like this, it's only going to make the problem worse in the long run. [editline]21st December 2017[/editline] [QUOTE=DrarrkS52;52995219] It's Christmas though, when the hell are they supposed to do the event?[/QUOTE] and another thing i just thought of now; what fucking part of this "christmas event" is actually a gameplay element and not more of this bullshit microtransaction baiting. the only noteworthy thing they've added to the game in this update that doesnt have to do with eververse is the new mayhem mode (which btw is the funnest shit ive ever done in this game). and even that- technically isnt new because it was in destiny one. they didnt even bring back sparrow racing. the only things they added that were actually new were fucking snowballs and ice hockey. the rest of this shitty event is just more eververse suffocation

And you know the worst part about this is? The fact that I love Destiny. I love the world they built. I love the characters. Guardians are cool as shit. Some of the exotic weapons are some of my favorite weapons in video games ever. Memories of playing the Vault of Glass for the first time and finally striking down Atheon and getting the Vex Mythoclast and Chatterwhite together is one of my most memorable moments I've had in gaming. And then Bungie just shits on everything that I loved. It's tragic.

here's all you get in the free dawning lootbox by doing a daily secret santa quest [t]https://i.imgur.com/Ytvz5l8.jpg[/t] Here's all you get in the paid lootbox by paying money: [t]https://i.imgur.com/bMDV77e.png[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/VYyyNRq.png[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/wUlEDYx.jpg[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/79Cfrqa.jpg[/t]

7 Dawning Engrams for each account, fuck this game man. Don't even get me started on Lost Prophesies and how long that takes.

[QUOTE=Wii60;52995560]here's all you get in the free dawning lootbox by doing a daily secret santa quest [t]https://i.imgur.com/Ytvz5l8.jpg[/t] Here's all you get in the paid lootbox by paying money: [t]https://i.imgur.com/bMDV77e.png[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/VYyyNRq.png[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/wUlEDYx.jpg[/t] [t]https://i.imgur.com/79Cfrqa.jpg[/t][/QUOTE] Man, it's one thing knowing about it, it's another thing seeing it exactly laid out like this, it's pathetic.

oh yeah one of the hardest space management sections of the game, Destiny 2 mods. The transmat effects are also seperate stacks from free lootboxes, making a space management hell even worse. [t]https://i.imgur.com/l6VoFWx.png[/t]

Defending this is defending double dipping for no reason Like look, if you want your games to gouge you, fine, but I don't want to see this shit.

There's not even inventory space for 1 of every item. You HAVE to trash things. Wouldn't be a problem if the shaders were permanent and had their own menu. But nope. All mods, including cosmetics, have to share the tiny amount of space

Remember when all of the armor sets via eververse were unlocked in kiosks? Why didn't they just bring that system back? I have like several pieces of armor cluttering up my vault that i don't have the heart to throw away because they were things from eververse engrams. Bungie had the right idea in year 3 of destiny 1 why the hell isn't that the case in Destiny 2? Why are emotes in a vault kiosk and armor isn't? Why aren't sparrows under that either? It's annoying as all hell and completely backwards from how it worked in Destiny 1.

Jesus christ the levels of avarice in the AAA industry is just getting worse

People pay money for this game, right? Jesus christ, what the fuck bungie.

Despite the massive backlash on both reddit and bungie's own forums, i'm convinced that nothing's gonna change as far as Destiny 2's spendgame goes. I regularly see people standing at the eververse kiosk buying shitloads of the lootboxes (it prints a message on the HUD of everyone nearby whenever someone picks anything up, lootboxes included) in one go, and the funbucks you purchase with real cash to get the lootboxes are among the top game-addons in PSN. We're either gonna get a patch of feel-good changes that dont actually remedy shit or a PR statement that essentially amounts to "we're listening to your feedback and value it, really, honestly, but tbh fuck you we're making money hand over fist so we're not changing shit lel"

[QUOTE=apurplerock;52995510] in my opinion, it's players like you two that are exactly the problem with the games industry right now. spouting off things like "it's just cosmetic" and "you can earn them ingame" in defense of the poor poor indie dev AAA games studios; trying to vapidly shout down any criticism of these issues just because they're saying mean things about the game you like. [/QUOTE] this is the most ridiculous thing i have ever read. i swear to fuck, you guys will heroicize yourselves over the dumbest shit and write these huge long paragraphs that do nothing but accomplish the same exact thing you're sitting here blatantly and thinly preaching about. how in the fuck can the Destiny 2 players that defend the game "shout down" criticism? are you in the same fucking universe as I am? the amount of outrage over the game is exponentially disproportionate to the amount of players defending the game. get the fuck out of here with this egotistical, protagonistic attitude shit. just because you can write a long post for 20 minutes doesn't mean your opinion is the word of god. [editline]22nd December 2017[/editline] any sentence that begins with "it's players like you..." is shitposting. like who the fuck do you think you are? trying to preface it with "in my opinion" doesn't somehow make you not seem like you're trolling hard [highlight](User was banned for this post ("There are many ways to respond tactfully to another's post. This is not one of those ways." - UncleJimmema))[/highlight]

Calm down dude. He wrote up a fairly well reasoned and structured arguement and you're just trying to tear it down on the basis that he called destiny players out (despite being one). He's absolutely right that the games industry has a huge problems with fans defending indefensible practices, presumably because they just enjoy the game otherwise. It doesn't matter how disproportionate it is because any defense for bad practices is defending bad practices. There's no way to get around that. Even if the outrage is fierce, loud and overblown, no one really needs to jump to the defence of the poor, poor multi million dollar company.

it's 2017 and I'm starting to hate videogames Never thought I'd say it, but god. I dont want every AAA to go this way

[QUOTE=FFStudios;52998465]this is the most ridiculous thing i have ever read. i swear to fuck, you guys will heroicize yourselves over the dumbest shit and write these huge long paragraphs that do nothing but accomplish the same exact thing you're sitting here blatantly and thinly preaching about. how in the fuck can the Destiny 2 players that defend the game "shout down" criticism? are you in the same fucking universe as I am? the amount of outrage over the game is exponentially disproportionate to the amount of players defending the game. get the fuck out of here with this egotistical, protagonistic attitude shit. just because you can write a long post for 20 minutes doesn't mean your opinion is the word of god. [editline]22nd December 2017[/editline] any sentence that begins with "it's players like you..." is shitposting. like who the fuck do you think you are? trying to preface it with "in my opinion" doesn't somehow make you not seem like you're trolling hard[/QUOTE] it doesnt matter that there are more people trashing on this game right now, because they're in the right. bungie doesn't deserve to be defended by anyone for what they're doing to their own fanbase. also im not sure where you're getting the idea that "my opinion is the word of god", but you need to calm the hell down. remember when i said that people try to "vapidly shout down criticism" about this game? yeah, that's kinda what you're doing right now

[QUOTE=LAMB SAUCE;52998565]it's 2017 and I'm starting to hate videogames Never thought I'd say it, but god. I dont want every AAA to go this way[/QUOTE] I play a lot of indie and old games at this point. There are still the odd big game that interests me, but those are far and few between. Don't even own a console from this generation.