This blog has been pretty much entirely informative posts with a few opinions scattered throughout, but now it’s time to go into some long-form opinion. And what better place to start than one of the more contentious parts of the game currently?
Eververse has become increasingly predatory over the years since it was first introduced in The Taken King, and Tess Everis has become a symbol of the community’s ire towards the microtransaction store. Her repetitive voice lines in the Tower certainly don’t help her image, causing some players to mute dialogue entirely just so they don’t have to hear her talk about sending the whole shipment back to Fenchurch again. It’s gone from a supplement of cosmetics to the primary source, with items earned in-game at an all-time low. You can spend real money on more items than ever, but you’re given fewer items for free each week.
Suffice it to say, Eververse has issues. Here’s my opinions on what those problems are and some possible solutions.
The history of Eververse, Destiny 1
This is going to be a long section, but I think it’s important to see how we got to where we are now.
Newer players may not know this, but Tess was originally the Special Orders vendor in Destiny 1, where you could pick up various emblems and shaders from external promotions. For example, if you played during Destiny 1’s beta, you earned a free emblem that you could pick up from Tess when the game launched.
That changed with the launch of The Taken King. Tess was repurposed as the Eververse vendor, a new in-game microtransaction store that was initially billed as a replacement for the expansion model from the first year of Destiny 1. Instead of buying large content drops every few months, players could continue to financially support the game by buying emotes from Eververse, which would support free content updates throughout the year. Fairly innocuous at first.
Then came the first Festival of the Lost, and with it the first lootbox added to Destiny, Legacy of the Lost. While you could earn masks during the event through gameplay, they would expire at the end of the event. If you wanted to keep them permanently, you had to upgrade them to legendary quality with Paper Glue found in these lootboxes, which would also contain a random legendary mask. Everyone got one for free, but if you wanted more, you had to pay up. The boxes could also contain an exclusive Skull Mask unavailable through regular gameplay, further increasing incentive to pony up the cash for more boxes.
Alas, this was only the beginning. The SRL event that came that winter added Sparrow Toolkits, containing random Sparrows and Sparrow horns. Then Sterling Treasures were added with TTK’s April Update, adding new cosmetic armor sets, armor glows, and a couple ships and a Sparrow to collect, the latter at a low droprate. You could earn three of these a week, but once again, if you wanted more, you had to buy ’em. This was then followed by Radiant Treasures in Rise of Iron, which added exotic weapon ornaments to the game along with the Silver Dust currency, used to buy random ornaments from Xur when he showed up. Treasures of the Lost made a return in year 3, with new masks and random cosmetics that could only realistically be acquired through purchases.
As you can probably tell, the microtransactions were starting to get out of hand. Most items were only available if you spent a fair chunk of change; otherwise, you’d just have to live with what you got. Despite adding yet another lootbox, the first Dawning event began to add some quality-of-life improvements through the Silver Dust Kiosk, letting players trade their Silver Dust for various items that were rewarded from previous lootboxes. This was expanded upon with the Age of Triumph update, which coalesced all previous lootboxes into a single Treasure of Ages with a fairly strict knockout system. If you’d already earned an item, you were less likely to acquire it through another lootbox. The Silver Dust Kiosk was also expanded to include basically every cosmetic ever acquired through microtransactions, allowing players to purchase exactly the rewards they wanted.
By the end of Destiny 1’s lifespan, microtransactions were in a better place than they had been for a while. It wasn’t perfect, but you didn’t necessarily feel like you had to spend tens or hundreds of dollars just to get that one cosmetic you had your eye on. And there were still plenty of other cosmetic sources in the game itself, so it wasn’t that big of a deal if you didn’t get exactly what you wanted.
The history of Eververse, Destiny 2
For many players, Destiny 2 felt like a major step back in a variety of ways. While the biggest complaints focused on the slower gameplay and weaker power fantasy, a less notable problem at first was the regression of Eververse.
Destiny 2 introduced the Bright Engram concept, replacing the various Treasures from the first game. Bright Engrams were earned every time you leveled up, unlike Destiny 1, which gave you a few Orbs of Light consumables instead. These engrams could be decrypted at Tess for various cosmetic rewards, with easily a hundred potential rewards inside, compared to the various Treasures’ two dozen or so. Your odds of getting a particular reward were thus pretty small, especially the new exotic cosmetics that looked flashier than their legendary counterparts. And of course, you could always purchase more from Tess.
