Bungie weekly update detailing the fate of PVP changes from Destiny

While Bungie still is not ready to reveal a release date for the next major Destiny update, the studio has shed light on yet another noteworthy change coming to the game’s competitive mode. If you have upgrade trouble, you can find destiny power leveling.

According to the developer’s weekly update, ammo within the Crucible is getting a few modifications in order to change the the general flow of PVP matches. As such, Special ammunition will be a “more precious resource,” as Bungie seeks to create a more balanced landscape for those playing against one another online.

Limiting high-damage weapons and clearly defining the role of Heavy ammo within the shared-world shooter’s PVP is a major goal of the studio as well, undoubtedly altering the way gamers will have to approach online battles.

For more on Destiny, you can read all about the forthcoming changes that were revealed last week.

Agent of the Nine Exotic Items Up To May 19 from Destiny

It seems like Destiny Xur: Agent of the Nine vs Megaman saga has finally come to an end. For past few weeks, Megaman openly admitted that he is finding it difficult to leak Xur Agent of the Nine exotic items (with the help of data mining tech) ahead of its official arrival. The reason behind it was (according to Megaman) Bungie made some drastic changes to curb hacking of Xur Agent of the Nine exotic items and upgrades via data mining tech (in short, Bungie started manually controlling Xur and changing Xur’s stock in real time via patch).

Megaman is a relief man now and feels like his task is accomplished, and he openly let this feeling of his know to Destiny community via Reddit. In the comment section of one of his thread, Megaman stated that because of recent Xur’s Stocks leak, Bungie was forced to changed him with new stocks because all old stocks were WEAK and Destiny players were not happy with it.

In addition to this, Megaman stated that he had possession of Xur: Agent of the Nine stocks and exotic items up to May 19, and those were “Awful”, Mida Multi Tool was scheduled to come three times.

Here is what Megaman said (in conversation with other Xur Items/Stock leaker) (translated) 

“I’m grateful to you. If you hadn’t published the data of xur, Bungie would not have changed xur. I had possession of data up to May 19th and it was awful. Mida Multi Tool was scheduled to come three times.”

Are you guys happy with the recent changes made (by Bungie) to Xur: Agent of the Nine exotic items, stocks and upgrades? Do let us know in the comment section below.

Destiny Share How Bungie Goes About Improving The Game Every Week

The video game industry moves fast. A game everyone’s talking about today can become a foggy memory in just a matter of weeks. The best chance most games have at success happens right around launch. One game, however, is bucking that trend: Destiny.

Built by Halo developer Bungie, Destiny came out in September 2014 to massive hype from shooter fans and the gaming press alike. But despite Bungie’s pedigree and the game’s positive pre-release press, many players’ initial reactions when it came out were surprisingly lukewarm.

For most games, this would be a death sentence; just look at what happened with the similarly-hyped but under-delivering Titanfall. But that’s not how Destiny has played out. In February — five full months after the game’s release — Destiny was the fifth most searched game on Google, well ahead of more recent major releases like Evolve and Resident Evil Revelations 2. So why is Destiny thriving while other games struggle to maintain the spotlight? It’s due in large part to the game’s weekly updates.

In the months since launch, Bungie has done a lot to improve Destiny’s gameplay experience, which pleases dedicated players and brings new ones into the fold.

The weekly updates keep the gameplay balanced and as bug-free as possible while Bungie works on the larger content updates it releases sporadically. As the developer writes on its blog:

We’ve said many times that Destiny is never finished. We’ll keep updating it, polishing it, revising it, and pushing its boundaries until you pry it from our cold, dead… You get the idea.

Bungie decides what to change in its weekly updates by listening to the fans, finding bugs, and searching its data to minimize pain points and things that frustrate players unnecessarily.

Since Destiny is an online game, it’s easy to find things to fix. The developers can look at just about everything people do in the game, which helps them identify things like which missions are too easy or difficult to complete, which guns are over- or under-powered, and exploits players have discovered.

To keep players up to speed on what’s happening in Destiny, Bungie hosts a news page. It shows an incredible amount of transparency between the game’s developers and the players. Each weekly update is accompanied by a post that explains what has changed and why. The game’s designers are quoted at length, discussing any challenges or concessions they had to make when designing the update.

