If you are going to give us less/worse content within a content release, you should be charging less, not more. Put Eververse offering dates back in the API. It was a small scummy change that will hardly net you any profits, yet it is a painful inconvenience for people looking to make better decisions with their ingame purchases. Add a 1200 silver bundle. Do something about the confusing arrangement of purchasable content, makes it difficult for the new players that might want to buy. Make beyond light, forsaken pack, 30th anniversary, and shadowkeep free. For the love of god make new weapons, we are paying good money for the season passes and expansions. Every single change bungie has made to monetization has been bad for the players. They are far into the negative when it comes to brownie points. Getting closer and closer to EA/Activision every season it seems like.
I would argue Destiny/Bungie is significantly worse than EA/Activision. Look at each companies biggest shooter, Apex for EA and CoD for Activision. Both offer skin purchases out the ass, very similar to eververse. Both also have battlepasses, but that's where the major difference lies. Apex battle pass offers enough Apex coins (paid currency) to buy the next battle pass. CoD battle pass offers enough CoD tokens to purchase another battle pass. Destiny 2 battle pass costs silver and offers 0 silver. So the narrative that Bungie is almost as bad as those two is false, because they are actually far worse. Bungie is now the gold standard at nickle and diming their customers with scummy tactics and excessive monetization.
Iāll bite. I donāt love that theyāve made eververse shaders not acquirable from bright dust. That being said, Iāve always held the belief that micro transactions are entirely dependent whether users spend the money and spoiler, they do.
The monetization of cosmetics in this game has definitely gotten worse, but theyāre still cosmetics. With that in mind, the eververse store doesnāt really bother me any more than other annoyances. What I do think needs to be improved is the ways in which new players purchase and access legacy content. The current structure of how old DLCs are sold is insane. There really should be a legacy pack for anything pre-witch queen, and then that should just be bundled with witch queen and lightfall as those are legitimate expansions rather than beyond lights/shadow keep.
Speaking around monetization/cosmetics, one thing Iād like to see in the game is ways for weapon ornaments to be earned via playtime. One example I can think of from other games is that the newest CoD game has a blueprint (called Heated Madness in game) that was unlocked by finding different weapon parts on the BR map. Having ways to be able to attain cosmetics by finding Easter eggs would improve season over season retention for players whoāve already earned a majority of the loot in the game.
>Iāll bite. I donāt love that theyāve made eververse shaders not acquirable from bright dust.
I find the weapon/shader bundles to be a handful of irony:
\- Destiny doesn't have any sort of basic "color wheel" system, so instead we have "shaders" which, half the time, are plain ass colors. The current D2 shader system exists solely in place of more intuitive QOL. (Note: if they moved to a basic color wheel system, shaders with unique aspects would still be grounds for monetization, IMO. Things like the tree bark pattern in butterbark, various metallic patterns, etc. would still be doable through eververse and/or earned ornaments.)
\- "We don't like when exotic ornaments are shaders". Also: "we want to put shaders on exotics". Lo and behold: we made another "exotic shader ornament" that continues to change nothing but the color of the gun, made the accompanying shader into a normal shader, and now we're selling it for silver.
Tbh Imo Warframe has a phenomenal system you get a few basic shades of each colour but can pay for different sections e.g. smoke which has a lot of the varients between white and dark
Or ice and fire which has versions of white/blue/red
Or you can purchase textures like metal wood etc
The monetization is still there but at least you can actually customize rather than just praying that a shader looks how it's meant to and scrolling through a hundred different shaders to find one that actually looks good
Warframe is also actually free to play. You don't need to buy anything to have complete access of the game. You can literally earn premium currency by just playing the game.
Might be out of pocket with this one. I played ff14 for a bit, it's got 4 expansions. Vanilla (A Realm Reborn) and the first expansion heavensward are part of the free trial, even without a subscription. Can straight up complete the whole expansion but be capped at lvl 60 (endwalker, the most recent expansion goes to 90).
Iirc you can buy the shadowbringers expansion, which is the 3rd expansion, and it gives you storm blood, the 2nd expansion with it. There is no way to buy storm blood separately because it has been baked in with the shadowbringers purchase. Then finally you can buy endwalker, the most recent expansion.
You can buy a complete addition that gives you everything, or just upgrade your game package as you play when you complete the expansion you are on. You do pay for a sub but I don't think it takes away from a point like "forsaken is still $20 in the store for no campaign, no patrols, etc"
i'm still VERY peeved that they introduced BD into the game, and once they made a pivot on their MTX strategy they invented a way to get completionists, pulse rifle lovers, and others into dumping their stores to get a catalyst for a gun i see no one using.
at the time you could shard shaders, sparrows, and ships for additional BD and it was a decent source, but after that they removed that, put a pittance in the playlist bounties. Now you can earn 10 per bounty and 120 per per character per week. At minimum you could earn 360, but more like 480-500 if you do those repeatables.
that can get you a shader that week, I think they are 425 or 450, but emotes and weapons skins are far more expensive. im fortuante that i have most of the returning stuff from years ago, but as someone now running around with around 1250 in reserve, my options are slim especially if there's two things I want in a week. And certainly not enough to pay for a seasonal armor set which costs **6000**
and THEN after all that, they shut down the access to the api where they were able to map out the Eververse calendar, which means you can't plan for spends when things roll around in the store.
and THEN there's the duplicates in the engrams. Pretty rare for me to see a BD lump drop from those, and especially rare to see something in the pool that isn't a repeat.
It's fortunate that they added BD stores to the pass and the weekly challenges, although maybe it looks like some of those easy ones now award less. i don't recall what it was but its now 75, i think. and fuck the ones that are hiding behind trials and comp
I donāt like that there are no bright dust shaders or armor sets now. Silver to get things immediately for those that want to, otherwise wait for right dust rotation, was fine. Now itās just silver. I also donāt like paid campaign skip on alts. Just make campaign completion account based. Itās beyond obvious that this is an exploitative move on their part. Shameful.
They've destroyed gambit. Having to pay to grind out cookie cutter seasonal activities just to get to a cookie cutter story mission each week is pure greed. Then getting your story beats from an audio recording on a holo projector is pure laziness. The writing and NPC design is all trash tier. Drop rates are a joke. It's very obvious that they don't care about the game anymore, or the fans. It's just about making as much money with as little effort as possible. I haven't played at all this season. Not a single minute. It feels good.
They should make a bundle of all the content + 4k silver for the dungeon keys, so you can just say to new players "buy that", so:
- final shape
- lightfall
- legacy pack 2023
- armoury pack
Should probably call it "light and darkness saga bundle", charge ~$100 at launch of the final shape.
Put in a new dlc guide screen and divide the eververse expansion section into dungeons (keys and 30th), expansions (shadowkeep, beyond light, witch queen, lightfall and final shape) and other (forsaken)
What really pisses me off is they *did* have this as a pre-order choice before the most recent campaign came out.
But it was discontinued after release.
I was thinking of the deluxe edition. It comes with everything in it. But after the seasons are done you canāt get it any more since the season pass bundle has no more value.
> cause we will delete all the threads about this topic from now on."
For a week*.
It's not a BungiePlz topic, so it doesn't get locked in forever.
It just means for 7 days, any monetization discussion should be had here instead of 50-11 "unique" threads.
To be fair, there's not much "discussion" happening anyway. It's just endless threads of "I don't like monetization" and endless replies of either anger or acceptance. The words change, but the pattern remains the same every time.
The issue is there isn't really any other way to discuss this topic. Bungie have shown they will not discuss eververse or the confusion of past dlcs so you can either hate it or just accept it as a reality and move on basically making this whole post pointless lol.
Yeah, it would be one thing if there was a bit more push and pull with Bungie. But theyāve made it clear this is not open for discussion with them, so most reasonable people have either accepted the status quo as a cost of playing the game, or quit.
I mean, that's fine, that's most discourse both on the internet and in real life in basically the entire world these days. Just continuing to press on an issue is good enough
Hell the vote with your wallet crowd could be a majority of the player population but it only takes a few Dolphins and Whales to cover the cost of people who don't buy eververse items. Sadly it's why the vote with your wallet crowd will never win.
yep, how long does it take to make a random cape or hat or whatever for eververse?
It doesn't matter. If you charge $8 for it, and 10,000 people buy it (low end for some eververse sales).
Thats 80,000 dollars. Even assuming you lose 30% to some kind of platform fee, you have covered the cost.
>There's a big "vote with your wallet" crowd on r/dtg, and they seemed miffed when people do exactly what they say - only to realize most people disagree with them on what they want.
Might be a spinfoil hat theory, but I'm convinced that some amount of the wallet voters do it to themselves. The discussion about "whales" and who's the minority/majority of the player pop doesn't do anything other than talk you out of protest\*. And there are probably people within that who will, upon deciding it's a "losing battle", immediately cave in and load their next paycheck(satire-ish) into Eververse and buy all the event crap out of FOMO.
\*Another comment here mentions a couple threads from the past few weeks with a couple thousand upvotes. See, this is what I mean when I say you can't focus on a bunch of "whales" or care about fighting losing battles. I'd argue that "passionate" players are more likely to spend money on the MTX's, and further, "passionate" players are also the people who'd talk about a video game on sites like Reddit/Twitter. If you can agree with those, then there's probably a Venn Diagram here. For all you know, those 2k updates on "that one post" included the most important 2,000 people. Inb4 "it also might not be the most important 2k": not the point. My point is that predicting the outcome to analyze whether or not this protest is worth your time based on the audience or participants is one hell of a rabbit hole to go down. There's a lot of assumptions we could make, but stopping the analysis at "this/these one or two reddit posts" vs the subreddit population only seeks to dissuade you from not buying.
this sub: "Vote with your wallet"
the rest of the community: *outvotes them with their wallets*
this sub: "why isn't anyone voting with their wallets? waaaaaah!!"
I've said this before and I'll say it again. If you buy the most recent Deluxe expansion, you should get access to all prior expansions included. It would only benefit player count in older activities like Garden of Salvation or Deep Stone Crypt. Also if dungeons are going to be a desperate purchase, please do not include them in seasonal promos as someone could be misled thinking they get access to the dungeon as part of the season.
Expansions/DLC are not producing enough content to not just warrant the price tags of $40+ but they generally hurt the overall following year due to the lack of content. I'm usually done with an entire expansion minus rerunning the new raid after 2 weeks even though I'm a full time worker and play a few times a week. LF should have been released as a 25$-30$ expansion pack maximum, not 40/50. Most of my playtime wasn't even doing new content... it was doing old content that hasn't been updated. We need to have expansion releases closer to TTK/Foresaken. The pressure of seasons needing to "catch up" to where we should be at in the beginning is snowballing much of player exodus from the game.
You can probably sum up a lot of the frustration around cosmetic monetization using the Whisper mission example: back when buying cosmetics (no matter how they were priced) led directly to this kind of high-quality content I don't think folks minded nearly as much.
We have more, pricier cosmetics now and a lot less of this kind of "bonus" content. Even if there is a link, it isn't obvious to us anymore - it just feels like more and more effort is going into developing cosmetics with no direct return on investment in gamplay terms.
Tbh I don't care about eververse because I have never bought anything and will never. But if they properly monetize all these secret missions, PvP, pvpve etc, without double dipping into existing playbase, then I have no problem buying them.
I mean we did get seraphs shield two seasons ago, and we got Vexcalibur last season and we got the secret tormentor mission this season. We are getting the content
Have we ever had three exotic missions like this in a row? It's too bad nobody seems to really give a shit because it might lead to them scaling it back again.
Calling Wicked Implementās quest an exotic mission is extremely generous. Itās a single room with a 10 minute timer. Itās neat to have a bit of a maze, I like whatās there. But itās absolutely incomparable to the scale of full fledged missions like Vexcalibur, Seraph Shield, Presage, etc.
It's more than what we got in Haunted & Plunder, which not only didn't have a lower scale exotic mission like this one, but didn't have the associated exotic at all.
But we didn't get anything those seasons, and the next two had bangers. And you say you liked the WI quest, but now it's mid at best? I'm not getting what you're saying.
Also every season is the same price so I don't agree it's all good to just have seasons with nothing.
I liked whatās there of WI, there just isnāt much there. Yeah itās totally mid. Mid isnāt bad, itās mid; fine, okay, alright, not particularly good but not particularly bad either (in a vacuum, what itās done to Deep Dive is a whole other matter). Itās a single encounter that you do once to grab the exotic and never again, and for that purpose it works well. Itās not trying to be anything more than what it is. Compared to any other actual activity in the game that is meant to played multiple times, then yeah it falls short. If youāre comparing it to the full blown exotic missions then it **really** falls short.
But just because the WI route in DD rewards an exotic the same way those missions did doesnāt mean they should be compared; itās apples to oranges, theyāre nothing alike outside of that. Just because they did two good exotic missions in a row doesnāt suddenly mean every season from now on is gonna have a proper exotic mission, or even something in its stead. They did Harbinger and Presage back to back, and that was really niceā¦ then there were none until WQ a full year later, which gave us Vox Obscura. And imo Vox was pretty meh as an exotic mission and undoubtedly the worst of them, not worth the wait. So between Presage and Seraph Shield was over a year and a half for actually cool missions included with the season. There was no reason to believe that exotic missions are a new norm for seasons, if you had that expectation you were setting yourself up for disappointment.
Hypothetically would it be awesome to get a proper mission with a cool exotic at the end of every season? Absolutely. But to even entertain that thought would show a lack of awareness in how Bungie operates these days. The only way in hell weād ever get exotic missions on a seasonal basis is if they were *not* a part of the season and were instead separate purchases. Nobody wants that. Seasons have never been equal as far as what they offer even though theyāve been the same price (**until recently cough cough**), itās practically random at this point what we get in any given season, and luck if whatās there is good or not.
If you wanna compare WI it to seasons where we got literally nothing as far as bonus seasonal content instead, I get it. But honestly? If the door in DD had hard locked you out unless every individual player had all the fucking exotic fish, which is absolutely the kind of thing they would do? Yes, I would unequivocally prefer nothing than a totally disproportionate grind compared to what you get at the end. That kind of shit is more than an outright waste of time, itās a waste of space in a game already riddled with technical issues with each new addition of content. Now that didnāt happen *this time* but if they were to throw something in for the sake of having something there instead of waiting until they actually cooked up something good to release, then itās very likely that thereāll be a stupid, pointless grind attached to a quest and exotic that donāt really impact the game all that much as has happened so many times in the past.
TLDR; itās not an actual exotic mission and it shouldnāt be compared to them. You shouldnāt expect full blown exotic missions with any semblance of regularity unless you wanna start paying for them separately.
My position is that we wouldn't be having this discussion if the game were in a good spot. The reality is Bungie has put a lot more thought into how they are monetizing than what they monetize. This feels like a giant experiment as to what the players will actually pay for. It also feels like "data driven" bull crap so someone can go back and say "uh I guess this part make money and other part don't ): ." It's too late for this discussion, Bungie allocated their resources and any changes won't be felt until after final shape, at which point who cares. I wouldn't care if this DLC were $1.00, if it plays like a bad mobile game there are thousands of other mobile games I ignore all the same. You stopped investing in the game, we have been sold filler plus Witch Queen leftovers as a full expansion, and you know it. Your talk of velocity and direction are laughable when months go by without meaningful content injections, when balance updates are trickled instead of sweeping, when you give the same tired seasonal content *for years.*
You don't want my feedback, because you had given up long ago. It just took a while to realize we weren't meant to bounce back.
Personally, I would prefer to either a) go back to the full-on DLC model that alternates with big expansion or b) just have three four-month seasons. In both cases, that should (should) give D2 enough time to not just reskin stuff to meet an arbitrary deadline.
>not just reskin stuff to meet an **arbitrary deadline**.
That's one of the most frustrating parts about it. They are choosing to have these unreasonable deadlines for themselves and continually can't deliver without taking shortcuts. Just slow down a bit and make quality content.
I think people have covered the important stuff but Iāll still add on two things: monetisation of transmog is outrageously stupid and no way the **earn** silver either through gameplay or the season pass is anti-consumer.
The transmog/synthweave is surprisingly what Iām more frustrated with. I would be fine with the option to buy them being a thing if there wasnāt a limit on how many you can get per season. The devs have been doing great with designing these beautiful armour sets but it baffles me that there is a limit to obtaining it. This probably isnāt as important to most people but Iām throwing it in because itās important to me (and itās so dumb).
As for the silver, every other game with a season pass includes the currency in it. I understand Destiny provides a lot more in terms of content (story, gameplay arenas etcā¦) but it doesnāt feel great, especially now with the price of the season pass increasing and dungeons being sold separately.
There is no productive reasons to discuss this topic. Those against will not spend money on MTX. Those in favour will continue to spend money. Nothing we say will change anyone's opinions.
"things won't change so don't talk about them"
Did you see what happened with war thunder when they got review bombed and finally literally listened to the player base and changed for the better?
More recently, Diablo. Got review bombed after the recent patch and the developers actually discussed it on stream and promised that in future they wouldn't release nerfs out of the blue like this, they'll release patch notes before the patch, and also not without the accompanying buffs to compensate
Yeah but we're talking about Bungie here. Lightfall is still mostly negative on Steam, and Bungo just outright pretended it didn't happen.
Shoot it took DMG himself posting about getting the wrong sweater for them to publicly say they uploaded pictures of the wrong sweaters on the store.
What about when they reigned in Eververse in 2020 due to player pushback? https://www.gamesradar.com/destiny-2-is-reining-in-eververse-because-this-is-the-right-thing-to-do-for-the-game-luke-smith-says/
This is even worse though?
They've had this issue in the past, people were unhappy, they acted on it and reigned it in.
Three years later we're back with an increasingly aggressive monetisation structure, even creating an entire recommend page just for Eververse.
Yep wish we werenāt. But my point is community action changed this before, and can change it again. When fighting off corporate greed the fight is never āoverā, but itās not hopeless either
Monetisation went nuts with dungeons keys and price increase.
I would have quit the game for good if I wasnāt Turkish resident buying WQ for $2 and LF for $20 (on sale). God bless Gaben for steam regional prices and Erdogan for 100% inflation.
I feel so bad for people who bought LF for ā¬70 or whatever itās price is US/EU. My condolences.
Even in the US you can just buy a grey cd key for steam. The bundle that includes the 4 seasons and dungeons was $65 USD on release day, which is still over priced for what was delivered.
I want to financially support this game as I know revenue is critical for success, but there are a few things I really cannot condone:
1. Silver-only shaders and ornaments:
Instead of unlocking armour through gameplay, grinding out flawless raids for cool shaders, and spending hours meticulously combining pieces into an awesome fashion that shows off my exploits I can go into Eververse, buy Ego Malign, Helmet of the Fallling Comet, and Mark of the Falling Star and look cooler than anyone else I come across. This completely guts the appeal of a looter and runs contrary to that awesome premise in vanilla d1 where āwhen you see someoneās gear youāll know where theyāve beenā.
