Destiny's unusual max level ghost drop rate bug now fix

Sometimes things happen in Destiny that are downright hilarious, and over the past few days, that’s exactly what’s been going on with the game’s much-derided ‘Crimson Days’ event.

Players were already upset about Crimson Days being little more than a single PvP mode during an age when everyone wants more substantive content, but they were anticipating being able to land a fresh new Ghost shell, the most coveted reward of the mode. The Ghosts were supposed to drop at up to 320 light, meaning they were the last piece of the puzzle for many players looking to up their light level or max out completely.

Unfortunately, when Crimson Days arrived the drop rates weren’t quite what people imagined they’d be. Some players played Crimson Doubles for ridiculous amounts of time without getting a Ghost drop, and ones arriving at 320 light were even more insanely rare. It seemed like the unluckier players were going to have to play dozens and dozens of hours to get one, when this was supposed to be a relatively low-key casual affair.

But then the community figured out that the game didn’t really care whether you won or lost your match, as it would dole out random rewards all the same. This led to the seemingly-insane-but-actually-quite-logical practice of immediately killing yourself when you arrived in a Doubles game, ending the round and the match as quickly as possible to just get to the rewards screen. Players would jump off the edge of the map, mainly.

Needless to say, that’s not exactly how Bungie thought this was going to go.

So while fans have been requesting better drop rates for Ghosts, we’re now practically at the end of the event just a few days from now, and Bungie has to deal with an entire community killing themselves on a loop like its Edge of Tomorrow trying to land a Ghost Shell.

Their solution?

“If you stop killing yourself and act like normal humans we’ll just give you a damn 320 Ghost Shell.”

If you’ve completed seven matches of Crimson Doubles, and those matches did not involve killing yourself on repeat, you are guaranteed to get either a Chocolate or Crimson Ghost at 320 light at the end of the event.

It’s a hilarious fix to a hilarious problem, though maybe not so hilarious if you’ve already spent 20 hours auto-suiciding yourself to land a Ghost. B

This is a brilliant solution from Bungie because if they just adjusted drop rates, there still would have been unlucky people who ended up with nothing or low-light garbage thanks to RNG. Instead, they end up looking like Santa Claus by handing out free max level gear just for showing up and participating. And through all this, they understand that letting everyone get closer to max level doesn’t really even matter anymore. We just heard an announcement that new PvE content is coming this spring, and is bringing with it new gear and an increased light level cap. If it’s anything like past level cap increases, you will be able to blow by the old cap (that you’ve been grinding for dozens or hundreds of hours to reach) in pursuit of the new one. This “last piece of the puzzle” in the form of high-light Ghosts really doesn’t actually mean much of anything for longer than probably one or two months at most. And yet it still buys Bungie goodwill, as the community seems to love this solution.

Perhaps this is an inside the game “you had to be there” moment, but between the Crimson backlash, the suicide pacts and now the “screw it everyone have a Ghost” solution.

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