Destiny’s most recent weekly update offers a telling look into how Bungie goes about improving the game from week to week. The developer found that a small number of players would chronically sit idle during raids, letting other people do the fighting, but reaping the rewards once the raid was complete. The new update puts temporary restrictions on the accounts of people who exploit the game regularly.

Bungie also looked at the statistics for its missions and found that two missions had very low completion rates, with average completion times that were excessive. According to production engineer Brenton Woodrow:

Our goal was to ease the difficulty for the least-completed strikes. In order to do this, we focused on the final boss encounters, which were fairly lengthy on higher tiers. We addressed this by reducing the strength for several of the major combatants. We also felt that the bosses themselves could use some tweaking. We reduced Valus Ta’Aurc’s health by a third and reduced the Psion Flayers’ shields by about 15%. We locked these changes after several playtests with the designers and feel that they bring these encounters in line with the rest of the Strikes.

It’s exactly this kind of attention to detail week after week that has improved the experience of playing Destiny since its September launch. There’s a right way and a wrong way to approach a game that doesn’t click with players immediately. With Destiny, Bungie is showing everyone else how it should be done.

House of Wolves Release Date Coming Soon from Destiny

The latest weekly update on the Bungie blog indicates gamers won’t have to wait much longer for information, with news regarding a release date expected before the end of the month.

Since “The Dark Below” was released in December, “Destiny” gamers have played and replayed content a thousand different ways. The patient wait for the game’s next major DLC pack, “House of Wolves” continues, but at least fans now know when they can expect more news.

As noted by Gamespot, “The House of Wolves” is believed to launch with a new storyline focusing on the Awoken, an exclusive raid, three new Crucible maps, a new Fallen Strike and new weapons, armour and gear. Gamers who purchased the “Destiny” Expansion Pass will be able to access “House of Wolves” without paying anything extra, while the DLC is available to purchase separately for $20.

“The next expansion for Destiny is something we’re really looking forward to talking about. This month, there will come a day when we’ll reveal a release date for the trials that await you, with a whole reef of details soon to follow – but it is not this day,” read the blog post, by Bungie community manager, Deej.

The tease may seem cruel, but at least gamers will still have the weekly Heroic and Nightfall Strikes to keep them busy. Regular “Destiny” data-miner, Megamanexe4 has spilled the beans on Reddit, indicating gamers are set for a level 24 Heroic Strike mission to the Mars Median Bay for a showdown with Cabal Colossus Ultra; Valus Ta’aurc. Heroic and Lightswitch modifiers will be active, meaning hordes of enemies dealing greater damaged with increased aggression will be the order of the day.

The Weekly Nightfall offers up an even sterner challenge, with a level 30 Very Hard mission featuring Nightfall, Lightswitch, Angry and Juggler modifiers. Destiny power leveling make you upgrade more easy. As always, Nighftall means if the entire fireteam dies, players get kicked back to orbit, Angry sees enemies that don’t flinch even in the face of massive damage, while Juggler means enemies don’t drop ammo for currently equipped weapons.

Players looking for a leg up on Valus Ta’aurc can check out a video hosted on the DPJ – Daily Destiny Videos YouTube channel, which shows Guardians of all classes how to cheese the boss. Players will need to make their way up to a hidden spot in the battle arena, from where they can headshot Ta’aurc with ease, whilst staying behind cover.

That said, experienced players may have no need of the cheese. As noted by Polygon, Destiny aim to make some raid bosses, including Valus Ta’aurc a little easier in the near future. Finally, the developer is also planning on temporarily banning a small number of toxic players from matchmaking. Bungie said the offenders are chronic idlers who who sit idle in competitive and cooperative multiplayer, damaging the experience for others.

Destiny share Bungie devilishly trapped its players

On forums and in other community venues, both hardcore and casual players will attest to that sentiment, yet somehow, both fan bases still chug along, min-maxing their stats, grinding out faction reputation for a chance at extremely rare cosmetic items, or chasing that one elusive gun. Normally, that would sound like we players are making our own decisions about grinding extra hard for minimal returns, but really, we’ve fallen prey to Bungie’s grand designs.

