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Bungie kills the loot cave

The loot cave in Destiny is no more: Bungie has axed it with a patch that increases the time it takes for new enemies to spawn from six seconds to 40 seconds.

The tweak effectively ends the never-ending stream of enemies that emerged from the cave, who were being murdered in their thousands by players keen on grabbing the loot they’d inevitably drop.

The spot proved popular with high-level players keen on “grinding for loot”, which is essentially what you’re expected to do in Destiny once you’ve finished all of the single-player content.

Infinite grind loop

As Charlie said in his Destiny review, “So the grinding cycle continues: buy better gear to fight bigger enemies, so that you get rewarded to buy better gear to fight even bigger enemies, so that you can buy better gear… you get the point.”

The thing is, grinding for loot doing the activities Bungie put in place for the post-game game isn’t nearly as rewarding as players would like, and that, combined with the time those activities take naturally led to frustrated players being only too happy to exploit the loot cave as a quick fix.

Bungie wasn’t unaware of the cave, and even had a bit of fun with it by spawning enemies nearby that loot-grinders were woefully unprepared for as a bit of a joke. The developers acknowledged in a post on Bungie.net that it was pretty cool to see the Destiny community rally around the cave and work together in the way they did.

Not their vision

Ultimately, though, they canned the cave because “…shooting at a black hole for hours on end isn’t our dream for how Destiny is played. Our hope is that social engagement in public spaces [the abovementioned community cooperation] is only one part of the Destiny experience. Expect changes soon which decrease the efficiency of cave farming and correspondingly increase engram drops from completing activities.”

That last bit is the most interesting, as it says Bungie is aware of their poor loot drop balancing, and they’re working to improve it for the bits of the game they actually want people to play. The entire blog post is worth a read, as it’s a frank discussion of what the developers believe is and isn’t working in the game, and they’ve promised to rectify many of the issues with future updates.

Future Perfect?

It’s good to see Bungie paying attention to how people are playing, and committing to continually improving their game to the point where economic exploits like the loot cave lose their appeal. Let’s hope they do to Destiny what Blizzard managed to do with Diablo III which, after a lot of patches, is an entirely different, but infinitely better game than it was at launch.

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