Destiny 2 Quest Confirms Our Worst Fears

The latest quest to hit Destiny 2 is "The Lie," which aims to give players access to a legendary weapon from the first game, Felwinter's Lie. That is, if they can actually complete it. This quest is already proving to be incredibly brutal. 

The first phase of the event involves massive battles in which players must build and power up a Seraph Tower. These Seraph Towers must be protected as they are completed, which basically turns the battle into a mix of raid and tower defense strategies. Completing Seraph Tower events was already a chore, but recent updates to the game have raised that difficulty level considerably. There were some tricks for clearing these events a little more quickly, but those don't appear to be making a dent at this point.

Forbes' Paul Tassi explains that the most annoying part of completing these events (aside from the dramatic boost in difficulty) is that they must be completed by a group. This is already a difficult proposition when you're playing with your regular teammates, but it becomes nearly impossible when you're paired up with random players.

In fact, Tassi has been keeping track of the event's progression, and the numbers aren't terribly encouraging. It appears as though the Destiny 2 community as a whole is reluctant to engage with this latest event. Despite the awesome reward and the possibilities of what may lie beyond this first phase of "Felwinter's Lie," people simply aren't making that much progress. It seems like players are burnt out on the very idea of pushing through yet another Tower-centric event like this.

What's even more absurd is that the event isn't simply tracking the progress of individual players. This is an event that the whole of the Destiny 2 community is supposed to participate in, so the progress is being shared among everyone playing. In order to complete the first phase of the event, the Seraph Tower events must be cleared a total of three million times on Earth, the Moon, and Io. That's three million completions on each planet, by the way. That's nine million Tower completions. It all adds up to a ton of grinding that nobody seems keen on doing.

So to recap: the Seraph Tower events have been made more difficult than ever before, but they have to be completed. These can only be completed by a certain recommended number of players, but matchmaking has remained unbalanced because people don't want to participate. Finally, even though people are slowly getting in on the action, there's so little engagement that players have barely scratched the surface of the required number of challenges needed to progress.

In fact, Tassi has calculated that only 5% of players have finished the required number of Seraph Tower challenges on Earth. Meanwhile, the Moon and Io each sit at a measly 1% completion rate. If players continue at this low rate of engagement, Tassi figures that the Felwinter's Lie quest could stretch on well past any reasonably expected length of time. To be precise, it would take roughly 188 days to finish all of the required challenges at this rate. Of course, the current season of Destiny 2 ends next month, so there's absolutely no way that Bungie would allow things to crawl on for that long. 

Tassi also notes that these numbers have actually slowed down since the quest launched, which would imply that players are quickly becoming disinterested and are leaving the quest behind entirely. 

"The point is, the Destiny community is on track to badly fail this event and is completely discouraged from even trying it, given what's required," Tassi said in summation. "I did a survey of a few thousand players yesterday and only 14% said they had attempted and completed at least one Seraph Tower, while 13% said they tried and failed in all their attempts and a full 72% said they didn't try at all."

Fans are extremely frustrated with this event already. As one Reddit user wrote, "Bungie, if you gonna make higher difficulty events that requires more than 7 – 9 players then why is it you keep making the same mistakes again and again of patrol matchmaking being so limited than you can never find more than 4/5 players to do these events? ... I just spent an hour and 4 times in a row it ends in failure because theres only 4-5 players in the area ...This is seriously a waste of my effort and time doing these events because of their decision of patrol matchmaking being so limiting."

Grinding can be an exhausting prospect, particularly when it seems like you're one of the few people putting in the effort. It's also frustrating to see a series with such a rich mythology repeat itself so quickly with an event like this. Hopefully Bungie takes some of these criticisms to heart and at least lowers the difficulty on the Seraph Towers. Otherwise, it's definitely looking like the Destiny 2 community may be missing out on a fantastic reward.