Once you hit the soft level cap — something a robot has managed — you can play through four weekly events (currently two raids and two strikes) per character until the reset seven days later allows you to get loot from those events once again. In an effort to gain extra chances on dropping specific desired loot, players created extra characters (a maximum of three slots), which not only extends their playtime, but grants them access to the game’s most enjoyable content extra times per reset. At GDC this year, head of User Research at Bungie, John Hopson, revealed the tricks and strategies Bungie employed to keep us coming back for more — even if certain players are able to uncover what’s coming down the pipeline.

Three years before Destiny released, Bungie had test groups regularly playing game builds and documenting almost every response elicited during gameplay. The developer split players up into five categories: short and long campaigners, short and long omnivores, and specialists. Campaigners would play the campaign, omnivores would partake in activities from every category — PvE, PvP, and anything else — and specialists would focus on one specific activity. Wanting players to get the most out of its game, Bungie focused on the omnivores.

Bungie employed eye-tracking technology to document where players looked, they recorded what players said — explicit or otherwise — and gave players a button to press when they felt something in the game worked. So, while Bungie employs dastardly tricks like time-gating the game’s most fun content or requiring a slog of a faction reputation grind, the developer’s real trick is it psychoanalyzed — and recorded — players to find out what works best.

Destiny Share Skip Confluxes in Vault of Glass Raid

Thanks to Isaac356 on the Destiny subreddit, a new strategy has been uncovered that lets players bypass the time-consuming Conflux section of Vault of Glass. Now, this isn’t a particularly challenging section, especially for level 32 Destiny players, Destiny power leveling make you upgrade more easy, but it does take a while to get through. Some might even call it boring.

However, most of these “cheeses” have been regularly patched out of Destiny in an attempt to keep players on the straight and narrow path. For example, many Vault of Glass raiders preferred to push the Templar off the map in Vault of Glass, rather than actually fight him the correct way.

Once the Templar exploit was patched out, however, players found far fewer ways to exploit the raid as a whole. That isn’t to say the experience got more difficult, but it became a hefty time commitment. While some can run through the Crota’s End raid in under 30 minutes, the average Vault of Glass run can take close to an hour, and there’s really no way to speed it up…until now.

Getting past this section is fairly simple, although it’s unclear if the skip can be done with a full fireteam. In Isaac356’s example, he does it with a single teammate.

Here’s how it’s done. The first player stays in the Trials of Kabr section of the raid, waiting as early on as possible. The second player then descends to the Conflux area, triggers the section, and then returns to orbit. With nobody there to guard the Confluxes, but no player within the Darkness Zone, Destiny seemingly freaks out and keeps the Confluxes protected.

Ultimately, there’s still a lot more of the Vault of Glass to complete, including the Oracle phase, fighting the Templar, the Gorgon Maze, the Gatekeeper section, and then beating Atheon. But, even just a small skip is worth highlighting for players who regularly run this raid. Not to mention, this is one of the longer timed sections.

Yes, we know the loot isn’t great, but the shot at exotic weapons is still there, and the Fatebringer and Vision of Confluence are still really great Destiny weapons. Also, we highly doubt Bungie will patch this out; they’re too busy focusing on future content.

Destiny: April Fools’ Day Prank Is an Epic Dance Party

Who wants to dance? Your Destiny character does, that’s who. As part of Bungie’s April Fools’ Day prank, your Destiny character is locked into a constant state of dancing on Bungie.net.

Visit the “Legend” tab on the website to see your character get down. It’s even funnier if you have multiple characters, as YouTube user moreuse shows us in the video above.

Does Bungie have a dedicated dance choreographer on staff? They must, because some of these moves are pretty excellent.

Destiny is just one of the many games celebrating April Fools’ Day today. Check out our roundup here to see what other games are doing to mark the occasion.

Destiny Share May See The Return Of Queen’s Wrath Bounties

“Destiny” may be looking at new bounties in the future, specifically some new Queen’s Wrath Bounties. This is if new unearthed information via data mining is to be believed.

The new findings are courtesy of Redditor THConer. Inquisitr managed to spot the new findings, which hint at the possible return of the event once the “House of Wolves” arrives.

All of these should be taken with a grain of salt. As far as official promises go, Bungie has announced before that it will be dropping one more update before “House of Wolves” hits “Destiny.”

For now, developer Bungie has revealed the details, tweaks and changes that will be set for Inferno mode this week. The Inferno Clash will see some similarities with the Inferno Control mode.

