Destiny 2's Transmog System Fails Harder Than We Originally Thought It Would

The team behind Destiny 2 has a a bit of a rough PR trip for a few weeks now. From bugs, to patches, and even to the accidental early release and then revoking of cross-play features, yeah, it hasn't been all roses lately.

I'm sad to say it, but it isn't getting better any time some. Remember when we reported on Bungie's upcoming transmog system for the space shooter? At the time, which was only a few weeks ago, fans were already seeing problems with this new system and the way it seemed to push you to spend money to speed up the process. The initial blowback was because of the caps placed on a player's ability to farm up synthweave, the items needed to unlock transmog for your armor pieces. Having low caps based on each season (of which there are 4 per year) meant that you had to grind to get to cap, but once at cap you couldn't transmog any more pieces until the next season.

It appears though that the cap itself is the least of your worries.

Remember when I mentioned grinding to get to cap? Well as players have now had a chance to experience the system, it seems that grind is SO deep that even getting to the cap itself is a virtual impossibility for everyday players, and a pipe dream for casual players...unless you pony up some cash to help out, of course.

The primary problem appears to be that the acquisition of synthstrands, used to actually unlock synthcord bounties which is used to farm synthweave, is based on time in activities, not the actual, you know, killing of baddies or anything IN those activities. There's also a timer in between drops of the strands meaning that even if you play for long periods of time, a more hardcore player and a more casual player can only farm up the same amount of synthstrands in the same 1 hour of play, provided they are both actually IN activities for that hour...time in menus or whatever doesn't count. Conversely, you could just pay for the synthweave templates...you know, with cash.

Players like Skill Up have already taken to twitter to call out exactly how bad this farming process is:

Just hit level 31 in season pass. Did every pinnacle across three characters + raid + random stuff. In that time I earned around 300 synthweave, enough for two pieces of transmog gear.

Experiencing this first hand, it really feels like one of Bungie's lowest moments.

— Skill Up (@SkillUpYT) May 13, 2021

Reddit user I3igB, who claims to be in the top 3% of players based on playtime each season, takes it one step further and runs the math to show that even playing as much as they do, roughly 21 full days each year, they will fall short of making the cap for all four seasons by almost six full days of yearly playtime.

The system is a mess and is flat out greedy for a game that has many other monetization avenues already built in, not the least of which is that expansion are still an item that you must purchase if you want to play them, they aren't included in the free-to-play experience. What I expect will happen is some kind of reversal or change to this system soon...one that will still be mediocre at best but will probably see praise from some out there for being "better" than what is here now. If that day comes, they won't be getting much praise from me, we already saw what you wanted to do.