Destiny has no respect for play time

Price-change refunds are great, aren’t they? You pick up a new something ahead of the holidays, the price on it drops a few days later and, as long as your purchase is still within the return period, you can usually collect the difference. This makes people feel confident buying early, knowing that their money won’t be wasted. It’s a nice bit of buyer protection to lean on in sale season, a time of rapidly changing prices. It’s also a practice Bungie should learn to implement in Destiny.

Because Destiny is ultimately an experiment, a stab at persistent multiplayer from a studio built on shooting aliens, it changes at the drop of a hat. Compared to conventional MMORPGs, Destiny is the spry rabbit to their enduring turtle. Because its content is comparatively limited, the game receives frequent, significant changes to help smooth things over and keep things enjoyable. A reward here, a fix there: fundamental systems are constantly in flux. Which is a good thing, really, because Destiny has countless bumps to smooth over. But it also frequently leads to a frustrating sense of whiplash.

All three of these systems—Iron Banner, Nightfall and Shaxx—will be reworked in the November update, on track to release this week. With any luck the next Iron Banner will be markedly better than the most recent and Nightfall activities will actually be worth doing. But that’s only addressing half the problem: the fact that these systems are broken. It doesn’t do anything for the fact that they were broken—in Iron Banner’s case for a week but for Nightfall and Shaxx for well over a month.

These systems were broken when people played them. They were broken when players ground through a ludicrous Crucible questline just to access a batch of stingy bounties. They were broken when players brought down bullet sponge bosses in Nightfalls. And they were broken when players put up with Iron Banner’s god awful rewards. The balance of effort (or time) and reward was far steeper then than it will be in a few weeks. And that brings us back to those wonderful little refunds.

The principle behind price-change refunds is to guarantee an equal deal among consumers who buy at different but relatively close times. In essence, people shouldn’t be punished for buying early. Now let’s play a little mad lib. Say it with me:

Players shouldn’t be punished for playing early.

Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? Now let’s apply it to Destiny and its fickle systems. The biggest problem with Iron Banner, Nightfall and Shaxx rewards is that they weren’t worthwhile. They didn’t properly reward players who invested time into them, which is why they’re being changed for the future. In other words, their rewards will require less effort and time in the future. If you were a cheeky writer hellbent on beating a metaphor to death, you might even say they’re getting cheaper. And what do we do when things we invest in quickly get cheaper? Collect the difference.

I’ve probably beaten a mote around the proverbial bush at this point, so I’ll just say it: Destiny players deserve a refund. Iron Banner, Nightfall and Shaxx rewards are going to get better and come easier with future updates, so it’s only fair to compensate the players who have already sunk time into them. Of course, players can’t exactly get their time back, but they can get the rewards they were promised.

Fixing unabashedly inadequate mechanics and pulling a bug out of a hat doesn’t do anything for today’s players. The only thing that does is a partial refund, which could come in many forms. For Iron Banner, it could be a suite of loot for players who reached high reputation ranks despite the event’s abysmal rewards. So if you hit Iron Banner rank four, you get all the rewards you should have obtained from drops. If you hit rank five, you get everything. Why? Because you overpaid in time and effort. You did everything to earn those rewards, but you couldn’t. And why couldn’t you? Because Bungie let a devastating bug go live and apparently only it noticed it after the weeklong event came to a close, despite a constant torrent of feedback on the forums.

Nightfall and Shaxx have even more obvious solutions: reward packages. If you completed three Nightfalls before their rewards were improved, why shouldn’t you get three improved Nightfall rewards in the mail? If you trudged through Shaxx’s questline, let alone his bounties, why shouldn’t you be compensated for your now excessive efforts? What’s the harm in giving players what they should have gotten?

It’s great that Destiny continues to repair and improve its systems, but that’s not always enough when hundreds of thousands of players have already been gipped. They unknowingly spent too much time on too small a reward. For some time, these systems were all stick and no carrot. Retroactively rewarding players in addition to preventing similar issues in the future is a tidy, more complete answer to that problem.