There are 10 maps to be expected for Inferno Clash. These include The Anomaly, Firebase Delphi, Twilight Gap, Rusted Lands, Shores of Time, Bind Watch, Asylum, The Burning Shrine, The Cauldron and Pantheon.

The changes for the new Crucible have been lumped into four main areas of “Destiny.” The first is that there will be no trackers or radars involved when playing. In line with this, Bungie has also limited the Heavy crates per match to just one set. This matches the lack of Tracker for the mode.

As far as scoring is concerned, the Inferno mode will only be about getting kills. So even if players deliver good assists, it’s mostly to aid with teamwork more than anything else. On the topic of teamwork, Bungie Crucible Designer Jeremiah Pieschl also emphasised the importance of communication to push players more towards the winning side of the battle.

Bungie is already preparing a new bounty for “Destiny” players, to be held on April 1, 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time for PS4 players. Unlike a couple of gaming April Fools’ pranks, the hunt and reward are real. Those who claim victory will receive a nameplate as pictured in the Bungie blog post here.

The battle will be against the Guardians of Destiny. The team will have two members of Bungie as players.

Destiny Share New PVP Battleground Inferno Clash Hits This Week

Detailed on the Bungie blog, Inferno Clash will contain a few characteristics that were present in Inferno Control mode but has a heavier emphasis on scoring kills.

These include the removal of the radar on the HUD, placing only one set of heavy ammo crates per match, and simplified scoring. For the latter, Bungie has removed “as many scoring events as possible” and made it so that assists will no longer be awarded points. The map rotation will also be carried over from Inferno Control, which featured the following maps featured in the line-up:

  • The Anomaly
  • Firebase Delphi
  • Twilight Gap
  • Rusted Lands
  • Shores of Time
  • Blind Watch
  • Asylum
  • The Burning Shrine
  • The Cauldron
  • Pantheon

Destiny’s upcoming patch 1.1.2 update will introduce a few tweaks to the game in preparation for the House of Wolves expansion. This includes increasing the capacity for players’ storage vaults, which are currently capped at 20 slots each. The update will also implement new audio options, a feature for colorblind players, and various gameplay fixes.

Destiny Share New Queen’s Wrath Bounties

The baking of Queen’s Wrath was likely drawn out further as resources were split between updating Destiny and getting The Dark Below expansion ready for release. However, it appears that it could return with The House of Wolves based on these bounties discovered in DestinyDB by a sharp-eyed Redditor.

The first Queen’s Wrath PVE event received mixed reviews from Destiny players when it was first released a couple of weeks after the game’s launch. A mid-event patch was needed once Bungie realized how easy it was for players to rack up Ascendant Shards. The developer then announced the event was “going back into the oven for a while” at the end of October 2014.

New Queen’s Wrath Bounties

  • Moluk, Wormwaker – Defeat Molik, Wormwaker in “The Seeding” mission in the Cosmodrome on Earth.
  • Nycor, Reborn – Defeat Nycor, Reborn in “The Veil Lifted” mission in the Cosmodrome on Earth.
  • Watchers of Crota – Defeat the Watchers of Crota in “The Wakening” mission on the Moon.

The first two listed above are missions that appear to come with The House of Wolves expansions. Meanwhile, the Watchers of Crota bounty refers to a mission from The Dark Below.

These new bounties plus the pre-existing Queen’s Wrath bounties are all classified as “Reef” bounties. I can’t recall if they were classified as such when the original event was released, but it lines up with the new Reef social space outed in a recent Destiny leak.

Those aren’t the only new bounties discovered. There’s also a new Vanguard bounty.

  • Battle Scars – Earn 20000 Experience in story missions with the Epic modifier active.

And, a new Iron Banner bounty.

  • Salvaged Hope – Participate in the capture of 15 Salvage zones while competing in the Iron Banner tournament.

The Iron Banner bounty is interesting, because it is based on the Salvage game type. All six of the Iron Banner events to date have run the Control gametype. Could the PVP special event be due for a shakeup as well?

It’s good to see that Bungie hasn’t forgotten the Queen’s Wrath and there has been work done on it. Hopefully, it can help fill in some of the mid-game content where Destiny hits a lull between when players complete the campaign and when they can start participating in raids.

The House of Wolves is expected to bump up the starting levels for Heroic and Nightfall Strikes plus the Strike Playlist. Mid-game content will become more and more important as Destiny continues to expand.