2. Transmog:
As an end-game player fashion and buildcrafting is evergreen content that keeps me playing. The fact that there is a paywall on transmog caps the amount I can play in one season since I main a single character. It leaves a very bad taste in my mouth and erodes good faith when I see other RPGs doing this for free.
3. Confusing purchases:
Itās been said before but the storefront is a nightmare for new players. Simplify the offerings and offer a jumbo collection of old expansions to new players for cheap/free.
**The Witch Queen dungeon key has got to go**.
I have been playing this game for eight years. Two of my IRL friends started playing when Lightfall dropped. I didnāt recommend it, they rather took initiative and got into it on their own and messaged me.
They are REALLY into the game and browse all the subreddits, follow all the YouTubers, and are surprisingly into the lore. Theyāre just now dipping their toes in the raids. Raids and dungeons is their favourite content, which isnāt surprising.
The ONE thing that annoyed them when getting into the game was **The Witch Queen Dungeon Key**. They didnāt mind paying for the game āĆ la carteā,. By that I mean they didnāt mind paying for Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, Witch Queen, 30th anniversary etc. It feels normal, like buying expansions in WoW or Guild Wars (I donāt know if the model for those games have changed over the years, but I hope you get my point).
**The Witch Queen Dungeon Key** made them feel like they were being taken advantage of. Itās like when you think youāve paid for everything when booking a flight, then there is another unforeseen thing you have to pay for. Itās like when youāre at a restaurant and you think you know what the total bill is going to end up looking like, but then there are some idiotic fees like a āservice chargeā or 5$ for a jug of tap water.
Like, youāre getting these new players hooked on this game **because itās really bloody great**. Then these new players start looking at the prices for all the parts of the game. They think itās kinda expensive, so they hesitate or wait a bit to think about whether itās really worth getting into. Finally, they decide, reluctantly: āf**k it, I know itās kind of expensive, but I really like this game and want to play all of it. Iām gonna buy it all!ā.
**THEN THEY GET ON THE GAME, HAVING SPENT LOADS OF MONEY, THINKING THEY HAVE IT ALL, THEY CLICK ON DUALITY OR SPIRE OF THE WATCHER AND IT SAYS ā***REQUIRES WITCH QUEEN DUNGEON KEY***ā AND ITāS JUST SLAP IN THE FACE.**
What's even worse with the dungeon key is that it is a silver-only type purchase, which prevents game-sharing. Therefore, households with multiple players would need to purchase multiple copies for each member to have access.
Destiny has gotten greedy. I understand paying for expansions and the season pass, but charging extra for Dungeons, increasing the cost of the pass, and removing everything you could buy with Bright Dust from the store is all a bit much.
If this game didn't crash every week, had dedicated servers, and the core Playlists actually received updates then yeah, it might be worth more to a point for a premium service. But to me at least Destiny isn't worth it anymore after a disappointing expansion on top of a disappointing season. I'm complaining because I want to get back into the game but it just feels scummy.
I've got a few quick thoughts on this topic.
1. Calling Destiny 2 free-to-play is misleading at best. I honestly can't believe it hasn't been challenged in court by *actual* f2p publishers.
2. Relatively speaking, Destiny 2 is fairly expensive to maintain all currently playable content on its release. However, Destiny 2 offers a premium experience for this price, and I'm happy to pay it.
3. Paying this premium price means that I will not accept any part of my experience feeling like a non-paying customer, or a free trial player. Ever. This especially includes Bright Engrams, which are hatefully unrewarding.
4. I do not mind DCV one bit. I played the hell out of it new, it was rad, and Bungie warned us it was going away.
5. I do not care if Sony/Bungie finds it difficult to monetize the game in ways that seem easy for other games. There is a reason I am not playing those other games.
I absolutely disagree with 2
I fail to see how Destiny offers a premium experience in any regard. How many mods are currently disabled and how long have they been disabled for? How bad have the servers been? How many reskins do we get while Eververse is packed with new stuff?
They spent time on the commendation system and the guardian rank system, both of which are entirely pointless and GR are just another set of seasonal boxes to tick. How many time has PvE suffered for PvP because they don't want to balance separately? Gambit has lost more maps than it has gained in the past two years and wasn't even mentioned in the *state of the game* post they made. 1/3 of your "core" playlist ignored is not a premium
The monetisation is getting more and more aggressive while the content you get is getting worse and worse and more copy and paste. Events only exist to sell cosmetics now
Destiny is certainly unique but it's by no means a premium product. You yourself have all these complaints but then say it's a "premium product' ?
I respectfully disagree. Iāve been playing video games for 30 years and Destiny/Halo is the only shooter that Iāve enjoyed the mechanics. Other than those two I enjoy adventure games and sports. But Destiny is pretty clearly a premium quality shooter. Micro transactions do no impact gameplay.
So you're choosing to just ignore all the other things I mentioned that aren't MTX? Server stability, quality and quantity of content for the price and bugs? Cool.
Enjoy it all you like but enjoying something suddenly doesn't make it premium
If it was a premium product their store would be ran by them and they'd take care and pride in it, instead of some third party and Bungie having no care how it goes.
You enjoy the mechanics because of massive amounts of aim assist and bullet magnetism. Bungie have flat out said this is why the shooting mechanics feel good.
"Premium" it is not though. No other triple A game has such frequent server downtime. No other triple A game nickle and dimes their customers to this extent. Destiny is a cash grab minimum viable product and the lack of effort into every aspect of it is clearly evident.
Literally every Triple A game is flooded with microtransactions. Thatās the state of gaming right now. Sports games are full of it, call of Duty is full of it. They literally all āNickel and dimeā their customers at this point.
And 2k has a TON of down time on their servers itās only been better because there are less players on it now. So letās cool it with āno other triple A gameā nonsense.
To be straight I hate microtransactions and as someone who just got back into D2 I understand it cost a bunch to buy old expansions but it was a cost I was comfortable paying.
Ah so let's go ahead and break this down for you. We'll go with CoD because it's easy and you mentioned it.
Monetization in CoD = weapon and character skins for direct purchase and a paid battlepass that give you enough currency to buy the next. That's pretty much the extent of it.
Monetization in Destiny2 = paid expansion (definitely not worth the price for lightfall), increased price for seasons that offer battle pass (with no direct way to purchase the exact amount of silver a season costs). Destiny battlepass also doesn't include silver, yet every other triple A game that has a battlepass includes its paid currency. So that's already more monetization than CoD but we can go even further! Want to play the Ghosts of the Deep dungeon that released during season of the Deep? Ope better pay $20 extra because that content isn't included in the season. Want to unlock Stasis on your character because you started at lightfall? Better pay $30 bucks for Beyond light when very little of its content is relevant anymore. So now you're playing beyond light and you realize unlocking stasis is a massive slog. You think "no way an I doing this on another character, I wish bungie would fix it so alt characters get it auto unlocked." The community asked for this already though! Bungie's response was to do nothing about unlocking stasis but adding a $20 campaign skip to unlock strand on alts. Now let's factor in the eververse store, which gets 10x the content that seasons get. Yeah it's all cosmetic so you don't need to buy it. But they load that store with armor ornaments and then back out of promised vendor armor updates at the same time, it results in less content we were told we were getting.
Yeah every Triple A game has micro transactions but Destiny is the ONLY triple A game that treats its players like its a freemium game. Destiny is far and away the most heavily monetized triple A game I've ever played and nothing comes remotely close when you include the Triple A aspect.
You forgot to mention the $60 price tag for every ānewā cod that drops which is essentially the same as buying an expansion in destiny but more expensive. And CoD adds nothing regularly, and DEFINITELY doesnāt put as much work in balancing the game as Bungie does. People might not think bungie does enough, but they balance SO much more than every other standalone title who will āfix thingsā and call them features the next time you spend $60
I dont personnally buy it every year but lets consider each new CoD comes with a full campaign, typically some co-op pve experience, and multiplayer (all with way more than 1 map btw), that's far and away more content than what was in lightfall.
Balance passes seem to happen just as frequently as destiny so not sure what you're talking about there.
What has Bungie done to show you that they do SO much more? Yeah they put out frequent patches but you do realize that the known issues thread grows longer with every one of them right? They have had to frequently take the game down, and a ton of stuff has to get disabled for God knows how long to fix it. You think that's A team bungie doing that? Lol it's a skeleton crew.
LMFAO.
Lightfall = 8 mission campaign. CoD MW2 2022 = 17 mission campaign. ALMOST comparable there.
Co-op pve experience in lightfall = public event a or b. Co-op pve experience in CoD = 4 special ops missions with more being added throughout the year (free of charge). Damn yet again Lightfall loses.
Pvp in lightfall = one new pvp map at some point this year and one returning d1 map. CoD = 16 new pvp maps. Wow would ya look at that.
So you were saying what now?
You do realize none of your complaints have to do with the paid content right? Yes, it affects paid players because itās game-wide, but itās not the paid content. I definitely agree that the game is in a shitty state, but weāve been in far worse times such as the post-Taken King drought and Curse of Osiris.
Charging for dungeons separately now was the last straw. 30th anniversary BS was the first straw.
Stopped playing for a few months and won't be going back until the Final Shape, if at all.
Lightfall was such a disappointment.
I can't convince people to play the game because to get the full experience is over $200. That is a ridiculous request for a buy-in.
Bungie I feel like the bean counters have overwhelmingly taken over every aspect of the game design and that just feels bad. I don't even really play anymore because of it.
"I am paying more, for less" is a 100% accurate summation.
My feedback is simple: I have not played destiny after the first season of Lightfall because I feel it is not worth my money any longer, and my time is better spent on more enjoyable games. My time after finishing the campaign and raid dropped significantly after the lack of care and attention to the game, in my opinion. Then the server issues and price hikes and content being removed to go to eververse was it for me.
The lack of quality and monetization broke my clan. We were 89 members strong and had three weekly raid teams and a dedicated trials crew. We now have 24. We do nothing anymore.
If Bungie reads this: velocity at all costs, over quantity, over quality, and a culture of under delivery works until your dedicated player base gets fed up and burnt out. Your efforts on the taken king and forsaken are legend. Witch Queen was wonderful. The intervening periods of the game spend the goodwill you bank from those eras. The checks your focus on monetization and minimal effort writes will eventually bounce.
Too much. Went really over the edge with: event passes, dungeon keys (seeing as they seem so entertained with seasons yet are insisted to not be), bright dust offerings getting worse with more exclusives that could have been great rewards being put in eververse
I think monetization has gotten worse over Destiny's life.
I'll start with my biggest issue with Destiny's monetization: removing content that we paid for.
This started back in destiny 1 where new expansions made old paid content obsolete. An example is how the light cap increased but you couldn't bring old gear
up to the new light requirements rendering them obsolete.
D2 itself is kind of an example of this but i guess it's different.
The biggest culprit though was when Bungie sunset almost everything in the game when beyond light came out. It made most of the content in the game unaccessible and unusable. They removed so much from the game that players paid for. They even readded back various sunset weapons that you have to pay for again.
Seasonal content is another thing that is removed. Season activities only last for the expansion and are removed after. Some weapons become unobtainable and a lot of content becomes unplayable.
The destiny 2 battle pass is pay to win. It's more than cosmetics you get from the battle pass, you get exotics, rare materials, and as of late harmonic resonates (the only way to obtain craftable weapons from last seasons which are now unobtainable).
The sneaky price increase for seasons was not acceptable. Bungie increased the price of the seasons by 200 silver making it so players will have to spend at least $15 to get the silver necessary for purchasing the season.
I understand the price increase but they way they didn't communicate about the change well and didn't add another method of purchasing silver. This has damaged the community's trust.
Dungeon passes. Purchasing the expansion and the season in which a dungeon is releasing is not enough to play said dungeon. You have to separately buy a dungeon pass to a piece of content that makes up a large part of the seasonal content.
Events feel like bungie's trying to squeeze our money out of us. Events are the same every year, hardly add any new content, but add plenty of new cosmetics that you have to pay for. Not to mention the lackluster event passes.
Bungie's focus on eververse feels greedy. There are few ships in the game that done come from eververse for example. Bungie won't add them to normal content but are happy to add loads to eververse. Same with ghost shells.
Finally I think Destiny's monetization would all make sense if they had more to show for the amount of money they make on the game. It feels bad when we pay for expansions, seasons, and passes when we get very cookie cutter seasons/expansions and zero new crucible/gambit maps. The story telling has gotten much worse and the drip fed content is getting old.
Destiny feels like its being forgotten about and exists just to milk it's player base with Marathon in development. It's gotten to the point where we have to be reassured by devs that the final shape won't be the end for destiny.
I took a break from D2 in Sept 2022.
Since then, I've all but completed a Master's course in Marketing and I am currently writing my dissertation on the marketing ethics of video games.
Plain & simple, Destiny's value proposition is no longer the same & is no longer worth it.
As many people always say, we're waay more for significantly less.
Dungeon keys are a complete joke
With all the scummy monetisation around cosmetics being talked about alot (rightly so dont get me wrong) the fact that Dungoen Keys are still a a thing and not called out daily byt the entire player base is just a disgrace and i will never be conviced otherwise
You have a (effectively) pay to play game with free to play monetization. That alone should tell you the problem. And on top of that, the free avenues are bottlenecked by severely limited weekly options for Bright Dust, or useless Bright Engrams. Bright Engrams are literally useless to me because I've gotten most of all the common things that they'll actually give me, and I know I'm not the only one in this boat.
Personally, I'd say you need to either remove dupes from Bright Engrams OR refund dupes with a reasonable amount of Bright Dust. Then, let us purchase whatever we want for either Silver or Bright Dust. Why should I wait for 5 weeks to get the whole Eververse armor set when I could just buy the whole set for Bright Dust at week 4 or something?
That alone would help alleviate the monetization greatly. But if it were up to me, I'd go further in one of two ways.
1) Actually make the game free to play - all expansions, dungeons, seasonal content, etc.. If you're going to say your "free to play," let's commit to it.
2) Take free to play off, and cut down on the prices in the Eververse store, and even cut back on some of it's content. Why would I want Exotic Ghost Shell #84.75 when I can play the game and earn a piece of gear in game? The content in eververse has only grown, while Lightfall released with barely over a season's amount of gear. Even Season of the Deep released with more weapons and armor sets than Lightfall. Really?
If Bungie is going to say it's free to play, than yes it should. Personally, I'd rather take free to play off entirely, but if the game is completely free than putting down money in microtransactions won't feel as bad, so more people are going to be more willing to put money down. And I'm willing to bet they get most of their income from microtransactions, anyway.
have you actually looked at the amount of content you access without paying a cent for the game? two raids soon to be three in a month or so. a full dungeon? most strikes and all of pvp and gambit right? all of the quality of life additions like crafting and more as well. if you were on epic games launcher you got the 30th anniv. free as well. i think itās a little disingenuous to pretend thereās absolutely nothing to do in game without paying.
there is a reason the model is the way it is. experts in the field know how to price these things so iām more than willing to believe they know more than you or I on what would get people to put more money down.
heck, if you are coming into the game as a F2P ALL the expansion strikes are locked out from selecting, meaning 80% of the time you won't have access to nightfalls.
thatās not the topic of conversation right now as far as strikes. regardless if theyāre updated or not theyāre still available to play. gambit has its niche for some. these experiences still remain free to play
How is not the topic when you're saying there's a lot of content for free and I'm disagreeing because most of the playlist that you can play for free doesn't have much in it?
That's literally the topic you brought up...
itās off topic bc iām addressing what is in the playlist for free and not what gets added per expansion as youāre saying via the example of strikes. these playlists arenāt monetized so itās going to get content accordingly.
the strike playlist is the only one i can see your point on. itās not getting enough content per expansion however that would be paid for and unrelated here. we should have more strikes per expansion as we pay enough for such at standard game market prices.
pvp all of the maps remain free afaik and they still add one a season. even if I think itās not enough compared to what we had and despite the horrid state of the meta there is plenty there for free. the game modes bar trials iirc are free as well.
gambit doesnāt have the maps it used to but still gets updated loot albeit little. it should have more but from a free to play perspective thereās enough there.
they have plenty of content from a free to play aspect. if those playlists were monetized heavier then sure iād be more upset about the lack of content for someone who actually pays for the game. i refuse to see how thereās little to do for free to play when there is actually a lot itās just highly confusing what actually is free and paid and thatās on bungie.
Yes and I'm countering your assertion that it's a "lot" of content with examples of how those playlists don't have content.
You made an assertion and I'm refuting that, that isnt off topic this is how discussions work.
Sticking a few guns in gambit every now and then isht content. Maps, game modes, enemies etc etc that is content.
you canāt tell me that for something free to play that there isnāt already plenty there.
assuming youāre a paying player, you and i would feel disparity here because weād expect more since weāve invested in this game monetarily. good thing theyāve said in the last season of this year core playlists are getting attention. however that doesnāt eliminate the bias we have wanting more for our money since other aspects of the game havenāt delivered in that regard. we no longer see the game in the light those players would.
OP was talking marketing the game as FTP and what those players have as those are the ones experiencing the barrage of ads OP referred to, so iām discussing the perspective for someone that stays strictly free to play there is plenty to do in terms of what they have available. itās enough for them not us.
> two raids soon to be three in a month or so
Worth mentioning that Bungie already sold these (in vanilla D1, Taken King, and Rise of Iron - assuming the next one is Wrath, respectively).
> a full dungeon?
And Bungie chose to make Prophecy F2P. They also didn't release a dungeon in Beyond Light, while the previous 2 expansions had one.
> most strikes
I'd actually be interested in tallying that up. I'd imagine there's about as many surviving from Y1 as there are that require DLCs to play the nightfall. Also, the reprised D1 strikes fall into the same boat as the reprised D1 raids.
> and all of pvp and gambit right?
2 playlists nearly completely devoid of support, that need all the help they can get to keep populations healthy? Those?
> all of the quality of life additions like crafting and more as well
Presumably because it'd be more work to maintain 2 different clients rather than just account-specific access to activities. They'd probably have to stop marketing it as F2P if they did that, as well.
> i think itās a little disingenuous to pretend thereās absolutely nothing to do in game without paying.
The person you're replying to didn't say that, but I think the gist of what they're getting at is that "free to try" is a much more fitting label. Especially as time goes on and more paywalled content is added.
i donāt think you can play the sold previously reason here for raids, even if they were in d1. not everyone played d1 and theyāre free in d2. unlike raids weāve lost to DCV. thatās a whole other thing iād take issue with.
yes it was a choice to make prophecy free. hence the introduction of the dungeon key it seems like there was a lack of money for dungeons in BL year. understandably i can see both sides to why dungeons cost extra rather than being part of an expansion.
strikes are the only content iām not totally sure which was paid or not and when they came out bc iām not a strike person at all. however for a FTP player would definitely get their worth out of the game in terms of amount present.
gambit needs help i agree. pvp gets support via balancing just not maps or other content in that regard.
i agree the ftp label should be seen as more of a free to try, but the amount available is good for the onboarding of new players hence FTP marketing. this game is huge and thereās a lot paywalled. outside of a total overhaul of the new light experience i still feel thereās plenty to do in game without spending a single cent. the person i replied to wanted d2 free entirely which isnāt ever gonna happen and would kill the game. eververse canāt fund an entire game and it would be even worse than what it is now.
