The heart of this issue, IMO... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 15:25 (2348 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV

I can only think of 2 possible reasons for Bungie to clamp down on XP gains. It could be that Bungie thought that grinding Public Events would get players up to level 20 too quickly... but if that's the case, I would ask 2 things:
a) Really?
and b) then why hide the fact that XP gains were being reduced? Why not be transparent about it?

The other explanation I can think of does not look so good for Bungie. And that's the possibility that they didn't want players earning Bright Engrams so quickly that they'd never feel the need to buy any. So they artificially slowed down the progression towards earning them, and hid it from the player.

While either of those can be true, there's the possibility of a 3rd option: Bungie just honestly trying to steer players away from activities that can be completed too quickly for rewards to longer activities that might be more rewarding XP wise; which they did in Reach. Problem with that is though, Public Events are too rewarding regardless of how quickly they get done and every other activity is not as rewarding and subject to the token economy leaving most players who participate not feeling like their time was valued. But something like that's a whole other discussion.

That’s certainly possible, but my response would again be “why hide it from the player?”. If the expressed goal is to steer players away from repeating the same activity over and over, then one would think that Bungie would make diminishing XP returns as obvious as possible.

True, I would agree with you. But at the same time Bungie is also very much into making the game fun without know why it's fun. Seemlessness, in game play and User Interface. Yes, they need to change that the experience is changing dynamically when showing XP gain. But what they need to do is make it obvious through the bar, that if you grind the same thing over and over again your XP bar grinds to a stop.

This is all very hard to do imo. But I also think it lines up with what Bungie want for Destiny all along, diverse activities that allow people to have fun without feeling like they are working too hard. Grinding public events for loot is not what Bungie intended for public events. They implemented this XP debuf to make that happen.

I don't consider it "throttling the grinders" I consider it as Bungie making a game that they wanted to make.

Everything you say is certainly possible. However, my estimation, that scenario simply doesn’t add up. It took months of play and extensive testing for the community to even realize there was XP scaling happening. If scaling was so successfully hidden, then it certainly wasn’t influencing the play patterns of most players, right?