Every item aside from emotes and weapon ornaments could dismantle into Bright Dust, a currency which could then be used to purchase a small rotating selection of items from Tess’s weekly inventory. But the amount of dust you got back from most items was pretty pathetic, with only exotic items giving a substantial amount. Even so, you’d generally have to dismantle multiple exotics just to purchase that one cosmetic you had your eye on, and that was if you were lucky enough to have the funds when it came up. Frequently, items only appeared for sale once in the season, so if you missed them, you just had to hope your next engram was lucky.
And that’s before you get into the experience-throttling controversy from that first season. Players discovered that if you played the game for an extended period of time, your experience bar didn’t go up nearly as quickly as it did when you started. The numbers were the same, but the amount of pixels that filled the bar went down. This meant that players were earning fewer Bright Engrams than they should have been, and this became one of the first major controversies in Destiny 2. Whether this was intentional on Bungie’s part to spur Bright Engram purchases or just a simple programming mistake, Bungie fairly quickly patched the issue.
But Eververse controversies continued in season 2. The first was the replacement of existing Bright Engrams with a new engram, Illuminated Engrams. These engrams contained an entirely new selection of cosmetics, with no repeats from season 1 aside from shaders and transmat effects. Season 1 items were made effectively unavailable, only occasionally popping up for sale for Bright Dust. Exotic items (except weapon ornaments) and Eververse armor sets were strictly forbidden from making a return, meaning you could only get lower-quality legendary items if they were even available. There were naturally complaints lodged about this, but no changes were announced.
This controversy paled in comparison to the one that came with Destiny 2’s first Dawning event. During the event, Dawning Engrams replaced the standard Illuminated Engram, so you couldn’t earn a single season 2 item for the duration of the event. On top of that, it was possible to earn duplicate items through Dawning Engrams. Coupled with the event’s short duration, it became very hard to earn any specific item without dropping a large amount of money on buying more engrams. This led to another microtransaction outrage.
Bungie once again had to make improvements, which they did with the next event, Crimson Days. For this event, Crimson Engrams would drop in addition to Illuminated Engrams, giving additional rewards as a bonus for the holiday instead of locking out seasonal rewards. On top of that, Crimson Engrams had a strict knockout system, so once you earned an item or purchased it with Bright Dust, you wouldn’t see it again until you had claimed all rewards. This gave players a limit on how many engrams they needed to earn or buy to get all the event’s rewards, which was much better.
This became the standard for the next year of Destiny 2. Each season would bring a new Bright Engram with a new selection of items, while the previous season’s items would become difficult or impossible to acquire. Events would add in a new event engram that would drop in addition to the standard Bright Engram, and these event engrams would use the strict knockout system. Occasionally, some items were sold exclusively for Silver, but there were only a couple of these each season. Season 3 also added a system called the Prismatic Matrix, displaying a set of ten items and guaranteeing that players would acquire one of those in a strict knockout if activated. One free use was given per week, and players could buy more for Silver if they desired. Through skillful Bright Dust usage and dedicated play, it wasn’t too hard to unlock every item in a Bright Engram before the season ended, and with the introduction of the Collections system in Forsaken, you could even reacquire items you’d previously dismantled, albeit for a sum of Bright Dust.
Things started to go downhill with season 6 when the Prismatic Matrix was retired and a few more items were added for direct Silver purchase, but it got worse with season 7. Framed as a change to increase player agency in their rewards, the Eververse store was redesigned to offer a large amount of that season’s items for sale for large amounts of Silver. Bright Engrams would no longer offer that season’s rewards, but instead would give a variety of items from previous seasons. This was nice for players who started late and missed out on early seasons’ cosmetics, but for veteran players, Bright Engrams didn’t have much use. The only way to acquire new rewards for free was to buy them with Bright Dust, and since most of these rewards were exotic-quality, that meant dropping a lot of dust if you wanted multiple rewards. They also didn’t remove the rotating stock, so if you missed an item, you probably didn’t have another chance to get it later. Furthermore, the Solstice of Heroes event that season was the first event not to have its own engram, forcing players to spend more dust for those rewards as well.
This created a new pattern that persists today, except worse. Bright Engrams still reward items from past seasons, but now you only earn one every five levels as opposed to one every level. Items from season 7 forward have yet to make an appearance in any engram. Eververse rewards can no longer be dismantled for Bright Dust, making duplicates effectively worthless, and Bright Engrams themselves completely worthless if you’ve already earned everything in them. On a positive note, you also don’t have to spend Bright Dust to reacquire items from Collections, but that’s really the only positive here.