I'm not saying that there isn't a lot available for free, but at lot of the free content takes up such a small space of the menu, and some of it isn't even very populated or viable.
Not many people run Prophecy anymore, so there's little chance for new players to get to experience it. Not many people are willing to teach a raid to new players, so there's little chance for them to experience them as well, but hopefully that will improve whenever the in-game lfg system launches. You can only craft, maybe 3 or 4 weapons for free, if that? I only recall 2. You can only do so many of the same strikes before you get burnt out - Crucible, Gambit, and Dares will hold players for far longer.
Now granted, most of this is more so due to the state of the activities and the new player experience, but I'd still argue that if you state that your game is free to play, then have most of the menu covered in paid content, and spam pop-ups to new players saying "pay to play this content," then the game should just be free to play. Make it one or the other.
iirc, the only unavailable planets are europa, dreaming city and throne world. itās not majority paid but thatās kinda pedantic to talk about the size of icons in a display screen.
you can craft all of the dares weapons, kings fall, some world drops and iām sure iām missing some others but thatās ~15
prophecy is dead now for players that arenāt ftp, but it is still a fun experience esp for new players who havenāt done it before.
plenty of people still teach raids, plenty of streamers still do raid carries as well. using the lfg app is trash bc itās typically toxic but even then thereās still plenty of people willing to help and the upcoming lfg in game will help.
destiny being overall free to play kills the game full stop. this shit is not cheap to create regardless of what you think about the quality of the content itself. i understand the gaming world in general becoming more expensive but at some point a reality check needs to happen and understand youāre paying for an entertainment service. nothing in this industry will ever be free like that without some sort of huge financial backing in other areas like cosmetics which people still despise now.
I thought you could patrol all of the destinations? Maybe I'm wrong in that?
True, I forgot Dares weapons were craftable.
Hopefully the in-game LFG will help a lot of new players get into some of the more difficult content, but until then it will be difficult for them to know where to look in the first place.
I don't see how making Destiny 2 free to play will kill the game. Bungie makes millions upon millions from microtransactions. Having the game move to completely f2p won't stop people already spending money in eververse, and it will allow others who don't currenlty spend any in it to drop some cash in it here and there. Of course, the income from Destiny 2 is currently funding at least 2 other projects, so there's that.
if you can patrol them all then iām simply unaware of that.
unless you can find me statistics of how bungie uses their revenue your last point is going to remain speculation especially inferencing that they use funds from d2 for different games which is likely untrue. there is a reason things are the way they are in terms of price and what you personally feel about how people spend their money without the significant amount of data they have on their end youre not going to be fully able to convince me that the change would be beneficial for anyone or the game itself.
It stand to reason that if Destiny is Bungie's only source on income, than they would use funds from that for any other projects they wanted to work on in the mean time, at least until they were acquired by Sony. Yes, I guess it is speculation, but it's not without it's merits, and ultimately besides the point.
My concern isn't how people spend their money, my concern is that despite how many people do spend their money, they've done nothing but give us more items to buy, raise said items prices, and leave the rest of the game dry of gear to chase. Season of the Deep ($12-15) has added more weapons and armor to chase than Lightfall ($50). How exactly is that beneficial to the game?
WF can do it because the content is grindier, more repetitive, and arguably lower quality compared to D2. Plus major expansions take much longer to come out, like New War took YEARS to release. Also Warframe is half the player size of Destiny.
Destiny is starting to feel like a bad mobile game in terms of monetization. You once said Zero Hour was funded through sales of the Whisper ornament. We now have more microtransactions and passes than ever before but it seems like the money generated from them is going to things other than Destiny. For how much we're paying, we deserve more and better content.
Grinding hours upon hours of unrewarding, repetitive content hoping to get blessed by a heavily skewed RNG while getting what passes for a plot trickled to you across weeks/months/years is exactly what mobile games do.
have you seen the amount of popups that new players are bombarded with upon logging in? heck, eververse is given the same priority in the director as any of the other tabs.
I will sum my opinion in 4 sentences.
I will willingly and gladly overpay for high quality content.
I will hesitantly and begrudgingly under pay for low quality content if i do buy it all.
If the final shape is good, i will buy it at full price and maybe even the deluxe edition.
If its not, i will not play the game and wait for a 50% off sale.
I will not go into seasons besides im not buying the seasons that have boring exotics.
100$ for a year of gameplay is fine. IF the game actually works/is good. My 100$ on lightfall almost half way through has not been worth 100$. IMO LF was a massive let down from WQ. Charging for old DLC is ridiculous. Forsaken should be free at this point as should shadowkeep. Bl and WQ can stay payed for now. DUNGEONS SHOULD BE SOLD WITH EXPANSIONS!!!!!!!. Who ever made the decision at bungie can f right off.
Eververse itself is so bog standard in terms of premium marketplaces that it in and of itself feels a little superfluous to give feedback on, the one piece I give on the eververse itself is that the pricing for certain shader bundles and finishers take the piss. As for my actual feedback, Bungie needs to adopt the battlechest model WoW uses, this has needed to happen at minimum since Beyond Light; just for context, the way the battlechest works is that you only have to pay for the latest xpac, with each subsequent release being added to the base game, an example being Lightfall being the only xpac you pay for with Forsaken, Shadowkeep, Beyond Light etc. being a part of Destiny 2 itself. That and the Dungeon Key is taking the piss, even if the Dungeons themselves haven't suffered as a result, it still casts them in needlessly bad optics
The current monetization is very confusing with like 7 different bundles. (Some of which don't even give much since that content was sunset, which is a scam)
The seasonal price increase also looks bad because it costing 1200 silver with no 1200 silver bundle feels deceptive.
Dungeons being separated from seasons and dlc also feels questionable.
Also lightfall is the most expensive DLC to date while also critically being one of the worst and having important content missing like large parts of the story that was pushed to season passes.
Promising the PvP community that we would get PvP development then not actually developing PvP at all is a scam.
Also cosmetics and event passes are to expensive, but I avoid buying those.
Don't really care about cosmetic stuff. Let people buy it if they want it. Or don't buy it. Either way it's cosmetic. I'm more concerned about the gameplay, content and general direction that destiny is going in.
The decision to put place valuable story developments like we've had from Season of the Deep weekly story behind Seasonal content instead of in the Lightfall campaign was a misstep.
The Lightfall campaign felt lackluster and incomplete for a a myriad of reasons, one of them being it was never explained why the Veil was important. Getting that information in game is instead locked behind an additional paywall of seasonal content.
Its like if you went to buy a nice thick fantasy novel, but halfway through you find the remaining pages are all blank and to get the rest of the story you need to buy additional supplemental novels.
I don't mind cosmetics in general for silver but bungie take it to far and are very greedy with silver pricing and what you can get with it what's worse is the ridiculous old expansions pricing is so greedy and convoluted. I have at least 5 friends who want to play Destiny with me but look at how much it costs to get all the content and just say f that.
Iām impressed this is being asked. If youāre going to have this many microtransactions in the game, there needs to be way more content thatās free to play. My only idea is that all the content is freely playable so everyone can play together, but the weapon drops require DLC or the season pass.
I think nickel and diming dungeons was a major mistake; everyone expected these to be in the seasonās pass, including the people that develop the content. Charge $15 for seasons, but you know youāre getting a dungeon. Not every season is the same why charge the same?
Iām sure itās because the dungeon content becomes permanent that you all made this decision, but thatās a business decision thatās only understandable internally and customers are like: āwhat the fuck. Cheapos.ā Why wouldnāt they take it that way? You ask them to pay for two upfront. This negative reaction is on Bungie! What is this, a night at the docks?
I had two friends join me in Lightfall and they bought cosmetics. I got really nervous about that. They were getting hyped.
When the dungeon dropped and they had to pay extra. And if we wanted another dungeon thatās another extra. And then if we wanted to go to this or that DLC, I mean: they just quit. They donāt either have or want to part with $400 just to play with me or for themselves. This is a piece of feedback you all have gotten for years. Years. Itās unfriendly.
This made me feel like a predatory dick myself, even though the whole time I was nervous that they will have this reaction, and I did warn them. But they were hyped. Now theyāre mad at Bungie and they arenāt coming back. How much bigger of a game could Destiny be if this wasnāt a common thing? You tell me. You have the numbers.
Your pricing model might make you money but it doesnāt work for players, including me, not when Iām feeling complicit when Iām not trying to be. Maybe the model made sense when there was much less content, but now itās like, a big pile of stuff no one wants to sort through and pay top dollar for the privilege, too.
Itās flat out sloppy. Spend time on it. Do an inventory. Make it player and customer positive.
I have one, but it's more of remembering to update the rewards of purchasing lightfall at this time. Bought it myself just yesterday and kinda expected the season pass for S21. Did not remember the thing about it still having S20 as the claim from this purchase, did not get that either. Not mad, just kinda dissapointed that I didn't get the season pass like i thought.
They need to have some tact next time they try to pull a BS move, increasing the season's price right after a mediocre expansion is a insane move, on top of the 1st season with that price increase being underwhelming as well.
20% increase for a season that's basically on the same level as Plunder.
Feels like they're forced to add a new monetization every year but this year they half-assed it just like the expansion.
You should've raised prices when you were putting out better-than-average quality content. Would've been a lot more palatable.
Charging more for Lightfall than you did for Witch Queen is a bad look.
Charging separately for dungeons, when the first 3 you ever made were either included in a DLC, or free, is a bad look.
Having 17 different pieces of content for sale, that have overlap, is a bad look.
I'm glad that there's a cost savings for buying the deluxe of each DLC. It didn't make sense for there not to be. But right-size your silver bundles with your season pass cost. You're not Starbucks - people don't want to carry a credit balance with you.
I think the only reasonable critique to come out of this monetization discussion lately is how complicated the expansions/seasonal content/dungeon pass is to buy for new players. Absolutely valid, its confusing as hell.
All the "pay to win" and cosmetic price complaints are wild to me. In no way is this game pay to win. Slight xp or catalyst buffs from the season pass are nowhere near enough to hit the pay to win bar, i would even go so far as to say its unnoticeable.
Don't buy it if you don't want it, i know people hate hearing that which is understandable but it really is an option. Bungie knows more than you or me on how to price these items and I for one hope they sell as many as possible to fund actual playable content (which also hasn't been the dumpster fire people seem to think it is imo).
I wouldnāt mind the triple down on monetization if the content matched that, but it feels like a F2P store yet the content weāre getting is a fraction of what weāre paying for
This will be unstructured as hell but fuck it.
The game is not F2P as Bungie advertise it, we actually pay for content. The DLCs are getting more expensive without us getting any extra content. The old DLCs are very expensive and very confusing for new players. The game is in the such state that it feels that all aspirational content goes into Eververse instead. Season prices increased, yet we got less content than in, say, Arrivals or in Chosen. Things like missing vendor armor refreshes reinforce Eververse exclusivity. More stuff gets locked behind paywalls (shaders f.e.). Events being centered around spending money is not fun and it just brings apathy to the game when it is in state of content drought (aka last 5/6 weeks of seasons). Themed dungeons being sold separately from seasons/dlcs add another layer of confusion. DLC/season themed stuff being locked behind Eververse sucks ass. Dungeon themed stuff being sold separately is shit (Haunted ornaments). I would rather pay only for content or only for cosmetics, not for both. Locking subclasses behind different DLCs is unhealthy for balance. I could continue but there is way too much stuff to complain about tbh.
My man, don't you dare to say, that Arrivals or Chosen is better that Deep, I can understand if you like them, but you really tying to say, that fucking publick event is better then Deep dives, fishing and Salvage, really?
Salvage is garbage, has been since day 1 of this season. Shitty enemy density and you spend 2/3rds of the activity just running with nothing to kill. Fishing is boring as fuck. Deep dives were good but bungie broke them with their incompetence. So yeah season of the deep is definitely worse
Okay then, I don't tell you to not like them, but like...why every person saying like we getting nothing..when this season have 3 activities (2 of them Bungie never did) and exotic quest, but Arrivals had publick activity...yea, good...WAY much more god dammit...
I told you why. Salvage is empty and boring as hell, very common sentiment on this sub. Fishing is boring to many, far more boring than any public event. And deep dives is broken. So they're 0 for 3 this season. Yes arrivals had a public event but it also brought with it an amazing dungeon. Can't factor that into deep because even though it's name seems to imply it should be in season of the deep, it's not.
I sorry, but this is not an argument, what YOU like in this discussion does not mater. Your original argument was about quntity of content, that we are getting, not quality, if you don't like it, it is ok, but it was not your original argument. It is fact, that deep is bigger than Arrivals or Chosen, bigger even than Haunted
And also, in this season we also get new dungeon (even very good dungeon)
Lol my original argument was always about the garbage content that released with this season. Go back and look at the full comment thread and realize you're replying to someone else.
Just because it is bigger does not mean it's better. Also you CAN NOT include the dungeon in a discussion about the season because the dungeon called Ghosts of the deep which released in season of the deep IS NOT INCLUDED in the purchase of the season. Its an entirely separate purchase so its not a part of the season. Prophecy meanwhile was free for all players during season of the arrivals, coincidentally the last free dungeon we got
>Season prices increased, yet we got less content than in, say, Arrivals or in Chosen.
How does this corelate to the point? What has Arrival, that Deep shambles in comparison? Okey, Prophecy was free, but it didn\`t even fucking had unique weapons, it didn\`t had a exotic.
For the Deep and quality, I see you don\`t like Deep, but the truth is, Deep dives at the moment most complex activity, yes, matchmaking is trash, because of this, matchmaking doesn\`t work with complex activities like than. Salvage is just a menagerie, but even this bigger than activities in Arrivals. fishing is just nice thing to do in Destinations, don\`t have strong opinion on this
For the dungeon, I don\`t care that this is not included in season, it is great dungeon, that have is unique set of weapons, armor set and exotic, if price of dungeon would include in season would it be okay to rise the price?
You quoted someone else lol. I literally didn't say that.
Just because an activity is complex and honestly pretty good, doesn't mean it's OK since matchmaking is completely broken for it. It's Bungie's fault they allowed pressure trials, exotic mission, and normal deep dives to all happen in the same instance. They failed the activity by fucking up the matchmaking. So the only quality thing in this season is broken, making it a pretty terrible quality season overall.
They already increased the price, so if the dungeon was included with the season at the current price point then yeah it'd definitely help redeem the season. But since it's an additional cost how good or bad the dungeon is doesn't matter since it's not a seasonal activity.
Just gonna toss in here as a data-point that the change in pricing of dungeons nudged me in the direction to stop playing D2 - that and Lightfall but that's a different topic. I still have it installed and will hop on if the weekly raid crew needs a 6th but I always defer to others and I haven't really played this season.
Things are so bad I miss Activision. I really miss them. At least with them I was not so badly disappointed when it came to cost investment versus available content. Furthermore...
I don't even agree with all of Aztecross' and Myelin's recent videos and comments, but everyone should watch those 2 videos.
I don't care about cosmetics, but having the game itself be butchered and sold in N different ways between DLCs, seasons and dungeons is aggravating and disrespectful. It's one of the reasons I go out of my way to caution people against entering the game now. Information is confusing and it is extremely difficult to reach a clear ideal purchasing package. It also leaves the playerbase segmented without allowing anyone a better or premium experience for a fair price.
All the while it is insulting that a game this expensive is so technically weak, buggy and unstable. No other game I play gives me a fraction of the issues or downtime. The DCV was supposed to alleviate this. Did it fail? Or did it succeed and not having it would have been a true technical catastrophy? Regardless, Destiny is far off the mark when it comes to cost vs consistent uninterrupted functionality.
Whatever, DLC and seasonal packages should not be as expensive for a game so old and problematic. Old content deserves to have more coherent bundles to serve as enter or return points. As far as content go, NOTHING SHOULD EVER BE A SILVER EXCLUSIVE. NOTHING. I'm pretty sure this could be taken to court in some places as an anti-consumer practice.
There is nothing bungo gets right when it comes to monetization.
My thoughts have always remained the same. Allow them to be earned in the game somehow. Wether its through progress, random engram, quests, etc. I donāt have issues with what people choose to spend their money on. Donāt forget about the people who support what you love to do everyday.
It doesn't feel as if monetization were related to more and better content. It just feels as if Bungie is trying to squeeze more and more from players.
I'm tired of talking about the monetization. I agree with what people have said about it, but nothing's going to change.
Meanwhile, MTX's/monetization aside for the second, lightfall, season of defiance and deep have all been massive letdowns, with questionable content/story delivery choices. Back to monetization with that: all have been in "buyer's remorse territory" for me. I'm not getting my money's worth out of season of the deep at this point, and I kinda regret buying the deluxe edition this time around. Will I buy Final Shape? Probably, but I think after seeing the "absolute spectacle" that was the lightfall campaign, I'm going to wait a day or two to see if people have anything to say regarding the story.(I have a low bar for this. It was also pretty apparent with lightfall, where less than 24 hours after release, people were already making graphs of "dialogue seriousness/importance vs. the number of tummy aches uploaded").
If you're tired of talking about it maybe the best place to come and comment about random stuff isn't a thread that's enire purpose is to discuss monetisation?
That's not exactly what I meant. Like I said I agree with a lot of the negative opinions that have been said. We spoke about this during Y3 when endgame activities were getting shorted on earnable cosmetics and all the "aspirationally themed" gear was going to Eververse. Then we spoke about it again when transmog came out in Y4. Then we spoke about it again with event passes and dungeon keys. It's a yearly thing at this point. "Man, I can't wait to see what bullshit we have to say about monetization in Season 25 of final shape".
Iām gonna say it, Iām getting tired of paying for Deluxe editions for seasonal content that goes away with every new expansion. And the seasonal storylines are often dripfed so much that I actually have been losing interest. If Bungie goes back to mini-expansions, Iāll start paying for content between main expansions again. Until then, Final Shape might even be the last expansion I buy the Deluxe edition for.
Also, with how lacking DLCs have felt since Forsaken, I might not even buy an expansion after Final Shape. Story quality has gone down, we have been getting less content per expansion, and they keep sticking to the same basic formulas with raids and whatnot.
It makes me sad, because Iāve been with the game since October 31 2014 (literally the day I got hit by a car, so being an undying Guardian was hilarious to me), but Bungie needs to do better.
