Bungie responds to Destiny 2 players plans to boycott The Lie community event

When the Weekly Reset hit Destiny 2 yesterday players soon noticed that a new quest was available from Ana Bray called ‘The Lie’.

The first part of the quest took the form of a large-scale community event that required 3 million Guardian completions of the Seraph Tower events on each location of the EDZ, Io and the Moon.

A large portion of the community was immediately displeased with the direction Bungie had taken this quest for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, earlier in the Season of the Worthy these Seraph Tower public events were upgraded to a much more difficult Heroic version that required a perfect combination of high level players, good team coordination, and at least 5 or 6 Guardians participating in the event.

Secondly, the way instance matchmaking works in Destiny 2 can lead to people attempting the event either by themself, or with only a handful of other Guardians leading to low levels of success and high levels of frustration.

Thirdly, the above points just lead to the Seraph Tower events being "unfun" and tedious for many people.

The community’s displeasure with the quest is extremely evident in the overall progress of the Seraph Tower completions as the pace has slowed significantly.

After a full 24 hours of the quest being active, 15% of the EDZ objective has been completed while Io and the Moon are still only 1% completed. At this pace it would take many weeks for the community to progress to the next stage, which is time we don't have as there is only a little under a month until the end of the Season.

Players and streamers took to social media to try to reach out to Bungie that this style of quest is just not what the community wants and that its requirements are too far reaching.

One particular post on the Destiny 2 subreddit by user Dredgen1994, which amassed almost 7,000 upvotes and 1,000 comments, was titled the following: “Bungie will release the gun whether we participate or not. Don’t stress.”

In it, the disgruntled Guardian said he was sick of the quest already: “They have to release the weapon, they put resources and time into it. Put down the controllers and show them this kind of boring shit is not okay. I did one on each planet, and that’s it.”

The comments within this Reddit thread echo the opinions of Dredgen1994 with many saying they have only completed 1 or 2 run throughs of the Seraph Tower event before they have had enough and logged off the game. It's quite clear that the event is simply not sitting right with the community.

Popular Destiny 2 streamers and Youtubers even chimed in on their platforms as a way to reach out to Bungie that something has to change.

Datto, one of the biggest content creators for Destiny 2 tweeted the following after the scale of the quest became apparent: “3 weeks of bounties into 3 weeks of public event farming.” he said. “Got nothing of value to say. Apathy in its purest form. Here’s hoping it gets better.”

Mtashed, another Destiny Youtuber popular for his goofy personality, uploaded a video the day the quest was released titled “Honestly, The Felwinter Lie Quest is A Joke” with the words ‘Bad Content’ written on the thumbnail. You can probably guess his overall thoughts on the quest just from that.

Even Gothalion, a Destiny streamer that switched over to Mixer last year, replied to a tweet by game journalist Paul Tassi about the slow progress towards the quest completion. “I’m not participating,” said Gothalion. “This quest should have launched day one of season to be done while everything else was active.”

So from here we have a large section of the community not wanting to participate in the event as well as a large section of content creators calling out the poor quest design and also refusing to participate. We are on track to come to one of three conclusions to this community event:

1. We fail the event and Bungie doesn't release Felwinter’s Lie.
2. Bungie decides to just auto complete the step after a few days to maybe a week once it becomes obvious it won't be completed in a reasonable amount of time.
3. Bungie lowers the requirements to complete the community step.

Lucky for us, Bungie decided to go with number 3.

A day after the quest was live and when it was clear progress was just too slow, the official Bungie Twitter sent out the following tweet:

“We have made adjustments to “The Lie” Quest and Seraph Tower Difficulty:

• Champions have reduced power level and event progression has been slightly tuned.
• Effect immediately, quest progression has been given a 5x multiplier which will be increased to 10x on the weekends.”

So not only has the overall difficulty been lowered, making it easier for smaller groups and lower Power level Guardians to participate, but the rate of progress has been significantly increased.

This increased progression will most likely spur people on to do a few more completions during the weekend and here's to hoping that the event will possibly be completed before reset on Tuesday.