Your only source of Bright Dust is through completing weekly Vanguard, Crucible, and Gambit bounties. There are six of these in total, and each gives 200 dust, for a total of 1200 per character per week, or 3600 over an account each week, enough to buy one or maybe two rewards, depending on what you’re buying. You can also do as many repeatable bounties as you want, but these only give a pathetic 10 dust each. Events don’t offer engrams with strict knockout systems, so you have to spend more of your dust to earn event cosmetics. And the best part is that there’s still a weekly rotation, which can really screw you over if you happen to miss that one item you want during the only week it’s available.
Suffice it to say, Eververse really sucks right now. So now that we’ve seen the progression of Eververse from its beginning to the present, I’m going to go into the problems that I see with the microtransaction system in Destiny 2.
FOMO
This is by far the biggest problem with how the system is currently designed, with roots stretching back to the beginning of Destiny 2. I suppose an argument could also be made for some of the event lootboxes in Destiny 1, but let’s stick to this game.
FOMO, or “fear of missing out,” is pretty self-explanatory. It refers to a social anxiety where people feel that they must constantly be engaging with something, lest they miss out on a satisfying event. While it is often applied to social media addicts, FOMO is increasingly part of how modern video games are designed. Ever notice how many video games operate off of a “seasonal” structure now? When one season ends, activities or content from that season are often removed, sometimes for good. Players don’t remain engaged because they’re having fun, they keep playing for fear that they’ll be unable to earn an item or experience an event later on.
FOMO might have been affecting you as well, and you didn’t even realize it. Think about your time playing the game recently. Have you been playing Destiny 2 only because you felt like you needed to, not necessarily because you wanted to? Has logging on felt like a chore that you needed to get done instead of a fun activity to look forward to? FOMO likely has been driving your decision to play. I could go into FOMO in other aspects of the game, but that can be saved for another post. For now, let’s focus on Eververse.
Exploiting FOMO is the most prominent aspect of the Eververse store’s design. It started with the seasonal Bright Engrams, a hard reset of the items available to earn each season, locking away almost all of the previous seasons’ items. The weekly rotation of items available for Bright Dust is even worse, especially now that Bright Engrams no longer drop new cosmetics. Since there’s no indication if something will be available again, players may feel the need to grind a lot of bounties just to get that item they really want. Or players might decide that spending some money on Silver to directly purchase an item from the storefront is better than hoping for it to come around in the rotation.
None of this is really healthy behavior, both for players and for Bungie itself. Players may force themselves into unhealthy habits, playing longer than they really should just to be sure they’re earning everything they can. Some may even burn themselves out entirely, which is bad for Bungie for a simple reason: someone who isn’t playing is certainly not paying. It’s exploitative design that should be curtailed, the sooner the better.
Exorbitant prices
The next-biggest problem I see with Eververse is how damn expensive everything is, both in terms of Silver and Bright Dust. Coupled with FOMO, the high costs associated with Eververse feel excessively greedy.
We’ll start with Silver. Here’s a quick rundown of how much various items cost:
- Armor ornament sets: 1500 Silver (each piece costs 300)
- Exotic weapon ornament: 700 Silver
- Exotic armor ornament: 600 Silver
- Legendary weapon ornament: 400 Silver
- Exotic Ghost shell: 600 Silver
- Exotic emote: 1000 Silver (1200 for team emotes)
- Legendary emote: 500 Silver (800 for team emotes)
- Rare emote: 200 Silver
- Finisher: 800 Silver
- Exotic Sparrow: 800 Silver
- Exotic ship: 800 Silver
- Legendary Ghost projection: 200 Silver
- Rare Ghost projection: 100 Silver
- Transmat effect: 200 Silver
Generally speaking, 100 Silver is equivalent to $1; it’s a bit less if you buy larger bundles, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll keep that ratio. With that in mind, it’s crazy that you can spend ten bucks on a single emote, or fifteen on a set of armor ornaments. For the price of five or six cosmetics, you can buy Forsaken and Shadowkeep combined and get way more for your money. Hell, a single season pass is $10, and that gives way more than just one cosmetic item once fully leveled.