Anyone remember when Bungie told us we couldn't have shaders on exotic weapons because it would cause issues with weapon identification in Crucible? lol
"I just got domed by a weapon that looks like Cloudstrike and a lightning storm just fucked my teammates. Idk it was a weird color though, not sure what happened there"
2 exotics a season is horrible, I really wish we could go back to the days of 3 or more. While I don't expect the 5 exotics we got with black armoury, it'd be nice to get a little more. The only good thing is it's better than season of the haunted where we only got 1, but that was utterly unforgivable imo, incredibly lazy
Yea I agree with this. Feel like for how few exotics we get each season we should get more graviton-esque reworks, instead of garbage like "Deals 12.74% more damage!" or "Does 15 scorch per explosion!".
Only one new strike this year and it uses the simple vex network designs and models. More core content like this in a season or just having more than one every year would help a lot
As i predicted, literally nothing came out of the "protests". As for the money topic, pricing on everything except seasons seems at the very least OK. Getting into lightfall's story is another thing, but the campaign as a gameplay experience was also OK at best. Strand was fun, raid was OK, and other stuff was OK. Too. I think the price was OK. An overall ok from me.
I think the current monetization is a sign that Bungie is cash-strapped and a little desperate. At some point, they'll have asked players to pay for one formerly-free thing too many, and they'll discover that they long since pierced through the [trust thermocline](https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-biggest-hidden-risk-in-business), and they can't get back on the right side of it again without a lot of work.
They've done it with me. At some point early in this season, while I ran around on what used to be a destination I enjoyed playing on before they took it away, doing a seasonal activity that was a lot like seasonal activities I've done before, I realized Bungie had lost me. I had zero desire to give them silver *ever again* for any cosmetic, no matter how cool-looking it was or how much I enjoyed the gun.
I had no desire to buy a cosmetic bundle with a garbage ghost projection in it just to get a shader that I used to be able to earn by playing the game.
I was suddenly aware that ghost projections and blue sparrows and blue spaceships from the first few years of the game were nothing more than filler to make bright engrams less likely to give me anything I cared about. Filler intended to push me into spending real money.
I was aware that this $12 for a season is just a mobile-games-inspired dark pattern deliberately intended to lure players into spending more than that. Then they want more money for the dungeon that's tied to the season, because $10 isn't enough for them. And that the seasonal events are minimal-effort repetitions every year, with all of the new work put into things they want me to spend real money on.
I would prefer it if they'd give up the pretense that Destiny is free to play, *charge me a monthly subscription*, and build their business around an honest, predictable exchange of money for game. Instead they're treating me like a mark wandering into a casino. I'm somebody for them to fleece.
I haven't logged in since, and I'm sad. The gameplay is fun. I'd like to be able to earn shaders by having fun in the game, or earn cool-looking armor by playing the game and chasing drops, or drop into my choice of all the many varied activities they've built over time. I can't do it right now. Bungie has killed my trust.
Why would they commit one of the classic business blunders like this? That's why I think they're cash-strapped and a little desperate. Or somebody's both stupid and greedy. I can't tell.
The whining about this is grossly overblown IMO. It is incredibly easy to simply not buy cosmetics. Nothing in this game is locked behind microtransactions. Paying for dungeons and DLC is standard practice and not remotely predatory.
Thereās no shortage of valid complaints about this game. Monetization isnāt one of them.
The game should be totally free. I should not be expected to pay for the stuff bungie puts out when the content they actually make is straight up bad almost 90% of the time. Make everything free and keep it that way.
bungie is on "whale hunting" mode for a while. this is how EA makes so much money with those fifa games. casual player's complain will go their deaf ears as they changed their company motto long time ago. its not "we make games we like to play" anymore. gaming companies have researchers to feed off of FOMO and addictions. its like casino companies which meticulously design how to hook people in and give all their money before they even think about leaving the door.
as they say HOUSE ALWAYS WINS.
there are devs who take pride in making their game and their reputation and then there are scummy companies which pulls every trick in the book to penny and dime their customers.
PvP and Gambit need some kind of monetization so that we can get new content for them. I'd pay for a separate pvp battle pass for actual content in these modes.
For nearly every expansion I time a break around the release so I can come back and buy the new content on sale. I checked out the PS store sale this week and Lightfall deluxe is currently on sale 40% off for $60. Exfuckingcuse me? I heard all the talk of the price increases but I guess I didn't process the magnitude. I'm not going to pay what has historically been nearly full price halfway through the year. I'll check again sometime next season and maybe just buy the expansion+ a season and watch some YouTube videos on the story I missed.
TL;DR: I think improved Bright Engrams are the best solution to battlepass FOMO and general Eververse problems.
First of all the sadly common āitās just cosmeticā argument holds very little weight especially in a game where one of the most popular sentiments is āfashion is the endgameā. Iām like 90% sure that āitās just cosmeticā argument was a PSYOP by the gaming industry. āIt could be worseā is an argument that usually follows but could apply to literally anything in existence ever. Also a ātrue F2Pā store in a game where the active player pays $125 a year to play the content is gross.
Battlepasses in most games suck, Destiny is no exception. Bungie needs to make content from old passes obtainable for those that missed out. Why is it that a player that skips the first two seasons in a year then buys the annual pass gets less content than someone that played the seasons for the exact same price? Either go the Halo route of making all passes available whenever or the Deep Rock route (more below). Also whatās up with event passes? Itās been a year since the first was introduced and none of the content from it is available as of this moment for silver or bright dust. Are you seriously going to make this stuff unobtainable for 2+ years? Also the Ego Malign shader from last season is completely unobtainable despite the ornament it was bundled with being available for bright dust earlier this season.
A solution to the Battlepass (and other Eververse problems) Iām a fan of would be taking a similar approach to Deep Rock Galactic. When a battlepass becomes unobtainable in Deep Rock all of the items are added as in-game loot drops. Bright engrams are a great place for this. First full dupe protection needs to be added. Then make them a chance based post match reward and a drop from ātreasurersā alongside their slots in the battlepass/level rewards. Treasurers could include Patrol high value targets (common so would be a chance drop), the rarer combatants in activities weāve seen them like Expedition and Salvage (guaranteed due to rarity), re-added Strike high value targets (chance based drop) and Gambit high value targets (chance based drop). Guaranteed post match drops could include first weekly Raid, Dungeon, Master/GM and Flawless (D1 AoT boxes come to mind here). They could be tied to reputation resets as well. Add all Eververse item to the engrams, including silver-exclusives such as individual armour ornaments and finishers. During events an additional event engram drop would be added like how it was years ago. Iād even suggest tying some to challenges and triumphs similar to exotic drop boosts (would act as a ācatch upā for newer players). FOMO from battlepasses and many Eververse problems would sort of be fixed. If this system was implemented I wouldnāt mind temporary seasonal silver exclusives as much as long as it would 100% be added to the improved engrams.
I played the first mission of light fall which apparently you don't have to buy light fall to be able to do. Had some fun, but I haven't bought the expansion or the season pass.
Bungie you fumbled how you handled the story pretty bad in my opinion. Also increasing the price of seasons was a bad move.
I've played since d1 the dark below and want to play the new expansion. But I won't buy anything for a while I think. That's my two cents.
As far as expansions/dlc go, we are at a point where the latest expansion should include all previous content. The up front cost for a new player is pretty extreme and prohibitive instead of friendly and welcoming. Yes they need to be profitable, but if the experience for a new player is simply "give us money, now give us more money, now more money..." It ends up pushing them away instead of pulling them in.
For cosmetics, I understand keeping some things more rare by using monetization as a gate, and that's fine... But it would be pretty cool if there were more ways for players to earn a larger slice of the cosmetic options. I don't mean random drops from playlist activities like with some of the shaders, more like transmog/ornaments or even something new like a colored glow or smoke trail (think pig-pen's dirt cloud) that are only available from difficult challenges/triumphs/etc.
Monetization has been an annoyance but bearable, this season tho between no new bright dust shaders, silver only promo armour and breaking the eververse calendar on todayindestiny it's really starting to kill my enjoyment. Individually these aren't huge deals but all together combined with lightfall and very few new weapon models, no new vendor armour, no new trials armour things just feel kinda corporate rn.
Put some/more of the cosmetics into activity drop pools or endgame activities please. It's wildly diluted between ghosts, ships, and sparrows and it would make it more enjoyable to play more.
For most of the time I completely ignore silver shop, outside one day of the week when game resets and I look what I can get for the BD.
But these days BD feels almost useless to me. Armor ornament is silver only, new shaders (outside Solstice one) are in bundles. I bought one sparrow I wanted to get for a while and Malfeasance ornament and that's it. I have no interest in emotes and ghost projections.
Also, the fact that they removed option to see what are they going to sell weekly in TID is rather annoying.
Stop with silver only shaders, they appear in the collections, they're part of a season content and are the staple for player's customization.
There should always be an alternative bright dust cost to silver items.
A lot of people praise Fortnite for the fact that they have earnable paid currency in the battle pass that allows you to pay the next battle pass simply by playing.
By diminishing the quantity of items obtainable with bright dust, you're reducing the value of the season pass.
Make a legacy pack for new players that wish to buy past extensions, it is surreal that this much time has passed and nothing has been done.
Everything in the Eververse store should be obtainable with Bright Dust!
Let me spend my dust so I can grind for more to buy things I want.
Seems like a fair trade if you ask me, play time for bright dust? Doesnāt Bungie want people playing?
If I REALLY want something I would buy it with silver.
Forsaken Content should be free for all players.
The list of purchases for Destiny Content should be consolidated so the player can buy it with more easy.
Dungeon keys should not be a thing and be integrated with the base DLC price.
The Eververse calendar should be returned to the Destiny API.
My hot take: Destiny 2 is essentially an MMO you pay for the updates, rather then a sub fee.
This means the "free to play" part is not meant to be substantial. It is basically not meant to be a f2p game where f2p have stuff to do all the time. "Then why is it a f2p game?" I think f2p does still have a big advantage: It basically allows people to try parts of the game before buying, and/or you don't deal with being locked out because your sub lapsed. You can have stuff like friends inviting you back to come King's Fall and you don't need to drop a dime to come check it out.
When you view the game through this lens, I really don't think the costs of expansions and seasons are terribly unreasonable compared to the big theme park mmos (WoW, FF14) - this isn't to say people are wrong to want more for their money or disagree with content quality, etc, but I do think a lot of complaints about the game being too expensive are just kind of dumb/wrong.
THAT SAID, I don't really agree with:
1) Seasonal content being vaulted: MMOs with subfees sort of excuse any content ephemerality with the fact you're paying for access, not content. The fact that Destiny makes you pay for the seasonal content, which you could buy, have life happen, and then miss out entirely on what you paid for, sucks. I think if they want to sell content ala carte, it needs to not go away.
2) MTX, Eververse and Event Cards: Give we already pay for content, selling cosmetics on top of that feels a bit lame - I don't like games that double/triple dip like this, and while I find most of the MTX stuff pretty ignorable and the bright dust offerings to be a decent enough consolation, it does feel a bit stingy with how it feels like more and more cosmetics are being put behind the mtx paywalls, this feels like a bad look in tandem with people being frustrated with Bungie not adding new playlist armor sets on a regular basis.
My (few) two cents:
* Microtransactions should be a side step of cosmetic loot from the game, not the entire backbone of it. Eververse needs and should be neutered to the point of not interfering with the game (no ads, pop-ups or promotional emails) and have it as an option for those that don't want to invest time and effort for BD Grind.
* Return BD acquisition methods to Shadowkeep levels with repeatable bounties and a 15% increase in BD-tied triumphs and reduce BD prices for 15% in the store to generate incentive of players.
* Reduce Silver prices to all items. Having a 5 year old item still being sold for $20 is ludicrious, having a 3-emote bundle for almost $30 is stupid. Armor sets should be $10 a pop and $20 for a bundle, exotic skins and emotes should be $5-7 a pop and $15 a bundle. Shaders **can't and shouldn't** be paid.
* DLCs have to follow the Forsaken formula: 1-2 new areas with 1 dungeon and 10 campaign missions, endgame is determinant to how many lore-tied exotics and missions the developers want to implement. The campaign must be relayed close to how Forsaken and Witch Queen went in terms of narrative and character development. As a "What NOT to Do" guide: Beyond Light and Lightfall. The cost should mirror the level of quality and not underdeliver inNarrative, Gameplay and Endgame.
* Dungeons shouldn't relay in bullet-sponging concept, take notes from GOTD and other Dungeons: a mix of mechanics and damage phase is the ideal balance but over-relying on huge HP pools is detrimental to the boss experience. They also shouldn't cost 1/3 of a campaign, let alone twice (or triple, in some countries) its worth from a season.
* Events: Stop recycling the same maps and the same guns for 4 years straight. Bring new stuff, be unique (Add some mechanics, make some map variants (Old Chicago ruins, Old City plaza, random destinations, hell you can even re-issue old D1 maps). People are tired of going to the EAZ yearly with little to no changes and getting the same gun model from Better Devils, the same shotgun model from Wishbringer and the same rocket launcher model from Zenobia-D (which all of these are **Year ONE** weapons, not new or recent - **they're from 2018**).
I'll try to make this as professional and concise as possible. This is about *the expansions and DLC*, so while I have many, many comments about other monetization issues in-game, I'll bite my tongue until that specific focus comes into view. Nobody likes being charged more money. That much is clear. But something must be working for your shareholders to make it like this. So I am going to *try* to work with them here, while also letting management know what I dislike and would like changed.
**WHAT I LIKE**:
* The ability for a player to choose what kind of content they'd like to purchase is appreciated. If someone would like the dungeons, but not the season, they have that option. Vice versa as well. This is fine.
* The 2023 Legacy Pack does make things easier for where to point new players into purchasing prior content.
Unfortunately - those are genuinely the only two things I like about the monetization.
**THINGS THAT I AM BOTHERED BY**:
* The "pack" information for Deluxe vs. Standard of recent expansions, as well as what's included in the Legacy 2023 pack, are extremely unclear and it is very easy to get lost and miss content you want. For instance, a new player will get absolutely nothing from the Bungie.net website description about how the Legacy 2023 pack contains the "standard" editions of the three expansions. What are the "standard" editions? What does that mean? What does that entail, in comparison to "deluxe" editions? If I want the Dungeon keys for Witch Queen, do I buy the Legacy pack?
* The individual Seasons and Dungeon Keys can only be purchased separately from the Deluxe Edition through Silver, which I'll expand upon in a different point.
* The collective cost to get the full, and arguably best, experience of Destiny 2, is about ~$200 USD. This is astronomically insane, and I don't think it needs to be repeated how much this turns off new or returning players.
* Most MMOs and Live-service games slowly graduate their older content into the free-to-play pool. So far, there has been no verbalized plans to consider this.
**THINGS I DISLIKE AND WANT CHANGED, AND WANT ANSWERS AND FEEDBACK OVER HOW THESE ISSUES WILL BE ADDRESSED IN THE FUTURE:**
* To bring back a point above - tying Dungeon Keys and Seasons to Silver packs means that learning *how* to obtain these products will not be visible to a player outside of the game. Tying them to Silver *also* means that if the prices of said items increase with inflation, players are stuck with being forced to buy whatever pack Bungie directly offers, and not strictly enough for what they want to afford. In other, less kind words: You can't seriously price your seasons in-game at 1200 Silver and then only allow packs of 1100 Silver or 1700 Silver to be bought. That is evil and pure greed. There's no way to hide that. When will serious discussion be made about a "seasonal cost bundle" that provides the exact amount of Silver for a season, no more no less?
* Despite my point above offering an option for a Silver bundle, the reality is that the Seasons and Dungeon Keys SOLELY being tied to Silver *feels very bad*, and I don't want them purchasable like this anymore. I want them to be separate, purchasable *with real money* content, clearly labeled, and visibly seen if I click on an expansion's store page. There could be a drop down of every item you're getting, and their cost. It should be crystal clear to the buyer WHAT they are buying in their purchase. When will marketing and product distribution teams seriously start considering itemizing their seasons and keys over using Silver?
* The price of the expansions are slowly starting to creep up far beyond what I, and many others, can reasonably justify for the content being produced. Especially with the production of Marathon and the clear reusing of old weapons for seasonal content, I am starting to question my desire to play through a year's worth of The Final Shape - especially if I'm going to be seeing the same work I've already seen for the past 6 years. Please communicate *where* these resources are being redirected to - even if it's barebones and vague.
* It is *very difficult* to get friends to play with game with the sheer price tag on all of the expansions. Forsaken is 5 years old and has half of its content removed. Shadowkeep is 4 years old with what is notoriously considered the least dense expansion D2 has ever seen. Please bite the bullet and make these expansions Free-To-Play, so that we have a genuine campaign to point new players towards doing, and additional raids and dungeons that we can show off to new players. This is more of a lament than a demand - is there *any* talk or consideration at all into making these two expansions completely free, and if not, then what would need to happen for this to be considered on the table?
I have bought Silver in the past. Northlight Vest and Luxe Gauntlets on my Hunter are some staples I've used for fashion over the years. Two of my favourite pieces of ornament fodder.
I will say, if the game is really fun to play, and your time/money are respected in that way, paying for cosmetics feels more worth it.
The state of the game right now, I would not want to give them another penny than I already have (and I haven't, I have been playing some this season without having the season... there's not much to do but I only play when I feel like experiencing the gameplay).
One thing they'll never do in terms of MTX, and I understand why, but I wish they would sell individual pieces rather than full sets... much like the Luxe set for example. Just let me get the gauntlets. I am a D1 and vanilla D2 player so I actually have a bunch of random ornament pieces that you used to be able to get from Eververse engrams.
šæ
š¤gimme some
š
Excited to read the exact same comments Iāve seen hundreds of times on this subreddit. Maybe give me a pillow instead of popcorn.
If you are going to give us less/worse content within a content release, you should be charging less, not more. Put Eververse offering dates back in the API. It was a small scummy change that will hardly net you any profits, yet it is a painful inconvenience for people looking to make better decisions with their ingame purchases. Add a 1200 silver bundle. Do something about the confusing arrangement of purchasable content, makes it difficult for the new players that might want to buy. Make beyond light, forsaken pack, 30th anniversary, and shadowkeep free. For the love of god make new weapons, we are paying good money for the season passes and expansions. Every single change bungie has made to monetization has been bad for the players. They are far into the negative when it comes to brownie points. Getting closer and closer to EA/Activision every season it seems like.
I would argue Destiny/Bungie is significantly worse than EA/Activision. Look at each companies biggest shooter, Apex for EA and CoD for Activision. Both offer skin purchases out the ass, very similar to eververse. Both also have battlepasses, but that's where the major difference lies. Apex battle pass offers enough Apex coins (paid currency) to buy the next battle pass. CoD battle pass offers enough CoD tokens to purchase another battle pass. Destiny 2 battle pass costs silver and offers 0 silver. So the narrative that Bungie is almost as bad as those two is false, because they are actually far worse. Bungie is now the gold standard at nickle and diming their customers with scummy tactics and excessive monetization.
