I’m sure they’ll begin selling enhancement cores for bright dust at Eververse soon enough. They’ve created such a down in-game economy that people would absolutely spend real money to improve their experience. I could definitely see Bungie taking advantage of the player base with something like this. I mean they’ve already resorted to artificially extending play time with some pretty shady tactics so why not.
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Sure, there might be some players who buy into it; people spend on FTP Mobile games to refill stamina-type resources so they can keep playing or other sorts of resources to speed up the grind. The thing is, Destiny isn’t a free to play mobile game, and I think expecting the same tolerance out of Destiny players is dangerously arrogant and short sighted, and more than likely will backfire and push players away from the game faster, rather than retaining them and bringing them back to the game. Because if you think about it, asking players to pay for a resource to compensate for its relative scarcity so they can infuse freely is essentially asking them to pump money into the game to get back a feature quality of life experience that was just naturally part of the game at launch. That spells riots, not profits.
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There would certainly be riots. I don’t believe Bungie would be bothered by a decreased player base though. I think their arrogance is the primary reason for the state of the game currently. They have developed this really inappropriate authoritarian parenting mentality in regards to allowances for player progression, which is a little psychotic. Where most developers ask themselves what they can do to improve player experiences? Bungie asks, what can we do to slow the player’s progression down. The fact that they’re self publishing now means they’ll probably have to utilize more micro-transactions and enhancement cores happen to be a sought after material that doesn’t effect progression in the PvP realm. They clearly don’t care about our opinions of the current state of the game.
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Well, if they choose to not care about player drop-off, the long term consequences of that are having no one around to spend on micro transactions. Obviously, the population numbers today have not reached such a small level to force Bungie’s hand or make them recognize the dangers of their course of action. But I think, as players burn through the packages they’ve already invested money in and are faced with a choice to spend more for the next expansion or quit, the rates of hemorrhaging will increase every time (substantially) as long as they keep this attitude. And even beyond that, compared to the size of the initial player base, the active numbers are small enough at this point that Bungie should really be looking at what they can do to court players back, especially if they want to fund on MTX, rather than continue to push people away. But they’re so arrogant they’re going to push themselves out of business.