Bright Dust prices certainly aren’t much better. Almost all items cost a bare minimum of 1000 dust, with many costing 2000 or more. Their prices are also unchanged from back when you could earn Bright Dust more easily. Since your effective cap of Bright Dust earned in a week is 3600, so you’re lucky to get maybe one or two items a week if you’re lucky and you’re not sick to death of grinding those weekly bounties every week. And the prices certainly aren’t consistent with the Silver costs, making it even more difficult to determine the value of these currencies. As an example, 200 Silver can buy a rare emote or a legendary Ghost projection, but the former costs 500 Bright Dust while the latter costs 1500!
These prices are way too high for what you get in return. Dropping $10 on a single cosmetic when you could get an entire season of content for the same price is absurd, and only being able to obtain one or two cosmetics for free each week when you used to get many is ridiculous. I believe this needs to change.
Lack of player agency
Despite being billed otherwise, the current system gives players the least agency thus far in being able to earn the rewards they want, at least if they don’t want to spend large amounts of money. Players often only get one chance at any particular item, and if they miss it, they’re out of luck.
Previously, there were multiple avenues to earning new cosmetics. You could get them randomly through Bright Engrams, and due to the pseudo-knockout system (earning an item lowered its chance you would see it again), earning enough over the course of a season would effectively guarantee you’d acquire all rewards for free. You could also purchase them for Bright Dust, although you’d have to deal with the random weekly rotation of Tess’s stock and hope that you didn’t miss it. Seasons 3 through 5 had the Prismatic Matrix, guaranteeing one of ten random items each week on a strict knockout system, or more if you chose to pay to activate it more times. And as mentioned, there were the occasional items that were only available for Silver, but no more than a couple per season.
Now, there’s only one path: direct purchases. Bright Engrams only contain old cosmetics, being effectively worthless for veteran players with a lot of hours under their belt. I only needed one item from the season 7 engram and had completed the season 8 engram before the season even started; season 9’s engram was the first that actually had a few rewards I hadn’t unlocked, but it was still only a few. For the new stuff, you have to fork over Silver or Bright Dust to add them to your collection.
The biggest detriment to player agency is the weekly rotating stock. About half of the new cosmetics are available throughout the season for Silver, but the other half rotate in and out of the Featured menu in the Eververse storefront each week. Bright Dust purchases are solely on rotation, giving you no way to spend that currency at your own pace. You’re trapped in the whims of the system.
Enterprising players have managed to datamine the Eververse stock rotation and posted it to the Destiny subreddit, but many players are unaware of this. There’s no indication in-game that something will only be available one time only, and every time a player doesn’t have the funds to buy something they want, it only adds to FOMO. There are no official resources that help players plan their purchases ahead of time, and it’s stupid that Eververse is set up in such a way that we need one.
If Bungie were truly interested in increasing player agency, then they would design Eververse to let players obtain the exact cosmetics they want, when they want. Giving players only a single chance to acquire a cosmetic before it’s gone forever, with no warning that this is the case, is predatory.
Lack of cosmetics earned in-game
In Destiny 1, the bulk of cosmetic items were obtained through in-game activities. Every content update added multiple new ships, Sparrows, Ghost shells, shaders, or emblems to the game, which could then be earned solely through gameplay.
With the launch of Eververse, emotes were added as the first item that couldn’t be earned without dropping some additional cash. The various lootboxes added small amounts of new items exclusive to the microtransaction store, but there were still enough cosmetics elsewhere that it didn’t feel overwhelming. As reference, here are the cosmetics that each lootbox added:
- Legacy of the Lost: Permanent versions of sixteen Festival masks, exclusive Skull Mask
- Sparrow Toolkit: Five Sparrows
- Custom Horn Kit: Sixteen Sparrow horns, one Sparrow
- Sterling Treasure: Two armor sets per class, two ships, one Sparrow
- Radiant Treasure: Twenty-two exotic weapon ornaments, one emote
- Treasures of the Lost: Seventeen masks (seven new), two Ghost shells, one Sparrow, two exotic weapon ornaments
- Treasures of the Dawning: Two armor sets per class, nine Sparrows, ten exotic weapon ornaments, eleven Sparrow horns
- Treasure of Ages: All of the above, plus one new armor set per class, seven exotic weapon ornaments, two ships, and three shaders
A total of 134 items/armor sets were added through different lootboxes over the course of three years, a small fraction when compared to the rest of the game’s loot.
In contrast, Eververse has been the primary source of cosmetic items throughout Destiny 2. A single Bright Engram contains almost as many different items as all lootboxes in Destiny 1 combined! To illustrate this point further, let’s compare the two games when it comes to a particular category of cosmetic. We’ll use Sparrows for this because it’s the category that actually makes Destiny 2 look the best. Not good, but better than the others.