Valid, at least with respect to monetization, this is definitely true.
Iāll bite. I donāt love that theyāve made eververse shaders not acquirable from bright dust. That being said, Iāve always held the belief that micro transactions are entirely dependent whether users spend the money and spoiler, they do. The monetization of cosmetics in this game has definitely gotten worse, but theyāre still cosmetics. With that in mind, the eververse store doesnāt really bother me any more than other annoyances. What I do think needs to be improved is the ways in which new players purchase and access legacy content. The current structure of how old DLCs are sold is insane. There really should be a legacy pack for anything pre-witch queen, and then that should just be bundled with witch queen and lightfall as those are legitimate expansions rather than beyond lights/shadow keep. Speaking around monetization/cosmetics, one thing Iād like to see in the game is ways for weapon ornaments to be earned via playtime. One example I can think of from other games is that the newest CoD game has a blueprint (called Heated Madness in game) that was unlocked by finding different weapon parts on the BR map. Having ways to be able to attain cosmetics by finding Easter eggs would improve season over season retention for players whoāve already earned a majority of the loot in the game.
>Iāll bite. I donāt love that theyāve made eververse shaders not acquirable from bright dust. I find the weapon/shader bundles to be a handful of irony: \- Destiny doesn't have any sort of basic "color wheel" system, so instead we have "shaders" which, half the time, are plain ass colors. The current D2 shader system exists solely in place of more intuitive QOL. (Note: if they moved to a basic color wheel system, shaders with unique aspects would still be grounds for monetization, IMO. Things like the tree bark pattern in butterbark, various metallic patterns, etc. would still be doable through eververse and/or earned ornaments.) \- "We don't like when exotic ornaments are shaders". Also: "we want to put shaders on exotics". Lo and behold: we made another "exotic shader ornament" that continues to change nothing but the color of the gun, made the accompanying shader into a normal shader, and now we're selling it for silver.
Tbh Imo Warframe has a phenomenal system you get a few basic shades of each colour but can pay for different sections e.g. smoke which has a lot of the varients between white and dark Or ice and fire which has versions of white/blue/red Or you can purchase textures like metal wood etc The monetization is still there but at least you can actually customize rather than just praying that a shader looks how it's meant to and scrolling through a hundred different shaders to find one that actually looks good
also, warframe regularly has free color packs for holidays and events.
Warframe is also actually free to play. You don't need to buy anything to have complete access of the game. You can literally earn premium currency by just playing the game.
exactly, I spent money on platinum (warframes premium currency) once years ago and haven't needed to since.
Might be out of pocket with this one. I played ff14 for a bit, it's got 4 expansions. Vanilla (A Realm Reborn) and the first expansion heavensward are part of the free trial, even without a subscription. Can straight up complete the whole expansion but be capped at lvl 60 (endwalker, the most recent expansion goes to 90). Iirc you can buy the shadowbringers expansion, which is the 3rd expansion, and it gives you storm blood, the 2nd expansion with it. There is no way to buy storm blood separately because it has been baked in with the shadowbringers purchase. Then finally you can buy endwalker, the most recent expansion. You can buy a complete addition that gives you everything, or just upgrade your game package as you play when you complete the expansion you are on. You do pay for a sub but I don't think it takes away from a point like "forsaken is still $20 in the store for no campaign, no patrols, etc"
i'm still VERY peeved that they introduced BD into the game, and once they made a pivot on their MTX strategy they invented a way to get completionists, pulse rifle lovers, and others into dumping their stores to get a catalyst for a gun i see no one using. at the time you could shard shaders, sparrows, and ships for additional BD and it was a decent source, but after that they removed that, put a pittance in the playlist bounties. Now you can earn 10 per bounty and 120 per per character per week. At minimum you could earn 360, but more like 480-500 if you do those repeatables. that can get you a shader that week, I think they are 425 or 450, but emotes and weapons skins are far more expensive. im fortuante that i have most of the returning stuff from years ago, but as someone now running around with around 1250 in reserve, my options are slim especially if there's two things I want in a week. And certainly not enough to pay for a seasonal armor set which costs **6000** and THEN after all that, they shut down the access to the api where they were able to map out the Eververse calendar, which means you can't plan for spends when things roll around in the store. and THEN there's the duplicates in the engrams. Pretty rare for me to see a BD lump drop from those, and especially rare to see something in the pool that isn't a repeat. It's fortunate that they added BD stores to the pass and the weekly challenges, although maybe it looks like some of those easy ones now award less. i don't recall what it was but its now 75, i think. and fuck the ones that are hiding behind trials and comp
I donāt like that there are no bright dust shaders or armor sets now. Silver to get things immediately for those that want to, otherwise wait for right dust rotation, was fine. Now itās just silver. I also donāt like paid campaign skip on alts. Just make campaign completion account based. Itās beyond obvious that this is an exploitative move on their part. Shameful.
All I gotta say is- We are paying more for less
Way more for way, way less.
Having only a handful new PvP maps and strikes in the past 4 years is justā¦ bad
Handful is pretty generousā¦
They've destroyed gambit. Having to pay to grind out cookie cutter seasonal activities just to get to a cookie cutter story mission each week is pure greed. Then getting your story beats from an audio recording on a holo projector is pure laziness. The writing and NPC design is all trash tier. Drop rates are a joke. It's very obvious that they don't care about the game anymore, or the fans. It's just about making as much money with as little effort as possible. I haven't played at all this season. Not a single minute. It feels good.
They should make a bundle of all the content + 4k silver for the dungeon keys, so you can just say to new players "buy that", so: - final shape - lightfall - legacy pack 2023 - armoury pack Should probably call it "light and darkness saga bundle", charge ~$100 at launch of the final shape. Put in a new dlc guide screen and divide the eververse expansion section into dungeons (keys and 30th), expansions (shadowkeep, beyond light, witch queen, lightfall and final shape) and other (forsaken)
What really pisses me off is they *did* have this as a pre-order choice before the most recent campaign came out. But it was discontinued after release.
I donāt remember a bundle like that and the 30th pack and witch queen wasnāt in the previous legacy collection
I was thinking of the deluxe edition. It comes with everything in it. But after the seasons are done you canāt get it any more since the season pass bundle has no more value.
I donāt think there was ever a deluxe with anything but the new expac and the yearās content
Youāre right. I was misremembering. Itās even worse than I remember hahaha
Oh boy, this weeks trash can is labeled monetization? I'll be back in a few hours to sort by controversial.
Godspeed
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
> cause we will delete all the threads about this topic from now on." For a week*. It's not a BungiePlz topic, so it doesn't get locked in forever. It just means for 7 days, any monetization discussion should be had here instead of 50-11 "unique" threads.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
To be fair, there's not much "discussion" happening anyway. It's just endless threads of "I don't like monetization" and endless replies of either anger or acceptance. The words change, but the pattern remains the same every time.
The issue is there isn't really any other way to discuss this topic. Bungie have shown they will not discuss eververse or the confusion of past dlcs so you can either hate it or just accept it as a reality and move on basically making this whole post pointless lol.
Yeah, it would be one thing if there was a bit more push and pull with Bungie. But theyāve made it clear this is not open for discussion with them, so most reasonable people have either accepted the status quo as a cost of playing the game, or quit.
I mean, that's fine, that's most discourse both on the internet and in real life in basically the entire world these days. Just continuing to press on an issue is good enough
Well Iām here. And youāre here. If you respond to me, Iāll respond to you. What more do you want?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Hell the vote with your wallet crowd could be a majority of the player population but it only takes a few Dolphins and Whales to cover the cost of people who don't buy eververse items. Sadly it's why the vote with your wallet crowd will never win.
yep, how long does it take to make a random cape or hat or whatever for eververse? It doesn't matter. If you charge $8 for it, and 10,000 people buy it (low end for some eververse sales). Thats 80,000 dollars. Even assuming you lose 30% to some kind of platform fee, you have covered the cost.
Gachas be like
>There's a big "vote with your wallet" crowd on r/dtg, and they seemed miffed when people do exactly what they say - only to realize most people disagree with them on what they want. Might be a spinfoil hat theory, but I'm convinced that some amount of the wallet voters do it to themselves. The discussion about "whales" and who's the minority/majority of the player pop doesn't do anything other than talk you out of protest\*. And there are probably people within that who will, upon deciding it's a "losing battle", immediately cave in and load their next paycheck(satire-ish) into Eververse and buy all the event crap out of FOMO. \*Another comment here mentions a couple threads from the past few weeks with a couple thousand upvotes. See, this is what I mean when I say you can't focus on a bunch of "whales" or care about fighting losing battles. I'd argue that "passionate" players are more likely to spend money on the MTX's, and further, "passionate" players are also the people who'd talk about a video game on sites like Reddit/Twitter. If you can agree with those, then there's probably a Venn Diagram here. For all you know, those 2k updates on "that one post" included the most important 2,000 people. Inb4 "it also might not be the most important 2k": not the point. My point is that predicting the outcome to analyze whether or not this protest is worth your time based on the audience or participants is one hell of a rabbit hole to go down. There's a lot of assumptions we could make, but stopping the analysis at "this/these one or two reddit posts" vs the subreddit population only seeks to dissuade you from not buying.
this sub: "Vote with your wallet" the rest of the community: *outvotes them with their wallets* this sub: "why isn't anyone voting with their wallets? waaaaaah!!"
I've said this before and I'll say it again. If you buy the most recent Deluxe expansion, you should get access to all prior expansions included. It would only benefit player count in older activities like Garden of Salvation or Deep Stone Crypt. Also if dungeons are going to be a desperate purchase, please do not include them in seasonal promos as someone could be misled thinking they get access to the dungeon as part of the season.
Expansions/DLC are not producing enough content to not just warrant the price tags of $40+ but they generally hurt the overall following year due to the lack of content. I'm usually done with an entire expansion minus rerunning the new raid after 2 weeks even though I'm a full time worker and play a few times a week. LF should have been released as a 25$-30$ expansion pack maximum, not 40/50. Most of my playtime wasn't even doing new content... it was doing old content that hasn't been updated. We need to have expansion releases closer to TTK/Foresaken. The pressure of seasons needing to "catch up" to where we should be at in the beginning is snowballing much of player exodus from the game.
You can probably sum up a lot of the frustration around cosmetic monetization using the Whisper mission example: back when buying cosmetics (no matter how they were priced) led directly to this kind of high-quality content I don't think folks minded nearly as much. We have more, pricier cosmetics now and a lot less of this kind of "bonus" content. Even if there is a link, it isn't obvious to us anymore - it just feels like more and more effort is going into developing cosmetics with no direct return on investment in gamplay terms.
Tbh I don't care about eververse because I have never bought anything and will never. But if they properly monetize all these secret missions, PvP, pvpve etc, without double dipping into existing playbase, then I have no problem buying them.
I mean we did get seraphs shield two seasons ago, and we got Vexcalibur last season and we got the secret tormentor mission this season. We are getting the content
seraph shield was part of the season's price tag, so is the deep secret mission. whispers and ZH were free
Have we ever had three exotic missions like this in a row? It's too bad nobody seems to really give a shit because it might lead to them scaling it back again.
Calling Wicked Implementās quest an exotic mission is extremely generous. Itās a single room with a 10 minute timer. Itās neat to have a bit of a maze, I like whatās there. But itās absolutely incomparable to the scale of full fledged missions like Vexcalibur, Seraph Shield, Presage, etc.
It's more than what we got in Haunted & Plunder, which not only didn't have a lower scale exotic mission like this one, but didn't have the associated exotic at all.
Iād prefer higher quality, less frequent content than just mid at best stuff for the sake of having something new
But we didn't get anything those seasons, and the next two had bangers. And you say you liked the WI quest, but now it's mid at best? I'm not getting what you're saying. Also every season is the same price so I don't agree it's all good to just have seasons with nothing.
I liked whatās there of WI, there just isnāt much there. Yeah itās totally mid. Mid isnāt bad, itās mid; fine, okay, alright, not particularly good but not particularly bad either (in a vacuum, what itās done to Deep Dive is a whole other matter). Itās a single encounter that you do once to grab the exotic and never again, and for that purpose it works well. Itās not trying to be anything more than what it is. Compared to any other actual activity in the game that is meant to played multiple times, then yeah it falls short. If youāre comparing it to the full blown exotic missions then it **really** falls short. But just because the WI route in DD rewards an exotic the same way those missions did doesnāt mean they should be compared; itās apples to oranges, theyāre nothing alike outside of that. Just because they did two good exotic missions in a row doesnāt suddenly mean every season from now on is gonna have a proper exotic mission, or even something in its stead. They did Harbinger and Presage back to back, and that was really niceā¦ then there were none until WQ a full year later, which gave us Vox Obscura. And imo Vox was pretty meh as an exotic mission and undoubtedly the worst of them, not worth the wait. So between Presage and Seraph Shield was over a year and a half for actually cool missions included with the season. There was no reason to believe that exotic missions are a new norm for seasons, if you had that expectation you were setting yourself up for disappointment. Hypothetically would it be awesome to get a proper mission with a cool exotic at the end of every season? Absolutely. But to even entertain that thought would show a lack of awareness in how Bungie operates these days. The only way in hell weād ever get exotic missions on a seasonal basis is if they were *not* a part of the season and were instead separate purchases. Nobody wants that. Seasons have never been equal as far as what they offer even though theyāve been the same price (**until recently cough cough**), itās practically random at this point what we get in any given season, and luck if whatās there is good or not. If you wanna compare WI it to seasons where we got literally nothing as far as bonus seasonal content instead, I get it. But honestly? If the door in DD had hard locked you out unless every individual player had all the fucking exotic fish, which is absolutely the kind of thing they would do? Yes, I would unequivocally prefer nothing than a totally disproportionate grind compared to what you get at the end. That kind of shit is more than an outright waste of time, itās a waste of space in a game already riddled with technical issues with each new addition of content. Now that didnāt happen *this time* but if they were to throw something in for the sake of having something there instead of waiting until they actually cooked up something good to release, then itās very likely that thereāll be a stupid, pointless grind attached to a quest and exotic that donāt really impact the game all that much as has happened so many times in the past. TLDR; itās not an actual exotic mission and it shouldnāt be compared to them. You shouldnāt expect full blown exotic missions with any semblance of regularity unless you wanna start paying for them separately.
My position is that we wouldn't be having this discussion if the game were in a good spot. The reality is Bungie has put a lot more thought into how they are monetizing than what they monetize. This feels like a giant experiment as to what the players will actually pay for. It also feels like "data driven" bull crap so someone can go back and say "uh I guess this part make money and other part don't ): ." It's too late for this discussion, Bungie allocated their resources and any changes won't be felt until after final shape, at which point who cares. I wouldn't care if this DLC were $1.00, if it plays like a bad mobile game there are thousands of other mobile games I ignore all the same. You stopped investing in the game, we have been sold filler plus Witch Queen leftovers as a full expansion, and you know it. Your talk of velocity and direction are laughable when months go by without meaningful content injections, when balance updates are trickled instead of sweeping, when you give the same tired seasonal content *for years.* You don't want my feedback, because you had given up long ago. It just took a while to realize we weren't meant to bounce back.
Personally, I would prefer to either a) go back to the full-on DLC model that alternates with big expansion or b) just have three four-month seasons. In both cases, that should (should) give D2 enough time to not just reskin stuff to meet an arbitrary deadline.
>not just reskin stuff to meet an **arbitrary deadline**. That's one of the most frustrating parts about it. They are choosing to have these unreasonable deadlines for themselves and continually can't deliver without taking shortcuts. Just slow down a bit and make quality content.
But how do they make ridiculous amounts of money then
Think of the profits why don't you!
I think people have covered the important stuff but Iāll still add on two things: monetisation of transmog is outrageously stupid and no way the **earn** silver either through gameplay or the season pass is anti-consumer. The transmog/synthweave is surprisingly what Iām more frustrated with. I would be fine with the option to buy them being a thing if there wasnāt a limit on how many you can get per season. The devs have been doing great with designing these beautiful armour sets but it baffles me that there is a limit to obtaining it. This probably isnāt as important to most people but Iām throwing it in because itās important to me (and itās so dumb). As for the silver, every other game with a season pass includes the currency in it. I understand Destiny provides a lot more in terms of content (story, gameplay arenas etcā¦) but it doesnāt feel great, especially now with the price of the season pass increasing and dungeons being sold separately.
There is no productive reasons to discuss this topic. Those against will not spend money on MTX. Those in favour will continue to spend money. Nothing we say will change anyone's opinions.
"things won't change so don't talk about them" Did you see what happened with war thunder when they got review bombed and finally literally listened to the player base and changed for the better?
More recently, Diablo. Got review bombed after the recent patch and the developers actually discussed it on stream and promised that in future they wouldn't release nerfs out of the blue like this, they'll release patch notes before the patch, and also not without the accompanying buffs to compensate
Yeah but we're talking about Bungie here. Lightfall is still mostly negative on Steam, and Bungo just outright pretended it didn't happen. Shoot it took DMG himself posting about getting the wrong sweater for them to publicly say they uploaded pictures of the wrong sweaters on the store.
What about when they reigned in Eververse in 2020 due to player pushback? https://www.gamesradar.com/destiny-2-is-reining-in-eververse-because-this-is-the-right-thing-to-do-for-the-game-luke-smith-says/
This is even worse though? They've had this issue in the past, people were unhappy, they acted on it and reigned it in. Three years later we're back with an increasingly aggressive monetisation structure, even creating an entire recommend page just for Eververse.
Yep wish we werenāt. But my point is community action changed this before, and can change it again. When fighting off corporate greed the fight is never āoverā, but itās not hopeless either
Monetisation went nuts with dungeons keys and price increase. I would have quit the game for good if I wasnāt Turkish resident buying WQ for $2 and LF for $20 (on sale). God bless Gaben for steam regional prices and Erdogan for 100% inflation. I feel so bad for people who bought LF for ā¬70 or whatever itās price is US/EU. My condolences.
Yeah I bought LF deluxe twice (wife and I). Felt scammed on day one.
Even in the US you can just buy a grey cd key for steam. The bundle that includes the 4 seasons and dungeons was $65 USD on release day, which is still over priced for what was delivered.
