Deceptive Bright Dust changes leave hardcore Guardians with less buying power

In the most recent ‘This Week at Bungie’ blog post it was announced that there would be a multitude of changes to the Bright Dust economy when Beyond Light and Season of the Hunt launches on November 10th.

In case you missed it, here’s a quick breakdown of the changes:

• Season Pass free path will now offer 7,500 Bright Dust (was previously 2,300)
• Season Pass paid path will now offer 3,000 Bright Dust (was previously 400)
• Weekly bounties will no award 100 Bright Dust (was previously 200)

At a glance this looks like a really nice change to the rate at which players will be able to earn Bright Dust. Unfortunately, it is actually a net loss of Bright Dust over the course of a Season for hardcore players who complete the weekly bounties on all 3 characters each week.

Let’s breakdown the maths:

Current Bright Dust Earnings

• (200 BD per weekly bounty) x (2 weekly bounties per vendor) x (3 vendors) x (3 characters) x (13 week Season) + (Eva event bounties 200 x 2 bounties x 3 characters x 4 weeks) + (Season Pass 2,700) = 54,300 Bright Dust

Beyond Light Bright Dust Earnings

• (100 BD per weekly bounty) x (2 weekly bounties per vendor) x (3 vendors) x (3 characters) x (13 week Season) + (Eva event bounties 100 x 2 bounties x 3 characters x 4 weeks) + (Season Pass 10,500) = 36,300

This is a dramatic drop in buying power with hardcore players only being able to earn 70% of the Bright Dust they could earn in previous Seasons.

This comes across as quite deceptive from Bungie due to how this change is framed in the TWAB. “With these changes, the vast majority of players will be earning more Bright Dust than before. One of our goals here is to not have a system that pushes you to try to grind out every weekly bounty on all three characters every single week. Whether you are a three-character player or only play a Hunter, Bright Dust will be more available when earning ranks on the Season Pass.” says Bungie community manager Christ ‘Cozmo’ Shannon.

At face value it’s quite easy to take this paragraph as a positive change but it's no coincidence that only the Season Pass Bright Dust is mentioned in detail and not the huge nerf to Bright Dust from weekly bounties. Bungie is simply hoping this will be glossed over and won't get too much attention.

The issue here is that a lot of hardcore players will still feel forced to complete these  nerfed weekly bounties as if they dont they will be obtaining even less Bright Dust than the already reduced amount compared to last Season. Essentially, hardcore players will be doing the same amount of work for even less of a reward.

A change coming soon that feeds into the above issue is that the ability to purchase Season Pass ranks will become available starting week five instead of week nine. See the trend here? Bungie has lowered the overall buying power of those hardcore players fully invested in the series and has then also made it easier to essentially trade Silver for Bright Dust.

Who’s more likely to drop real world money on Destiny as an impulse buy? Casual players who only play one character for a few hours a week or hardcore players that play all three classes who have just had their Bright Dust earnings reduced?

What is happening here is that Bungie has framed this change as a huge favour to the Destiny 2 community but has strategically lowered the buying power of those most likely to shell out real money to offset the loss of Bright Dust.

It's understandable that at the end of the day Bungie is a business and is out to make money but it’s the deceptive framing of the whole change that has left a small portion of the player base with a sour taste in their mouth.

However, Bungie has stated that they are working on additional avenues for earning Bright Dust that should become available in Season 13.

Hopefully these new avenues are enough to offset the loss from the weekly bounties. Bungie is asking for feedback on these changes so if you don't agree with them be sure to voice your opinions on social media, every bit helps.