‘Destiny 2’ Deletes Easy Encore Power Farm That Will Now Split The Community

Well, it turns out when you change essentially everything about every system in Destiny 2, some things are going to slip through the cracks. And that’s what’s happened with the launch of The Edge of Fate, and it’s actually Bungie not reacting fast enough that’s created a big problem with the game.

As of yesterday, Bungie disabled the exotic mission Encore (after which they briefly disabled the entire Pinnacle Ops playlist), as it had turned into a speed farm for huge power gains and some of the best gear in the game. Here’s what they said:

“We have identified an issue where the Encore mission is substantially easier to complete, and dropping higher quantities of rewards, than intended within Pinnacle Ops.”

“As such, we have disabled the Encore mission within Pinnacle Ops and the “Grappler” modifier within the Portal. These will be reenabled at a future date.”

The idea here was that you could speed through the mission with the triple grapple modifier and net tons of great rewards with little effort, boosting your power level immediately, skipping potentially weeks of grinding for some players.

Should this have been disabled? I mean, probably. It’s pretty dumb to not have tested a triple grapple modifier that the literal dev team was showing off on stream if it was an issue in a mission like this, but yes, I understand why Encore probably couldn’t exist like this indefinitely.

However, the problem is how long it did last. It took three full days for Bungie to disable the Encore farm. That means while some players were busy actually playing the campaign, those that figured this out were just grinding Encore endlessly in these short intervals, rocketing up their power and getting high tier loot almost instantly. So now with this disabled, half the community (well, probably more) isn’t anywhere close to the power level of that group, while the other group has destroyed most of the power leveling goals of the entire season in 72 hours (I am not blaming them for that).

It’s a mess. It’s unclear how you would even roll this back. You can’t just reactivate the farm and let everyone do it from here on out. You can’t…what, delete all the high power high tier these players got. So Bungie is sort of stuck here, and this highlights some problems with a system where the main goal is getting power to get high tier loot, because if you skip that power grind, whoops, you’re sort of done. And if you think this is the only “efficient” grind that the community is going to dig up, you’re wrong.

These new systems and the way they interact feels like it’s going to be a problem, and this is just the first example of it. But now, this has dramatically split the community between those who did this farm and those who didn’t, and there does not seem to be any way to close that gap at all.

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