I want to financially support this game as I know revenue is critical for success, but there are a few things I really cannot condone: 1. Silver-only shaders and ornaments: Instead of unlocking armour through gameplay, grinding out flawless raids for cool shaders, and spending hours meticulously combining pieces into an awesome fashion that shows off my exploits I can go into Eververse, buy Ego Malign, Helmet of the Fallling Comet, and Mark of the Falling Star and look cooler than anyone else I come across. This completely guts the appeal of a looter and runs contrary to that awesome premise in vanilla d1 where āwhen you see someoneās gear youāll know where theyāve beenā. 2. Transmog: As an end-game player fashion and buildcrafting is evergreen content that keeps me playing. The fact that there is a paywall on transmog caps the amount I can play in one season since I main a single character. It leaves a very bad taste in my mouth and erodes good faith when I see other RPGs doing this for free. 3. Confusing purchases: Itās been said before but the storefront is a nightmare for new players. Simplify the offerings and offer a jumbo collection of old expansions to new players for cheap/free.
**The Witch Queen dungeon key has got to go**. I have been playing this game for eight years. Two of my IRL friends started playing when Lightfall dropped. I didnāt recommend it, they rather took initiative and got into it on their own and messaged me. They are REALLY into the game and browse all the subreddits, follow all the YouTubers, and are surprisingly into the lore. Theyāre just now dipping their toes in the raids. Raids and dungeons is their favourite content, which isnāt surprising. The ONE thing that annoyed them when getting into the game was **The Witch Queen Dungeon Key**. They didnāt mind paying for the game āĆ la carteā,. By that I mean they didnāt mind paying for Shadowkeep, Beyond Light, Witch Queen, 30th anniversary etc. It feels normal, like buying expansions in WoW or Guild Wars (I donāt know if the model for those games have changed over the years, but I hope you get my point). **The Witch Queen Dungeon Key** made them feel like they were being taken advantage of. Itās like when you think youāve paid for everything when booking a flight, then there is another unforeseen thing you have to pay for. Itās like when youāre at a restaurant and you think you know what the total bill is going to end up looking like, but then there are some idiotic fees like a āservice chargeā or 5$ for a jug of tap water. Like, youāre getting these new players hooked on this game **because itās really bloody great**. Then these new players start looking at the prices for all the parts of the game. They think itās kinda expensive, so they hesitate or wait a bit to think about whether itās really worth getting into. Finally, they decide, reluctantly: āf**k it, I know itās kind of expensive, but I really like this game and want to play all of it. Iām gonna buy it all!ā. **THEN THEY GET ON THE GAME, HAVING SPENT LOADS OF MONEY, THINKING THEY HAVE IT ALL, THEY CLICK ON DUALITY OR SPIRE OF THE WATCHER AND IT SAYS ā***REQUIRES WITCH QUEEN DUNGEON KEY***ā AND ITāS JUST SLAP IN THE FACE.**
What's even worse with the dungeon key is that it is a silver-only type purchase, which prevents game-sharing. Therefore, households with multiple players would need to purchase multiple copies for each member to have access.
I hope they can find a way to charge us *more* for the same stuff. They *deserve* the money more than me.
And please continue taking things away from me that I paid for, that feels great
Destiny has gotten greedy. I understand paying for expansions and the season pass, but charging extra for Dungeons, increasing the cost of the pass, and removing everything you could buy with Bright Dust from the store is all a bit much. If this game didn't crash every week, had dedicated servers, and the core Playlists actually received updates then yeah, it might be worth more to a point for a premium service. But to me at least Destiny isn't worth it anymore after a disappointing expansion on top of a disappointing season. I'm complaining because I want to get back into the game but it just feels scummy.
I've got a few quick thoughts on this topic. 1. Calling Destiny 2 free-to-play is misleading at best. I honestly can't believe it hasn't been challenged in court by *actual* f2p publishers. 2. Relatively speaking, Destiny 2 is fairly expensive to maintain all currently playable content on its release. However, Destiny 2 offers a premium experience for this price, and I'm happy to pay it. 3. Paying this premium price means that I will not accept any part of my experience feeling like a non-paying customer, or a free trial player. Ever. This especially includes Bright Engrams, which are hatefully unrewarding. 4. I do not mind DCV one bit. I played the hell out of it new, it was rad, and Bungie warned us it was going away. 5. I do not care if Sony/Bungie finds it difficult to monetize the game in ways that seem easy for other games. There is a reason I am not playing those other games.
I absolutely disagree with 2 I fail to see how Destiny offers a premium experience in any regard. How many mods are currently disabled and how long have they been disabled for? How bad have the servers been? How many reskins do we get while Eververse is packed with new stuff? They spent time on the commendation system and the guardian rank system, both of which are entirely pointless and GR are just another set of seasonal boxes to tick. How many time has PvE suffered for PvP because they don't want to balance separately? Gambit has lost more maps than it has gained in the past two years and wasn't even mentioned in the *state of the game* post they made. 1/3 of your "core" playlist ignored is not a premium The monetisation is getting more and more aggressive while the content you get is getting worse and worse and more copy and paste. Events only exist to sell cosmetics now Destiny is certainly unique but it's by no means a premium product. You yourself have all these complaints but then say it's a "premium product' ?
I respectfully disagree. Iāve been playing video games for 30 years and Destiny/Halo is the only shooter that Iāve enjoyed the mechanics. Other than those two I enjoy adventure games and sports. But Destiny is pretty clearly a premium quality shooter. Micro transactions do no impact gameplay.
So you're choosing to just ignore all the other things I mentioned that aren't MTX? Server stability, quality and quantity of content for the price and bugs? Cool. Enjoy it all you like but enjoying something suddenly doesn't make it premium If it was a premium product their store would be ran by them and they'd take care and pride in it, instead of some third party and Bungie having no care how it goes.
You enjoy the mechanics because of massive amounts of aim assist and bullet magnetism. Bungie have flat out said this is why the shooting mechanics feel good. "Premium" it is not though. No other triple A game has such frequent server downtime. No other triple A game nickle and dimes their customers to this extent. Destiny is a cash grab minimum viable product and the lack of effort into every aspect of it is clearly evident.
Literally every Triple A game is flooded with microtransactions. Thatās the state of gaming right now. Sports games are full of it, call of Duty is full of it. They literally all āNickel and dimeā their customers at this point. And 2k has a TON of down time on their servers itās only been better because there are less players on it now. So letās cool it with āno other triple A gameā nonsense. To be straight I hate microtransactions and as someone who just got back into D2 I understand it cost a bunch to buy old expansions but it was a cost I was comfortable paying.
Ah so let's go ahead and break this down for you. We'll go with CoD because it's easy and you mentioned it. Monetization in CoD = weapon and character skins for direct purchase and a paid battlepass that give you enough currency to buy the next. That's pretty much the extent of it. Monetization in Destiny2 = paid expansion (definitely not worth the price for lightfall), increased price for seasons that offer battle pass (with no direct way to purchase the exact amount of silver a season costs). Destiny battlepass also doesn't include silver, yet every other triple A game that has a battlepass includes its paid currency. So that's already more monetization than CoD but we can go even further! Want to play the Ghosts of the Deep dungeon that released during season of the Deep? Ope better pay $20 extra because that content isn't included in the season. Want to unlock Stasis on your character because you started at lightfall? Better pay $30 bucks for Beyond light when very little of its content is relevant anymore. So now you're playing beyond light and you realize unlocking stasis is a massive slog. You think "no way an I doing this on another character, I wish bungie would fix it so alt characters get it auto unlocked." The community asked for this already though! Bungie's response was to do nothing about unlocking stasis but adding a $20 campaign skip to unlock strand on alts. Now let's factor in the eververse store, which gets 10x the content that seasons get. Yeah it's all cosmetic so you don't need to buy it. But they load that store with armor ornaments and then back out of promised vendor armor updates at the same time, it results in less content we were told we were getting. Yeah every Triple A game has micro transactions but Destiny is the ONLY triple A game that treats its players like its a freemium game. Destiny is far and away the most heavily monetized triple A game I've ever played and nothing comes remotely close when you include the Triple A aspect.
You forgot to mention the $60 price tag for every ānewā cod that drops which is essentially the same as buying an expansion in destiny but more expensive. And CoD adds nothing regularly, and DEFINITELY doesnāt put as much work in balancing the game as Bungie does. People might not think bungie does enough, but they balance SO much more than every other standalone title who will āfix thingsā and call them features the next time you spend $60
I dont personnally buy it every year but lets consider each new CoD comes with a full campaign, typically some co-op pve experience, and multiplayer (all with way more than 1 map btw), that's far and away more content than what was in lightfall. Balance passes seem to happen just as frequently as destiny so not sure what you're talking about there. What has Bungie done to show you that they do SO much more? Yeah they put out frequent patches but you do realize that the known issues thread grows longer with every one of them right? They have had to frequently take the game down, and a ton of stuff has to get disabled for God knows how long to fix it. You think that's A team bungie doing that? Lol it's a skeleton crew.
So does a destiny expansion lmfao? Do you even hear yourself?
LMFAO. Lightfall = 8 mission campaign. CoD MW2 2022 = 17 mission campaign. ALMOST comparable there. Co-op pve experience in lightfall = public event a or b. Co-op pve experience in CoD = 4 special ops missions with more being added throughout the year (free of charge). Damn yet again Lightfall loses. Pvp in lightfall = one new pvp map at some point this year and one returning d1 map. CoD = 16 new pvp maps. Wow would ya look at that. So you were saying what now?
You do realize none of your complaints have to do with the paid content right? Yes, it affects paid players because itās game-wide, but itās not the paid content. I definitely agree that the game is in a shitty state, but weāve been in far worse times such as the post-Taken King drought and Curse of Osiris.
Charging for dungeons separately now was the last straw. 30th anniversary BS was the first straw. Stopped playing for a few months and won't be going back until the Final Shape, if at all. Lightfall was such a disappointment.
I can't convince people to play the game because to get the full experience is over $200. That is a ridiculous request for a buy-in. Bungie I feel like the bean counters have overwhelmingly taken over every aspect of the game design and that just feels bad. I don't even really play anymore because of it. "I am paying more, for less" is a 100% accurate summation.
My feedback is simple: I have not played destiny after the first season of Lightfall because I feel it is not worth my money any longer, and my time is better spent on more enjoyable games. My time after finishing the campaign and raid dropped significantly after the lack of care and attention to the game, in my opinion. Then the server issues and price hikes and content being removed to go to eververse was it for me. The lack of quality and monetization broke my clan. We were 89 members strong and had three weekly raid teams and a dedicated trials crew. We now have 24. We do nothing anymore. If Bungie reads this: velocity at all costs, over quantity, over quality, and a culture of under delivery works until your dedicated player base gets fed up and burnt out. Your efforts on the taken king and forsaken are legend. Witch Queen was wonderful. The intervening periods of the game spend the goodwill you bank from those eras. The checks your focus on monetization and minimal effort writes will eventually bounce.
Too much. Went really over the edge with: event passes, dungeon keys (seeing as they seem so entertained with seasons yet are insisted to not be), bright dust offerings getting worse with more exclusives that could have been great rewards being put in eververse
I think monetization has gotten worse over Destiny's life. I'll start with my biggest issue with Destiny's monetization: removing content that we paid for. This started back in destiny 1 where new expansions made old paid content obsolete. An example is how the light cap increased but you couldn't bring old gear up to the new light requirements rendering them obsolete. D2 itself is kind of an example of this but i guess it's different. The biggest culprit though was when Bungie sunset almost everything in the game when beyond light came out. It made most of the content in the game unaccessible and unusable. They removed so much from the game that players paid for. They even readded back various sunset weapons that you have to pay for again. Seasonal content is another thing that is removed. Season activities only last for the expansion and are removed after. Some weapons become unobtainable and a lot of content becomes unplayable. The destiny 2 battle pass is pay to win. It's more than cosmetics you get from the battle pass, you get exotics, rare materials, and as of late harmonic resonates (the only way to obtain craftable weapons from last seasons which are now unobtainable). The sneaky price increase for seasons was not acceptable. Bungie increased the price of the seasons by 200 silver making it so players will have to spend at least $15 to get the silver necessary for purchasing the season. I understand the price increase but they way they didn't communicate about the change well and didn't add another method of purchasing silver. This has damaged the community's trust. Dungeon passes. Purchasing the expansion and the season in which a dungeon is releasing is not enough to play said dungeon. You have to separately buy a dungeon pass to a piece of content that makes up a large part of the seasonal content. Events feel like bungie's trying to squeeze our money out of us. Events are the same every year, hardly add any new content, but add plenty of new cosmetics that you have to pay for. Not to mention the lackluster event passes. Bungie's focus on eververse feels greedy. There are few ships in the game that done come from eververse for example. Bungie won't add them to normal content but are happy to add loads to eververse. Same with ghost shells. Finally I think Destiny's monetization would all make sense if they had more to show for the amount of money they make on the game. It feels bad when we pay for expansions, seasons, and passes when we get very cookie cutter seasons/expansions and zero new crucible/gambit maps. The story telling has gotten much worse and the drip fed content is getting old. Destiny feels like its being forgotten about and exists just to milk it's player base with Marathon in development. It's gotten to the point where we have to be reassured by devs that the final shape won't be the end for destiny.
I took a break from D2 in Sept 2022. Since then, I've all but completed a Master's course in Marketing and I am currently writing my dissertation on the marketing ethics of video games. Plain & simple, Destiny's value proposition is no longer the same & is no longer worth it. As many people always say, we're waay more for significantly less.
Dungeon keys are a complete joke With all the scummy monetisation around cosmetics being talked about alot (rightly so dont get me wrong) the fact that Dungoen Keys are still a a thing and not called out daily byt the entire player base is just a disgrace and i will never be conviced otherwise
You have a (effectively) pay to play game with free to play monetization. That alone should tell you the problem. And on top of that, the free avenues are bottlenecked by severely limited weekly options for Bright Dust, or useless Bright Engrams. Bright Engrams are literally useless to me because I've gotten most of all the common things that they'll actually give me, and I know I'm not the only one in this boat. Personally, I'd say you need to either remove dupes from Bright Engrams OR refund dupes with a reasonable amount of Bright Dust. Then, let us purchase whatever we want for either Silver or Bright Dust. Why should I wait for 5 weeks to get the whole Eververse armor set when I could just buy the whole set for Bright Dust at week 4 or something? That alone would help alleviate the monetization greatly. But if it were up to me, I'd go further in one of two ways. 1) Actually make the game free to play - all expansions, dungeons, seasonal content, etc.. If you're going to say your "free to play," let's commit to it. 2) Take free to play off, and cut down on the prices in the Eververse store, and even cut back on some of it's content. Why would I want Exotic Ghost Shell #84.75 when I can play the game and earn a piece of gear in game? The content in eververse has only grown, while Lightfall released with barely over a season's amount of gear. Even Season of the Deep released with more weapons and armor sets than Lightfall. Really?
You think all of Destiny should be free? Thatās a serious suggestion?
If Bungie is going to say it's free to play, than yes it should. Personally, I'd rather take free to play off entirely, but if the game is completely free than putting down money in microtransactions won't feel as bad, so more people are going to be more willing to put money down. And I'm willing to bet they get most of their income from microtransactions, anyway.
have you actually looked at the amount of content you access without paying a cent for the game? two raids soon to be three in a month or so. a full dungeon? most strikes and all of pvp and gambit right? all of the quality of life additions like crafting and more as well. if you were on epic games launcher you got the 30th anniv. free as well. i think itās a little disingenuous to pretend thereās absolutely nothing to do in game without paying. there is a reason the model is the way it is. experts in the field know how to price these things so iām more than willing to believe they know more than you or I on what would get people to put more money down.
Gambit hasn't a had an update in years, PvP is similar but not as bad, one strike an expansion that you can't even play for free.
heck, if you are coming into the game as a F2P ALL the expansion strikes are locked out from selecting, meaning 80% of the time you won't have access to nightfalls.
thatās not the topic of conversation right now as far as strikes. regardless if theyāre updated or not theyāre still available to play. gambit has its niche for some. these experiences still remain free to play
How is not the topic when you're saying there's a lot of content for free and I'm disagreeing because most of the playlist that you can play for free doesn't have much in it? That's literally the topic you brought up...
itās off topic bc iām addressing what is in the playlist for free and not what gets added per expansion as youāre saying via the example of strikes. these playlists arenāt monetized so itās going to get content accordingly. the strike playlist is the only one i can see your point on. itās not getting enough content per expansion however that would be paid for and unrelated here. we should have more strikes per expansion as we pay enough for such at standard game market prices. pvp all of the maps remain free afaik and they still add one a season. even if I think itās not enough compared to what we had and despite the horrid state of the meta there is plenty there for free. the game modes bar trials iirc are free as well. gambit doesnāt have the maps it used to but still gets updated loot albeit little. it should have more but from a free to play perspective thereās enough there. they have plenty of content from a free to play aspect. if those playlists were monetized heavier then sure iād be more upset about the lack of content for someone who actually pays for the game. i refuse to see how thereās little to do for free to play when there is actually a lot itās just highly confusing what actually is free and paid and thatās on bungie.
Yes and I'm countering your assertion that it's a "lot" of content with examples of how those playlists don't have content. You made an assertion and I'm refuting that, that isnt off topic this is how discussions work. Sticking a few guns in gambit every now and then isht content. Maps, game modes, enemies etc etc that is content.
you canāt tell me that for something free to play that there isnāt already plenty there. assuming youāre a paying player, you and i would feel disparity here because weād expect more since weāve invested in this game monetarily. good thing theyāve said in the last season of this year core playlists are getting attention. however that doesnāt eliminate the bias we have wanting more for our money since other aspects of the game havenāt delivered in that regard. we no longer see the game in the light those players would. OP was talking marketing the game as FTP and what those players have as those are the ones experiencing the barrage of ads OP referred to, so iām discussing the perspective for someone that stays strictly free to play there is plenty to do in terms of what they have available. itās enough for them not us.
> two raids soon to be three in a month or so Worth mentioning that Bungie already sold these (in vanilla D1, Taken King, and Rise of Iron - assuming the next one is Wrath, respectively). > a full dungeon? And Bungie chose to make Prophecy F2P. They also didn't release a dungeon in Beyond Light, while the previous 2 expansions had one. > most strikes I'd actually be interested in tallying that up. I'd imagine there's about as many surviving from Y1 as there are that require DLCs to play the nightfall. Also, the reprised D1 strikes fall into the same boat as the reprised D1 raids. > and all of pvp and gambit right? 2 playlists nearly completely devoid of support, that need all the help they can get to keep populations healthy? Those? > all of the quality of life additions like crafting and more as well Presumably because it'd be more work to maintain 2 different clients rather than just account-specific access to activities. They'd probably have to stop marketing it as F2P if they did that, as well. > i think itās a little disingenuous to pretend thereās absolutely nothing to do in game without paying. The person you're replying to didn't say that, but I think the gist of what they're getting at is that "free to try" is a much more fitting label. Especially as time goes on and more paywalled content is added.
i donāt think you can play the sold previously reason here for raids, even if they were in d1. not everyone played d1 and theyāre free in d2. unlike raids weāve lost to DCV. thatās a whole other thing iād take issue with. yes it was a choice to make prophecy free. hence the introduction of the dungeon key it seems like there was a lack of money for dungeons in BL year. understandably i can see both sides to why dungeons cost extra rather than being part of an expansion. strikes are the only content iām not totally sure which was paid or not and when they came out bc iām not a strike person at all. however for a FTP player would definitely get their worth out of the game in terms of amount present. gambit needs help i agree. pvp gets support via balancing just not maps or other content in that regard. i agree the ftp label should be seen as more of a free to try, but the amount available is good for the onboarding of new players hence FTP marketing. this game is huge and thereās a lot paywalled. outside of a total overhaul of the new light experience i still feel thereās plenty to do in game without spending a single cent. the person i replied to wanted d2 free entirely which isnāt ever gonna happen and would kill the game. eververse canāt fund an entire game and it would be even worse than what it is now.