In the Destiny 1 Sparrow kiosk (that game’s precursor to D2’s Collections), there are a total of 85 Sparrows. Of these, 57 can be acquired through in-game methods. Of the remaining 28, 20 are available from Eververse in some way, and the final eight are promotional items (pre-order bonuses, a Red Bull promotion, Refer-a-Friend, etc.). This means that 67% of the Sparrows in Destiny 1 are available through in-game drops or purchases, while 33% are earned through microtransactions or out-of-game promotions. If you remove promotional Sparrows, the percentages change to 74%/26%. To be fair, a lot of the Sparrows that can be earned in-game are the same model but with different engine trails, but I’m going off of raw numbers here.
In Destiny 2, as of the end of season 9, there have been 217 Sparrows released. Of these, a grand total of 36 can be acquired through in-game means, and a number of these aren’t even available to be collected anymore, like the Trials Sparrow introduced in season 3. Another two are promotional items, one coming from the Refer-a-Friend program that was retired with Shadowkeep, and the other being a bonus for purchasing the Forsaken Annual Pass. I could be mistaken, but I believe that you can’t get it if you buy Forsaken anymore, despite the Annual Pass content being rolled into the expansion.
That means a whopping 179 Sparrows can only be acquired through Eververse, either through Bright Engrams or direct purchases. Put another way, only 17% of all Sparrows released over the past two-and-a-half years can be earned through in-game methods, and that’s assuming you can still get them. One in six Sparrows could be acquired through playing the game, compared to two in three in Destiny 1. I could do the same comparison for ships or Ghost shells, but those make D2 look even worse.
Is it any wonder that the cosmetic side of the game feels hollow? Instead of being able to show off that cool item you earned, all a flashy cosmetic says these days is “that guy probably spent a lot of money.” In D1, I loved flying my Agonarch Karve or Birth of History or zipping around in my XV1 Timebreaker not just because they looked cool, but also because I earned them. There’s just not as much attachment to cosmetics in D2 because they are overwhelmingly acquired despite the time you spend in-game, as opposed to because of it.
Collectors are hurting
This is a more personal problem for me, but I know it applies to other players as well.
I love collecting things. It’s a habit of mine, for sure. Any time there’s a game with a collection aspect to it, I want to fill it out as much as possible. It’s satisfying for me to look at a complete collection, even if I rarely use most of it. I can’t really explain why, it’s just something I like to do.
Collecting things is certainly a valid way to play Destiny 2, but the current system has made that side of the game more difficult than ever. Even though the overwhelming majority of cosmetics come through Eververse, you could still feasibly acquire everything that came out in a season before the season ended through strategic planning or just playing a hell of a lot. My personal strategy was fairly simple: purchase any relatively inexpensive items each week for Bright Dust, especially account unlocks like emotes and ornaments, to increase the chances of acquiring more expensive exotic items from Bright Engrams (or the Prismatic Matrix when that was still a thing). I meticulously kept track of all the items I acquired to determine how many more I had left to earn. The result is that I know for a fact I acquired every single cosmetic from seasons 3-6, minus a couple of emotes from season 4. I was also able to amass a pretty good stockpile of Bright Dust in the process due to frugal spending.
But starting with the changes in season 7, it became much harder to complete my collections. With Bright Engrams no longer awarding new items, you couldn’t easily acquire new items just by playing the game. The new cosmetics were overwhelmingly expensive exotics, which drained my Bright Dust stockpile trying to get as many as I could before they disappeared. Then season 8 lowered the amount of Bright Engrams you’d earn while also removing Bright Dust from dismantling items, limiting you to an effective hard cap of dust each week from doing weekly bounties. You could do repeatable bounties, sure, but 10 dust per bounty is pathetic, frankly.
Your only other option is to spend real money, which would naturally be Bungie’s goal here. Since there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to earn what you want through just gameplay, you’re inclined to drop some money on the store to ensure you do. Obviously the point of any microtransaction store is to get you to spend money, but some players can take it too far. Those like me with a collecting habit are enticed to become whales, spending hundreds of dollars each season just to be sure their collection is filled out. It’s probably only thanks to my limited budget that I’ve avoided that fate, but I could certainly see myself falling into that money pit, sadly enough.
