In the time since last night’s post on why asking Destiny 2 players to perform nine million additional Seraph Tower activations was a bridge too far, Bungie has already patched the community event to require far fewer Seraph Tower activations than were originally stipulated.
This lightning-fast course correction follows our article, of course, but it also follows a brutal 24 hours of condemnation on the unofficially official Destiny subreddit, where near universal displeasure with the event has been expressed across dozens of new threads with titles like “I swear this game is on its like 3rd near death experience.”
“We have made adjustments to ‘The Lie’ Quest and Seraph Tower Difficulty,” Bungie said through its official Twitter account. “Champions have reduced power level and event progression has been slightly tuned. Effective immediately, quest progression has been given a 5x multiplier which will be increased to 10x on weekends.” This announcement came after an earlier brief from Bungie Community Manager DMG, who said that changes to the quest were rapidly approaching.
After a full day’s work under the original Seraph Tower completion conditions, Guardians across all platforms had completed 189,237 of the necessary nine million Seraph Tower activations, or just a little over two percent, which placed the community on track to complete this stage of the quest in around 48 days — well beyond the end of the current season. This projection also assumed a steady level of participation from Guardians, which had already begun to wane by the time Bungie announced the patch.
Responding to criticisms in the thread pertaining to today’s announcement, Community Manager DMG had this to say:
The feedback I’m seeing is as follows:
- Community events are cool, but they feel a bit too frequent at this point in time
- The current community event splits the population between three destinations. Would be nice to focus players more to a single activity or area.
- Players would like to see more rewards that are exclusive to the event, which could drive participation. Whether they be tied to steps or general engagement with the activity, “Exclusive” rewards for stuff like this is key to player excitement.
- The current goals were far too high, which resulted in a lack of visible progress. As such, folks felt like their contribution had no meaning, and ditched the event pretty quickly.
- The current objective focuses on a Public Event that’s been available since the launch of the season – without new rewards or reasons to visit the event, there’s a bit of burnout.
- Public area matchmaking can be frustrating when trying to find a space with enough players to attempt the event
While everything DMG lists here is part of the problem, they only just barely touch on the real core of the issue. The problem isn’t that Seraph Towers have been available since the beginning of the season, it’s that Seraph Towers have been the core gameplay loop of the entire season. It’s not that we had eggs for breakfast and now don’t want eggs again for dinner, it’s that we’ve been eating only eggs for every meal for months on end, and now, when the Costco pallets of eggs are finally empty, another shipment has arrived, just as eggy as the first.
If The Lie had asked us to go perform however many millions of Blind Well runs — I’m sure you could come up with a flimsy plot excuse for this — I don’t think I, nor the rest of the community, would have had as strong of a reaction as we all did. And doubly so, it wouldn’t sting as much if Bungie hadn’t done this exact same thing during the Season of Dawn. Today’s change is a welcome step in the right direction, but even with it, I have no interest in completing any more Seraph Tower activations. I will not eat the eggs.