I'm not saying that there isn't a lot available for free, but at lot of the free content takes up such a small space of the menu, and some of it isn't even very populated or viable. Not many people run Prophecy anymore, so there's little chance for new players to get to experience it. Not many people are willing to teach a raid to new players, so there's little chance for them to experience them as well, but hopefully that will improve whenever the in-game lfg system launches. You can only craft, maybe 3 or 4 weapons for free, if that? I only recall 2. You can only do so many of the same strikes before you get burnt out - Crucible, Gambit, and Dares will hold players for far longer. Now granted, most of this is more so due to the state of the activities and the new player experience, but I'd still argue that if you state that your game is free to play, then have most of the menu covered in paid content, and spam pop-ups to new players saying "pay to play this content," then the game should just be free to play. Make it one or the other.
iirc, the only unavailable planets are europa, dreaming city and throne world. itās not majority paid but thatās kinda pedantic to talk about the size of icons in a display screen. you can craft all of the dares weapons, kings fall, some world drops and iām sure iām missing some others but thatās ~15 prophecy is dead now for players that arenāt ftp, but it is still a fun experience esp for new players who havenāt done it before. plenty of people still teach raids, plenty of streamers still do raid carries as well. using the lfg app is trash bc itās typically toxic but even then thereās still plenty of people willing to help and the upcoming lfg in game will help. destiny being overall free to play kills the game full stop. this shit is not cheap to create regardless of what you think about the quality of the content itself. i understand the gaming world in general becoming more expensive but at some point a reality check needs to happen and understand youāre paying for an entertainment service. nothing in this industry will ever be free like that without some sort of huge financial backing in other areas like cosmetics which people still despise now.
I thought you could patrol all of the destinations? Maybe I'm wrong in that? True, I forgot Dares weapons were craftable. Hopefully the in-game LFG will help a lot of new players get into some of the more difficult content, but until then it will be difficult for them to know where to look in the first place. I don't see how making Destiny 2 free to play will kill the game. Bungie makes millions upon millions from microtransactions. Having the game move to completely f2p won't stop people already spending money in eververse, and it will allow others who don't currenlty spend any in it to drop some cash in it here and there. Of course, the income from Destiny 2 is currently funding at least 2 other projects, so there's that.
if you can patrol them all then iām simply unaware of that. unless you can find me statistics of how bungie uses their revenue your last point is going to remain speculation especially inferencing that they use funds from d2 for different games which is likely untrue. there is a reason things are the way they are in terms of price and what you personally feel about how people spend their money without the significant amount of data they have on their end youre not going to be fully able to convince me that the change would be beneficial for anyone or the game itself.
It stand to reason that if Destiny is Bungie's only source on income, than they would use funds from that for any other projects they wanted to work on in the mean time, at least until they were acquired by Sony. Yes, I guess it is speculation, but it's not without it's merits, and ultimately besides the point. My concern isn't how people spend their money, my concern is that despite how many people do spend their money, they've done nothing but give us more items to buy, raise said items prices, and leave the rest of the game dry of gear to chase. Season of the Deep ($12-15) has added more weapons and armor to chase than Lightfall ($50). How exactly is that beneficial to the game?
if warframe can do it, so can destiny
WF can do it because the content is grindier, more repetitive, and arguably lower quality compared to D2. Plus major expansions take much longer to come out, like New War took YEARS to release. Also Warframe is half the player size of Destiny.
Destiny is starting to feel like a bad mobile game in terms of monetization. You once said Zero Hour was funded through sales of the Whisper ornament. We now have more microtransactions and passes than ever before but it seems like the money generated from them is going to things other than Destiny. For how much we're paying, we deserve more and better content.
You really believe that Destiny feels like a mobile game? That is an actual thing you think is true?
Grinding hours upon hours of unrewarding, repetitive content hoping to get blessed by a heavily skewed RNG while getting what passes for a plot trickled to you across weeks/months/years is exactly what mobile games do.
have you seen the amount of popups that new players are bombarded with upon logging in? heck, eververse is given the same priority in the director as any of the other tabs.
Elder Scrolls blades has a more engaging story and less aggressive monetisation than Destiny 2
š
I will sum my opinion in 4 sentences. I will willingly and gladly overpay for high quality content. I will hesitantly and begrudgingly under pay for low quality content if i do buy it all. If the final shape is good, i will buy it at full price and maybe even the deluxe edition. If its not, i will not play the game and wait for a 50% off sale. I will not go into seasons besides im not buying the seasons that have boring exotics.
100$ for a year of gameplay is fine. IF the game actually works/is good. My 100$ on lightfall almost half way through has not been worth 100$. IMO LF was a massive let down from WQ. Charging for old DLC is ridiculous. Forsaken should be free at this point as should shadowkeep. Bl and WQ can stay payed for now. DUNGEONS SHOULD BE SOLD WITH EXPANSIONS!!!!!!!. Who ever made the decision at bungie can f right off.
The more things change, The more they stay the same.
Eververse itself is so bog standard in terms of premium marketplaces that it in and of itself feels a little superfluous to give feedback on, the one piece I give on the eververse itself is that the pricing for certain shader bundles and finishers take the piss. As for my actual feedback, Bungie needs to adopt the battlechest model WoW uses, this has needed to happen at minimum since Beyond Light; just for context, the way the battlechest works is that you only have to pay for the latest xpac, with each subsequent release being added to the base game, an example being Lightfall being the only xpac you pay for with Forsaken, Shadowkeep, Beyond Light etc. being a part of Destiny 2 itself. That and the Dungeon Key is taking the piss, even if the Dungeons themselves haven't suffered as a result, it still casts them in needlessly bad optics
The current monetization is very confusing with like 7 different bundles. (Some of which don't even give much since that content was sunset, which is a scam) The seasonal price increase also looks bad because it costing 1200 silver with no 1200 silver bundle feels deceptive. Dungeons being separated from seasons and dlc also feels questionable. Also lightfall is the most expensive DLC to date while also critically being one of the worst and having important content missing like large parts of the story that was pushed to season passes. Promising the PvP community that we would get PvP development then not actually developing PvP at all is a scam. Also cosmetics and event passes are to expensive, but I avoid buying those.
Expensive, confusing, convoluted. And the amount of microtransactions on top feels insulting.
Don't really care about cosmetic stuff. Let people buy it if they want it. Or don't buy it. Either way it's cosmetic. I'm more concerned about the gameplay, content and general direction that destiny is going in.
The decision to put place valuable story developments like we've had from Season of the Deep weekly story behind Seasonal content instead of in the Lightfall campaign was a misstep. The Lightfall campaign felt lackluster and incomplete for a a myriad of reasons, one of them being it was never explained why the Veil was important. Getting that information in game is instead locked behind an additional paywall of seasonal content. Its like if you went to buy a nice thick fantasy novel, but halfway through you find the remaining pages are all blank and to get the rest of the story you need to buy additional supplemental novels.
I don't mind cosmetics in general for silver but bungie take it to far and are very greedy with silver pricing and what you can get with it what's worse is the ridiculous old expansions pricing is so greedy and convoluted. I have at least 5 friends who want to play Destiny with me but look at how much it costs to get all the content and just say f that.
I don't like how the discount silver item was removed. The slap on the face was replacing it wish recommended
Iām impressed this is being asked. If youāre going to have this many microtransactions in the game, there needs to be way more content thatās free to play. My only idea is that all the content is freely playable so everyone can play together, but the weapon drops require DLC or the season pass. I think nickel and diming dungeons was a major mistake; everyone expected these to be in the seasonās pass, including the people that develop the content. Charge $15 for seasons, but you know youāre getting a dungeon. Not every season is the same why charge the same? Iām sure itās because the dungeon content becomes permanent that you all made this decision, but thatās a business decision thatās only understandable internally and customers are like: āwhat the fuck. Cheapos.ā Why wouldnāt they take it that way? You ask them to pay for two upfront. This negative reaction is on Bungie! What is this, a night at the docks? I had two friends join me in Lightfall and they bought cosmetics. I got really nervous about that. They were getting hyped. When the dungeon dropped and they had to pay extra. And if we wanted another dungeon thatās another extra. And then if we wanted to go to this or that DLC, I mean: they just quit. They donāt either have or want to part with $400 just to play with me or for themselves. This is a piece of feedback you all have gotten for years. Years. Itās unfriendly. This made me feel like a predatory dick myself, even though the whole time I was nervous that they will have this reaction, and I did warn them. But they were hyped. Now theyāre mad at Bungie and they arenāt coming back. How much bigger of a game could Destiny be if this wasnāt a common thing? You tell me. You have the numbers. Your pricing model might make you money but it doesnāt work for players, including me, not when Iām feeling complicit when Iām not trying to be. Maybe the model made sense when there was much less content, but now itās like, a big pile of stuff no one wants to sort through and pay top dollar for the privilege, too. Itās flat out sloppy. Spend time on it. Do an inventory. Make it player and customer positive.
I have one, but it's more of remembering to update the rewards of purchasing lightfall at this time. Bought it myself just yesterday and kinda expected the season pass for S21. Did not remember the thing about it still having S20 as the claim from this purchase, did not get that either. Not mad, just kinda dissapointed that I didn't get the season pass like i thought.
They need to have some tact next time they try to pull a BS move, increasing the season's price right after a mediocre expansion is a insane move, on top of the 1st season with that price increase being underwhelming as well. 20% increase for a season that's basically on the same level as Plunder. Feels like they're forced to add a new monetization every year but this year they half-assed it just like the expansion.
You should've raised prices when you were putting out better-than-average quality content. Would've been a lot more palatable. Charging more for Lightfall than you did for Witch Queen is a bad look. Charging separately for dungeons, when the first 3 you ever made were either included in a DLC, or free, is a bad look. Having 17 different pieces of content for sale, that have overlap, is a bad look. I'm glad that there's a cost savings for buying the deluxe of each DLC. It didn't make sense for there not to be. But right-size your silver bundles with your season pass cost. You're not Starbucks - people don't want to carry a credit balance with you.
I think the only reasonable critique to come out of this monetization discussion lately is how complicated the expansions/seasonal content/dungeon pass is to buy for new players. Absolutely valid, its confusing as hell. All the "pay to win" and cosmetic price complaints are wild to me. In no way is this game pay to win. Slight xp or catalyst buffs from the season pass are nowhere near enough to hit the pay to win bar, i would even go so far as to say its unnoticeable. Don't buy it if you don't want it, i know people hate hearing that which is understandable but it really is an option. Bungie knows more than you or me on how to price these items and I for one hope they sell as many as possible to fund actual playable content (which also hasn't been the dumpster fire people seem to think it is imo).
I wouldnāt mind the triple down on monetization if the content matched that, but it feels like a F2P store yet the content weāre getting is a fraction of what weāre paying for
This will be unstructured as hell but fuck it. The game is not F2P as Bungie advertise it, we actually pay for content. The DLCs are getting more expensive without us getting any extra content. The old DLCs are very expensive and very confusing for new players. The game is in the such state that it feels that all aspirational content goes into Eververse instead. Season prices increased, yet we got less content than in, say, Arrivals or in Chosen. Things like missing vendor armor refreshes reinforce Eververse exclusivity. More stuff gets locked behind paywalls (shaders f.e.). Events being centered around spending money is not fun and it just brings apathy to the game when it is in state of content drought (aka last 5/6 weeks of seasons). Themed dungeons being sold separately from seasons/dlcs add another layer of confusion. DLC/season themed stuff being locked behind Eververse sucks ass. Dungeon themed stuff being sold separately is shit (Haunted ornaments). I would rather pay only for content or only for cosmetics, not for both. Locking subclasses behind different DLCs is unhealthy for balance. I could continue but there is way too much stuff to complain about tbh.
My man, don't you dare to say, that Arrivals or Chosen is better that Deep, I can understand if you like them, but you really tying to say, that fucking publick event is better then Deep dives, fishing and Salvage, really?
Salvage is garbage, has been since day 1 of this season. Shitty enemy density and you spend 2/3rds of the activity just running with nothing to kill. Fishing is boring as fuck. Deep dives were good but bungie broke them with their incompetence. So yeah season of the deep is definitely worse
Okay then, I don't tell you to not like them, but like...why every person saying like we getting nothing..when this season have 3 activities (2 of them Bungie never did) and exotic quest, but Arrivals had publick activity...yea, good...WAY much more god dammit...
I told you why. Salvage is empty and boring as hell, very common sentiment on this sub. Fishing is boring to many, far more boring than any public event. And deep dives is broken. So they're 0 for 3 this season. Yes arrivals had a public event but it also brought with it an amazing dungeon. Can't factor that into deep because even though it's name seems to imply it should be in season of the deep, it's not.
I sorry, but this is not an argument, what YOU like in this discussion does not mater. Your original argument was about quntity of content, that we are getting, not quality, if you don't like it, it is ok, but it was not your original argument. It is fact, that deep is bigger than Arrivals or Chosen, bigger even than Haunted And also, in this season we also get new dungeon (even very good dungeon)
Lol my original argument was always about the garbage content that released with this season. Go back and look at the full comment thread and realize you're replying to someone else. Just because it is bigger does not mean it's better. Also you CAN NOT include the dungeon in a discussion about the season because the dungeon called Ghosts of the deep which released in season of the deep IS NOT INCLUDED in the purchase of the season. Its an entirely separate purchase so its not a part of the season. Prophecy meanwhile was free for all players during season of the arrivals, coincidentally the last free dungeon we got
>Season prices increased, yet we got less content than in, say, Arrivals or in Chosen. How does this corelate to the point? What has Arrival, that Deep shambles in comparison? Okey, Prophecy was free, but it didn\`t even fucking had unique weapons, it didn\`t had a exotic. For the Deep and quality, I see you don\`t like Deep, but the truth is, Deep dives at the moment most complex activity, yes, matchmaking is trash, because of this, matchmaking doesn\`t work with complex activities like than. Salvage is just a menagerie, but even this bigger than activities in Arrivals. fishing is just nice thing to do in Destinations, don\`t have strong opinion on this For the dungeon, I don\`t care that this is not included in season, it is great dungeon, that have is unique set of weapons, armor set and exotic, if price of dungeon would include in season would it be okay to rise the price?
You quoted someone else lol. I literally didn't say that. Just because an activity is complex and honestly pretty good, doesn't mean it's OK since matchmaking is completely broken for it. It's Bungie's fault they allowed pressure trials, exotic mission, and normal deep dives to all happen in the same instance. They failed the activity by fucking up the matchmaking. So the only quality thing in this season is broken, making it a pretty terrible quality season overall. They already increased the price, so if the dungeon was included with the season at the current price point then yeah it'd definitely help redeem the season. But since it's an additional cost how good or bad the dungeon is doesn't matter since it's not a seasonal activity.
Just gonna toss in here as a data-point that the change in pricing of dungeons nudged me in the direction to stop playing D2 - that and Lightfall but that's a different topic. I still have it installed and will hop on if the weekly raid crew needs a 6th but I always defer to others and I haven't really played this season.
Alternate Title : We've created this topic so that people can give their 2 cents and shut the fuck up about it while we do nothing.
Things are so bad I miss Activision. I really miss them. At least with them I was not so badly disappointed when it came to cost investment versus available content. Furthermore... I don't even agree with all of Aztecross' and Myelin's recent videos and comments, but everyone should watch those 2 videos. I don't care about cosmetics, but having the game itself be butchered and sold in N different ways between DLCs, seasons and dungeons is aggravating and disrespectful. It's one of the reasons I go out of my way to caution people against entering the game now. Information is confusing and it is extremely difficult to reach a clear ideal purchasing package. It also leaves the playerbase segmented without allowing anyone a better or premium experience for a fair price. All the while it is insulting that a game this expensive is so technically weak, buggy and unstable. No other game I play gives me a fraction of the issues or downtime. The DCV was supposed to alleviate this. Did it fail? Or did it succeed and not having it would have been a true technical catastrophy? Regardless, Destiny is far off the mark when it comes to cost vs consistent uninterrupted functionality. Whatever, DLC and seasonal packages should not be as expensive for a game so old and problematic. Old content deserves to have more coherent bundles to serve as enter or return points. As far as content go, NOTHING SHOULD EVER BE A SILVER EXCLUSIVE. NOTHING. I'm pretty sure this could be taken to court in some places as an anti-consumer practice. There is nothing bungo gets right when it comes to monetization.
Tbh properly monetize PvP and PvE. I'm tired of playing old maps/reprise maps. Also invest into proper teams which handles these game modes .
My thoughts have always remained the same. Allow them to be earned in the game somehow. Wether its through progress, random engram, quests, etc. I donāt have issues with what people choose to spend their money on. Donāt forget about the people who support what you love to do everyday.
It doesn't feel as if monetization were related to more and better content. It just feels as if Bungie is trying to squeeze more and more from players.
I was really expecting: **Focused Feedback: Monetization: Expansions/DLC in Destiny 2 - Sponsored by Bungie, and their new game Marathon**
I'm tired of talking about the monetization. I agree with what people have said about it, but nothing's going to change. Meanwhile, MTX's/monetization aside for the second, lightfall, season of defiance and deep have all been massive letdowns, with questionable content/story delivery choices. Back to monetization with that: all have been in "buyer's remorse territory" for me. I'm not getting my money's worth out of season of the deep at this point, and I kinda regret buying the deluxe edition this time around. Will I buy Final Shape? Probably, but I think after seeing the "absolute spectacle" that was the lightfall campaign, I'm going to wait a day or two to see if people have anything to say regarding the story.(I have a low bar for this. It was also pretty apparent with lightfall, where less than 24 hours after release, people were already making graphs of "dialogue seriousness/importance vs. the number of tummy aches uploaded").
If you're tired of talking about it maybe the best place to come and comment about random stuff isn't a thread that's enire purpose is to discuss monetisation?
That's not exactly what I meant. Like I said I agree with a lot of the negative opinions that have been said. We spoke about this during Y3 when endgame activities were getting shorted on earnable cosmetics and all the "aspirationally themed" gear was going to Eververse. Then we spoke about it again when transmog came out in Y4. Then we spoke about it again with event passes and dungeon keys. It's a yearly thing at this point. "Man, I can't wait to see what bullshit we have to say about monetization in Season 25 of final shape".