I tallied up just the items available in the Seasonal Offerings category, so this does not include items available in the weekly Featured rotation. In total, purchasing everything in the Seasonal Offerings category would cost 26,200 Silver. Purchasing the largest bundles possible to reach that total (four 6000 Silver bundles and one 2300 Silver bundle), it would cost $220 to buy all of those cosmetics. And as I mentioned, that doesn’t even include a couple dozen more items that are only in the weekly rotation, so it would probably cost closer to $300 to get every cosmetic in a season, if not more. That’s five times more than the game cost when new!
Hell, New Light players have it even worse. On top of the high expense to acquire new items, older items are more of a pain to acquire. Now that you only get a Bright Engram every five levels as opposed to every level, getting any particular item from a past season is next-to-impossible. As I mentioned above, we’ve gone from nine easy engrams per week down to just one, so it’s just that much harder to fill out a collection. The engrams aren’t under a strict knockout system either, so you can easily get a lot of dupes before getting that one item you want. But hey, at least Bungie was nice enough to sell you more engrams!
I also see another problem for newer players. Due to the sheer amount of items that have been added over the past few years, it’s very likely that they’ll see plenty of cool ships or Sparrows or Ghosts or emotes that they simply won’t be able to acquire themselves because they’re not in the engrams. I can only see that as discouraging continued play. Why bother when you can’t even get the reward you want, no matter how much you play?
Sure, Bungie may try to mitigate this through hiding unearned items from previous seasons, but we all know they’re there, taunting us that we just didn’t play enough or spend enough to get them when we had the chance. I used to buy the Silver-exclusive items each season for the sake of completeness and because I liked to continue to support the game financially, but now that there’s so many of them, I don’t even bother. I haven’t made an Eververse purchase since the Solstice armor glows (boy that was a mistake), and I probably won’t make one for a while yet, not until changes are made.
What’s to be done?
So let’s recap the problems as I see them:
- Fear of missing out (FOMO) being leveraged to hook players into playing and spending more, but also causing burnout
- Silver and Bright Dust prices are far too high for what you’re getting, and Bright Dust is difficult to earn in large enough quantities to make frequent purchases
- Lack of player agency: players are unable to acquire what they want when they want it and are strung along by an opaque system they can’t control
- A huge lack of cosmetics acquired through in-game activities, with almost everything locked behind the Eververse store
- Collectors unable to complete their collections, New Light players being the most adversely affected
My summation of these problems: Eververse feels like it’s designed to fund and perpetuate itself, with no indication that it’s actually funding anything else.
Sure, Luke Smith talked about how the Whisper of the Worm ornaments justified the expense of the Zero Hour mission, but that’s a single example. Eververse has continued to grow and consume the cosmetic side of Destiny 2, but there really doesn’t seem to be any noticeable effects on the rest of the game. Updates haven’t really increased in cadence, new content drops aren’t all that much bigger or higher-quality (even accounting for the loss of other Activision studios when Bungie went solo), but hey, at least Bungie is able to put out another slew of Eververse content each season!
Now I will be 100% fair here: I don’t know the details of Bungie’s budget. I get the standard defenses of “Bungie’s a business, they have to make money somehow” that often crop up when Eververse is criticized, which are fair to point out. Obviously, I can’t say for certain that Eververse isn’t funding the game itself, and I know logically it’s got to be playing at least some part. I’m just talking about how it feels as an outside observer.
Eververse feels like an entirely separate system from the rest of the game, taking over all cosmetic acquisition and nickel-and-diming players in the process. While we don’t know where the various sources of funding go (and there may not even be a breakdown like that in Bungie’s books), the only thing we can probably say for certain is that Eververse is definitely funding the continuation of Eververse. If it weren’t successful in some way, it wouldn’t have grown into the behemoth it is today.
That having been said, here are a few improvements I feel could be made. There’s not a strict order to these, but I’ve kind of sorted them through what I think are the most important changes first, with long-shot wishes towards the end. I’m also aware that not all of these changes would necessarily be implemented for whatever reason, but my goal is a list of suggestions that will make Eververse feel less exploitative.
No more weekly rotations
This is probably the biggest change that would have a major improvement on everyone’s mental health. The weekly rotation serves no purpose other than to drive FOMO purchases, which only works until it doesn’t. As soon as a player gives up on the idea that they need to keep playing lest they miss out on something they want, they’re unlikely to want to come back and play again because they weren’t having fun while they were playing. And since they really have no fond attachments to the game, you’ve lost that player for good.
Instead, have all items from a particular season available at all times for Silver and Bright Dust. This will give players ample opportunity to acquire the items they want when they want, and they’ll no longer be forced to follow the whims of a random rotating stock. It will also give Bungie feedback as to what items sell the most, which can then inform their decisions about what to make in future seasons.