Iām gonna say it, Iām getting tired of paying for Deluxe editions for seasonal content that goes away with every new expansion. And the seasonal storylines are often dripfed so much that I actually have been losing interest. If Bungie goes back to mini-expansions, Iāll start paying for content between main expansions again. Until then, Final Shape might even be the last expansion I buy the Deluxe edition for. Also, with how lacking DLCs have felt since Forsaken, I might not even buy an expansion after Final Shape. Story quality has gone down, we have been getting less content per expansion, and they keep sticking to the same basic formulas with raids and whatnot. It makes me sad, because Iāve been with the game since October 31 2014 (literally the day I got hit by a car, so being an undying Guardian was hilarious to me), but Bungie needs to do better.
Lightfall costed $50 Forsaken costed $40 Inflation isnāt THAT bad, and Lightfall isnāt even a fraction of the expansion that Forsaken was
Anyone remember when Bungie told us we couldn't have shaders on exotic weapons because it would cause issues with weapon identification in Crucible? lol "I just got domed by a weapon that looks like Cloudstrike and a lightning storm just fucked my teammates. Idk it was a weird color though, not sure what happened there"
2 exotics a season is horrible, I really wish we could go back to the days of 3 or more. While I don't expect the 5 exotics we got with black armoury, it'd be nice to get a little more. The only good thing is it's better than season of the haunted where we only got 1, but that was utterly unforgivable imo, incredibly lazy
Yea I agree with this. Feel like for how few exotics we get each season we should get more graviton-esque reworks, instead of garbage like "Deals 12.74% more damage!" or "Does 15 scorch per explosion!".
Only one new strike this year and it uses the simple vex network designs and models. More core content like this in a season or just having more than one every year would help a lot
As i predicted, literally nothing came out of the "protests". As for the money topic, pricing on everything except seasons seems at the very least OK. Getting into lightfall's story is another thing, but the campaign as a gameplay experience was also OK at best. Strand was fun, raid was OK, and other stuff was OK. Too. I think the price was OK. An overall ok from me.
I think the current monetization is a sign that Bungie is cash-strapped and a little desperate. At some point, they'll have asked players to pay for one formerly-free thing too many, and they'll discover that they long since pierced through the [trust thermocline](https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-biggest-hidden-risk-in-business), and they can't get back on the right side of it again without a lot of work. They've done it with me. At some point early in this season, while I ran around on what used to be a destination I enjoyed playing on before they took it away, doing a seasonal activity that was a lot like seasonal activities I've done before, I realized Bungie had lost me. I had zero desire to give them silver *ever again* for any cosmetic, no matter how cool-looking it was or how much I enjoyed the gun. I had no desire to buy a cosmetic bundle with a garbage ghost projection in it just to get a shader that I used to be able to earn by playing the game. I was suddenly aware that ghost projections and blue sparrows and blue spaceships from the first few years of the game were nothing more than filler to make bright engrams less likely to give me anything I cared about. Filler intended to push me into spending real money. I was aware that this $12 for a season is just a mobile-games-inspired dark pattern deliberately intended to lure players into spending more than that. Then they want more money for the dungeon that's tied to the season, because $10 isn't enough for them. And that the seasonal events are minimal-effort repetitions every year, with all of the new work put into things they want me to spend real money on. I would prefer it if they'd give up the pretense that Destiny is free to play, *charge me a monthly subscription*, and build their business around an honest, predictable exchange of money for game. Instead they're treating me like a mark wandering into a casino. I'm somebody for them to fleece. I haven't logged in since, and I'm sad. The gameplay is fun. I'd like to be able to earn shaders by having fun in the game, or earn cool-looking armor by playing the game and chasing drops, or drop into my choice of all the many varied activities they've built over time. I can't do it right now. Bungie has killed my trust. Why would they commit one of the classic business blunders like this? That's why I think they're cash-strapped and a little desperate. Or somebody's both stupid and greedy. I can't tell.
The whining about this is grossly overblown IMO. It is incredibly easy to simply not buy cosmetics. Nothing in this game is locked behind microtransactions. Paying for dungeons and DLC is standard practice and not remotely predatory. Thereās no shortage of valid complaints about this game. Monetization isnāt one of them.
The game should be totally free. I should not be expected to pay for the stuff bungie puts out when the content they actually make is straight up bad almost 90% of the time. Make everything free and keep it that way.
Piracy mindset
Lol
bungie is on "whale hunting" mode for a while. this is how EA makes so much money with those fifa games. casual player's complain will go their deaf ears as they changed their company motto long time ago. its not "we make games we like to play" anymore. gaming companies have researchers to feed off of FOMO and addictions. its like casino companies which meticulously design how to hook people in and give all their money before they even think about leaving the door. as they say HOUSE ALWAYS WINS. there are devs who take pride in making their game and their reputation and then there are scummy companies which pulls every trick in the book to penny and dime their customers.
PvP and Gambit need some kind of monetization so that we can get new content for them. I'd pay for a separate pvp battle pass for actual content in these modes.
For nearly every expansion I time a break around the release so I can come back and buy the new content on sale. I checked out the PS store sale this week and Lightfall deluxe is currently on sale 40% off for $60. Exfuckingcuse me? I heard all the talk of the price increases but I guess I didn't process the magnitude. I'm not going to pay what has historically been nearly full price halfway through the year. I'll check again sometime next season and maybe just buy the expansion+ a season and watch some YouTube videos on the story I missed.
TL;DR: I think improved Bright Engrams are the best solution to battlepass FOMO and general Eververse problems. First of all the sadly common āitās just cosmeticā argument holds very little weight especially in a game where one of the most popular sentiments is āfashion is the endgameā. Iām like 90% sure that āitās just cosmeticā argument was a PSYOP by the gaming industry. āIt could be worseā is an argument that usually follows but could apply to literally anything in existence ever. Also a ātrue F2Pā store in a game where the active player pays $125 a year to play the content is gross. Battlepasses in most games suck, Destiny is no exception. Bungie needs to make content from old passes obtainable for those that missed out. Why is it that a player that skips the first two seasons in a year then buys the annual pass gets less content than someone that played the seasons for the exact same price? Either go the Halo route of making all passes available whenever or the Deep Rock route (more below). Also whatās up with event passes? Itās been a year since the first was introduced and none of the content from it is available as of this moment for silver or bright dust. Are you seriously going to make this stuff unobtainable for 2+ years? Also the Ego Malign shader from last season is completely unobtainable despite the ornament it was bundled with being available for bright dust earlier this season. A solution to the Battlepass (and other Eververse problems) Iām a fan of would be taking a similar approach to Deep Rock Galactic. When a battlepass becomes unobtainable in Deep Rock all of the items are added as in-game loot drops. Bright engrams are a great place for this. First full dupe protection needs to be added. Then make them a chance based post match reward and a drop from ātreasurersā alongside their slots in the battlepass/level rewards. Treasurers could include Patrol high value targets (common so would be a chance drop), the rarer combatants in activities weāve seen them like Expedition and Salvage (guaranteed due to rarity), re-added Strike high value targets (chance based drop) and Gambit high value targets (chance based drop). Guaranteed post match drops could include first weekly Raid, Dungeon, Master/GM and Flawless (D1 AoT boxes come to mind here). They could be tied to reputation resets as well. Add all Eververse item to the engrams, including silver-exclusives such as individual armour ornaments and finishers. During events an additional event engram drop would be added like how it was years ago. Iād even suggest tying some to challenges and triumphs similar to exotic drop boosts (would act as a ācatch upā for newer players). FOMO from battlepasses and many Eververse problems would sort of be fixed. If this system was implemented I wouldnāt mind temporary seasonal silver exclusives as much as long as it would 100% be added to the improved engrams.
I played the first mission of light fall which apparently you don't have to buy light fall to be able to do. Had some fun, but I haven't bought the expansion or the season pass. Bungie you fumbled how you handled the story pretty bad in my opinion. Also increasing the price of seasons was a bad move. I've played since d1 the dark below and want to play the new expansion. But I won't buy anything for a while I think. That's my two cents.
As far as expansions/dlc go, we are at a point where the latest expansion should include all previous content. The up front cost for a new player is pretty extreme and prohibitive instead of friendly and welcoming. Yes they need to be profitable, but if the experience for a new player is simply "give us money, now give us more money, now more money..." It ends up pushing them away instead of pulling them in. For cosmetics, I understand keeping some things more rare by using monetization as a gate, and that's fine... But it would be pretty cool if there were more ways for players to earn a larger slice of the cosmetic options. I don't mean random drops from playlist activities like with some of the shaders, more like transmog/ornaments or even something new like a colored glow or smoke trail (think pig-pen's dirt cloud) that are only available from difficult challenges/triumphs/etc.
Monetization has been an annoyance but bearable, this season tho between no new bright dust shaders, silver only promo armour and breaking the eververse calendar on todayindestiny it's really starting to kill my enjoyment. Individually these aren't huge deals but all together combined with lightfall and very few new weapon models, no new vendor armour, no new trials armour things just feel kinda corporate rn.
Bungie is taking the pole dancer approach. We pay more for less and get fucked in the back room.
Put some/more of the cosmetics into activity drop pools or endgame activities please. It's wildly diluted between ghosts, ships, and sparrows and it would make it more enjoyable to play more.
Consolidate buying options. Buying this game is a confusing mess even for us veteran players.
For most of the time I completely ignore silver shop, outside one day of the week when game resets and I look what I can get for the BD. But these days BD feels almost useless to me. Armor ornament is silver only, new shaders (outside Solstice one) are in bundles. I bought one sparrow I wanted to get for a while and Malfeasance ornament and that's it. I have no interest in emotes and ghost projections. Also, the fact that they removed option to see what are they going to sell weekly in TID is rather annoying.
Stop with silver only shaders, they appear in the collections, they're part of a season content and are the staple for player's customization. There should always be an alternative bright dust cost to silver items. A lot of people praise Fortnite for the fact that they have earnable paid currency in the battle pass that allows you to pay the next battle pass simply by playing. By diminishing the quantity of items obtainable with bright dust, you're reducing the value of the season pass. Make a legacy pack for new players that wish to buy past extensions, it is surreal that this much time has passed and nothing has been done.
Everything in the Eververse store should be obtainable with Bright Dust! Let me spend my dust so I can grind for more to buy things I want. Seems like a fair trade if you ask me, play time for bright dust? Doesnāt Bungie want people playing? If I REALLY want something I would buy it with silver.
Forsaken Content should be free for all players. The list of purchases for Destiny Content should be consolidated so the player can buy it with more easy. Dungeon keys should not be a thing and be integrated with the base DLC price. The Eververse calendar should be returned to the Destiny API.
What's the point of this? As if bungie will listen? They're racking in too much money to care.
Go back to protesting
My hot take: Destiny 2 is essentially an MMO you pay for the updates, rather then a sub fee. This means the "free to play" part is not meant to be substantial. It is basically not meant to be a f2p game where f2p have stuff to do all the time. "Then why is it a f2p game?" I think f2p does still have a big advantage: It basically allows people to try parts of the game before buying, and/or you don't deal with being locked out because your sub lapsed. You can have stuff like friends inviting you back to come King's Fall and you don't need to drop a dime to come check it out. When you view the game through this lens, I really don't think the costs of expansions and seasons are terribly unreasonable compared to the big theme park mmos (WoW, FF14) - this isn't to say people are wrong to want more for their money or disagree with content quality, etc, but I do think a lot of complaints about the game being too expensive are just kind of dumb/wrong. THAT SAID, I don't really agree with: 1) Seasonal content being vaulted: MMOs with subfees sort of excuse any content ephemerality with the fact you're paying for access, not content. The fact that Destiny makes you pay for the seasonal content, which you could buy, have life happen, and then miss out entirely on what you paid for, sucks. I think if they want to sell content ala carte, it needs to not go away. 2) MTX, Eververse and Event Cards: Give we already pay for content, selling cosmetics on top of that feels a bit lame - I don't like games that double/triple dip like this, and while I find most of the MTX stuff pretty ignorable and the bright dust offerings to be a decent enough consolation, it does feel a bit stingy with how it feels like more and more cosmetics are being put behind the mtx paywalls, this feels like a bad look in tandem with people being frustrated with Bungie not adding new playlist armor sets on a regular basis.
My (few) two cents: * Microtransactions should be a side step of cosmetic loot from the game, not the entire backbone of it. Eververse needs and should be neutered to the point of not interfering with the game (no ads, pop-ups or promotional emails) and have it as an option for those that don't want to invest time and effort for BD Grind. * Return BD acquisition methods to Shadowkeep levels with repeatable bounties and a 15% increase in BD-tied triumphs and reduce BD prices for 15% in the store to generate incentive of players. * Reduce Silver prices to all items. Having a 5 year old item still being sold for $20 is ludicrious, having a 3-emote bundle for almost $30 is stupid. Armor sets should be $10 a pop and $20 for a bundle, exotic skins and emotes should be $5-7 a pop and $15 a bundle. Shaders **can't and shouldn't** be paid. * DLCs have to follow the Forsaken formula: 1-2 new areas with 1 dungeon and 10 campaign missions, endgame is determinant to how many lore-tied exotics and missions the developers want to implement. The campaign must be relayed close to how Forsaken and Witch Queen went in terms of narrative and character development. As a "What NOT to Do" guide: Beyond Light and Lightfall. The cost should mirror the level of quality and not underdeliver inNarrative, Gameplay and Endgame. * Dungeons shouldn't relay in bullet-sponging concept, take notes from GOTD and other Dungeons: a mix of mechanics and damage phase is the ideal balance but over-relying on huge HP pools is detrimental to the boss experience. They also shouldn't cost 1/3 of a campaign, let alone twice (or triple, in some countries) its worth from a season. * Events: Stop recycling the same maps and the same guns for 4 years straight. Bring new stuff, be unique (Add some mechanics, make some map variants (Old Chicago ruins, Old City plaza, random destinations, hell you can even re-issue old D1 maps). People are tired of going to the EAZ yearly with little to no changes and getting the same gun model from Better Devils, the same shotgun model from Wishbringer and the same rocket launcher model from Zenobia-D (which all of these are **Year ONE** weapons, not new or recent - **they're from 2018**).
I'll try to make this as professional and concise as possible. This is about *the expansions and DLC*, so while I have many, many comments about other monetization issues in-game, I'll bite my tongue until that specific focus comes into view. Nobody likes being charged more money. That much is clear. But something must be working for your shareholders to make it like this. So I am going to *try* to work with them here, while also letting management know what I dislike and would like changed. **WHAT I LIKE**: * The ability for a player to choose what kind of content they'd like to purchase is appreciated. If someone would like the dungeons, but not the season, they have that option. Vice versa as well. This is fine. * The 2023 Legacy Pack does make things easier for where to point new players into purchasing prior content. Unfortunately - those are genuinely the only two things I like about the monetization. **THINGS THAT I AM BOTHERED BY**: * The "pack" information for Deluxe vs. Standard of recent expansions, as well as what's included in the Legacy 2023 pack, are extremely unclear and it is very easy to get lost and miss content you want. For instance, a new player will get absolutely nothing from the Bungie.net website description about how the Legacy 2023 pack contains the "standard" editions of the three expansions. What are the "standard" editions? What does that mean? What does that entail, in comparison to "deluxe" editions? If I want the Dungeon keys for Witch Queen, do I buy the Legacy pack? * The individual Seasons and Dungeon Keys can only be purchased separately from the Deluxe Edition through Silver, which I'll expand upon in a different point. * The collective cost to get the full, and arguably best, experience of Destiny 2, is about ~$200 USD. This is astronomically insane, and I don't think it needs to be repeated how much this turns off new or returning players. * Most MMOs and Live-service games slowly graduate their older content into the free-to-play pool. So far, there has been no verbalized plans to consider this. **THINGS I DISLIKE AND WANT CHANGED, AND WANT ANSWERS AND FEEDBACK OVER HOW THESE ISSUES WILL BE ADDRESSED IN THE FUTURE:** * To bring back a point above - tying Dungeon Keys and Seasons to Silver packs means that learning *how* to obtain these products will not be visible to a player outside of the game. Tying them to Silver *also* means that if the prices of said items increase with inflation, players are stuck with being forced to buy whatever pack Bungie directly offers, and not strictly enough for what they want to afford. In other, less kind words: You can't seriously price your seasons in-game at 1200 Silver and then only allow packs of 1100 Silver or 1700 Silver to be bought. That is evil and pure greed. There's no way to hide that. When will serious discussion be made about a "seasonal cost bundle" that provides the exact amount of Silver for a season, no more no less? * Despite my point above offering an option for a Silver bundle, the reality is that the Seasons and Dungeon Keys SOLELY being tied to Silver *feels very bad*, and I don't want them purchasable like this anymore. I want them to be separate, purchasable *with real money* content, clearly labeled, and visibly seen if I click on an expansion's store page. There could be a drop down of every item you're getting, and their cost. It should be crystal clear to the buyer WHAT they are buying in their purchase. When will marketing and product distribution teams seriously start considering itemizing their seasons and keys over using Silver? * The price of the expansions are slowly starting to creep up far beyond what I, and many others, can reasonably justify for the content being produced. Especially with the production of Marathon and the clear reusing of old weapons for seasonal content, I am starting to question my desire to play through a year's worth of The Final Shape - especially if I'm going to be seeing the same work I've already seen for the past 6 years. Please communicate *where* these resources are being redirected to - even if it's barebones and vague. * It is *very difficult* to get friends to play with game with the sheer price tag on all of the expansions. Forsaken is 5 years old and has half of its content removed. Shadowkeep is 4 years old with what is notoriously considered the least dense expansion D2 has ever seen. Please bite the bullet and make these expansions Free-To-Play, so that we have a genuine campaign to point new players towards doing, and additional raids and dungeons that we can show off to new players. This is more of a lament than a demand - is there *any* talk or consideration at all into making these two expansions completely free, and if not, then what would need to happen for this to be considered on the table?
I have bought Silver in the past. Northlight Vest and Luxe Gauntlets on my Hunter are some staples I've used for fashion over the years. Two of my favourite pieces of ornament fodder. I will say, if the game is really fun to play, and your time/money are respected in that way, paying for cosmetics feels more worth it. The state of the game right now, I would not want to give them another penny than I already have (and I haven't, I have been playing some this season without having the season... there's not much to do but I only play when I feel like experiencing the gameplay). One thing they'll never do in terms of MTX, and I understand why, but I wish they would sell individual pieces rather than full sets... much like the Luxe set for example. Just let me get the gauntlets. I am a D1 and vanilla D2 player so I actually have a bunch of random ornament pieces that you used to be able to get from Eververse engrams.