If you must insist on keeping some form of weekly rotation, then have a sale each week. A small selection of items can be put up for a hefty discount, so players can either choose to wait and see if an item will be on sale, or bite the bullet and purchase it whenever they want.
Make Bright Engrams useful again
Right now, Bright Engrams are not particularly beneficial to any player. New players don’t earn them at a high enough frequency to acquire cosmetics at an efficient rate, only getting one every five levels as opposed to one every level pre-Shadowkeep. Veteran players who already have a lot of old cosmetics get practically nothing out of opening a Bright Engram except for the occasional Bright Dust gift. Any rewards are dismantled into a small amount of Glimmer or Legendary Shards.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with Bright Engrams containing items from previous seasons because it helps newer players get items they wouldn’t have been able to acquire otherwise. I’d prefer to go back to acquiring new cosmetics through engrams, but assuming we continue moving forward with this system, then some suggestions for the changes I would make:
- Reward Bright Engrams on every level-up. Take them out of the season pass free track and replace them with some other reward.
- Put Bright Engrams on a strict knock-out system like event engrams used to be. There’s no point in acquiring duplicate items when they don’t dismantle into anything useful.
- When a player unlocks everything in a Bright Engram, the engrams should either award another old cosmetic at random or an amount of Bright Dust. This keeps engrams useful for veterans and gives newer players a goal to work towards.
- Events should also have their own engrams again to give players a free option to earn rewards without having to spend extra dust.
Rework the Silver/Bright Dust economy
Right now, cosmetics are far too expensive for what you get, regardless of what currency you use. You can buy a whole season’s worth of content for about the same cost as a single cosmetic item, or an entire expansion for the price of three or four. Bright Dust coming primarily from weekly bounties puts a relatively hard cap on the amount of dust you can earn in a week, unless you want to go through the tedious process of claiming and completing repeatable bounties over and over. And the high prices of cosmetic items remain unchanged from before when dust was available in higher quantities.
To that end, I believe a couple of changes are in order:
- Silver costs should come down a substantial amount. I’m talking 50% or more. Those prices are just way too high, and cheaper costs would likely encourage more players to hand over some cash.
- With regards to Bright Dust, either lower the prices of items or increase the sources of dust available in-game. The Bright Engram suggestion above is one possibility. Another is to increase the dust from weekly and repeatable bounties, and/or add dust as a reward to more activities.
- Also, as a suggestion, I’d prefer not to have to grind out weekly bounties on all characters every week to maximize my dust income. Perhaps double or triple the requirements, but have them work account-wide. Or better yet, have a weekly account objective that requires some form of engagement with ritual activities, rewarding a large amount of Bright Dust on completion. Or maybe just include a Bright Dust reward for your first five levels gained each week so players can choose exactly the activities they want to do.
Add more in-game cosmetic rewards
As mentioned above, we’ve gone from the majority of cosmetic rewards being obtained in-game to the majority coming from a game-adjacent system. This makes cosmetics as a whole less special since you didn’t really do anything to earn them outside of rare instances. And when most of what you can earn in-game is less flashy than an Eververse reward, it’s unlikely you’ll even be using those items in the first place.
At an absolute minimum, each content update should provide one of each of the three core cosmetics: ships, Sparrows, and Ghost shells. Some additional suggestions:
- Include at least one cosmetic for each of the three ritual vendors each season, available either through quest completions or random drops (with progressive drop chances so you’re not constantly chasing a 1% drop). The quests that give shaders and emblems each season are alright, but they’re not as flashy as riding a Sparrow.
- Go back to all old raids and give each one a complete exotic cosmetic set themed around the raid. By my estimation, this would include a ship and Sparrow for Leviathan, a ship and Ghost for Scourge of the Past, a Sparrow for Crown of Sorrow, and all three for Garden of Salvation.
- Bring a rotating stock of Sparrows and ships to Amanda like she had in Destiny 1. She’s been woefully underused for pretty much the entirety of Destiny 2, and she could use something new to do.
- Tie more rewards to Triumphs. There’s a lot of Triumphs in the game now, but only a small fraction reward anything aside from Triumph Score. Imagine getting a themed set of cosmetics for completing all Triumphs for a particular class, or for a destination, or what have you.
- If factions ever become relevant again, that would be another good source of cosmetics. Seriously, Bungie, it’s been a year and a half, what gives?
- Above all, keep these cosmetics available from season to season. Removing access to them doesn’t make them more special to those who got them, but it does lower the potential cosmetic pool for newer players.
Make all cosmetics available at all times
This is an extension of the “remove the weekly rotation” suggestion from above and would be a much larger change fundamentally. Still, I think it would be worth it.
I’m personally tired of seeing huge swaths of rewards disappearing from season to season. So many interesting and unique cosmetics are effectively gone every three months or so, with the only way to acquire them afterwards being sheer luck. Maybe you’ll see them again for Bright Dust, maybe they’ll show up in a seasonal engram, but given how many cosmetics are in the game now, the odds of seeing any particular item after its season concludes are incredibly low.
I’d love if you could view every item in Collections, even those you haven’t acquired yet, and purchase them directly from that menu for Bright Dust. Combined with the Bright Engram and Bright Dust changes above, players could set a goal of filling out their collections and work towards it without artificial time barriers getting in the way. This would also mean adding pages for the other cosmetics that currently don’t have a Collections menu, like ornaments and Ghost projections.
It’s not like there’s no precedent for these changes, either. As I went over in the history of Eververse section, we saw it with the Age of Triumph update in Destiny 1 which, in my opinion, was the best model Eververse has ever had. The update combined all previous lootboxes into one Treasure of Ages and expanded the Silver Dust Kiosk to include every single item as well. Treasures usually awarded something you didn’t already have, increasing the likelihood of getting the item you wanted in the next box. And since each Treasure contained some Silver Dust, you had a maximum number of boxes to open before you could just buy the item you desired if luck wasn’t in your favor.
Hell, it’s the same system that you see in other games too. Back when I used to play Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm, its in-game shop contained hundreds of items you could buy with real money at any time, with duplicate items you earned through lootboxes being automatically sharded for “free” currency you could also use for purchases. While some items did rotate in and out, most were available whenever you wanted to acquire them, the only major exceptions being items related to holiday events.
So why can’t we go back to that system in Destiny 2? Why are there all these artificial limits on being able to earn the items you want, when you want them? I get that Bungie can use all the income sources they can get their hands on post-New Light, but the current system is not something I want to take part in.
Conclusion
If it weren’t obvious by the fact I’m writing a blog on Destiny when blogs themselves have been out of fashion for years now, I’m a big fan of this series. I’m one of those “been there since D1 beta” people you hear from sometimes, though I go back even further still. I really love and care about the game and have supported it through thick and thin, from the days of the loot cave and “forever 29” all the way through to the present. And that support is also financial, purchasing every game and expansion on launch and spending a fair amount of money on Eververse.
But Eververse as it stands is not something I can financially support anymore. It feels nothing less than greedy, manipulative, and even abusive towards fans of the series. I can’t in good conscience spend money on a system designed in such a way, and I haven’t paid a dime for a cosmetic since season 7 (seriously, Bungie, Solstice glows were such a waste of money).
All hope isn’t lost so long as people continue to keep the pressure on, however. I’m aware that the changes I suggested would likely result in some short-term losses, but I think it would be made up in long-term gains. If people feel like their investment is worth it, they’ll be more likely to spend money on Eververse. I believe these changes would make that difference.
Phew, that was a long one, but I felt like getting it off my chest. I’d mentioned some problems I had with Eververse in a couple previous posts, so I thought it was time to go ahead and get them all in writing. If you made it this far, good job!
Only a couple weeks left in the season now, with the Empyrean Foundation steadily progressing towards its conclusion. This last phase still requires about three billion Fractaline to go, judging by the latest numbers (6.7 billion as of this writing). Bungie really seems to be wanting players to donate, if tweets from dmg04 are any indication:
My guess is that the season 10 reveal is contingent on the event’s conclusion, and Bungie really wants to get the reveal out there already! We did get a short Osiris/Rasputin cutscene this week as a teaser, but the big stuff is yet to come. Investments really aren’t going to pay off all that well anymore, so get to donating so we can light that beacon already!
Also, since this is the last Iron Banner of the season, a quick heads-up: the latest update added in a Triumph to track Iron Banner engram purchases for this season, so there’s one more seasonal Triumph you may want to get this week! It’s retroactive and just needs 15 purchases to unlock, so take a minute break from your donations and go pay Saladin a visit to get that done!
As for me, time to go donate some more. That Savior title isn’t gonna unlock itself.
Until next time!
Deep Stone Crypt 