TLDR – If you earn XP slow, the ingame display is correct. If you play normally, the game drops some XP (~ 50%). If you power-grind XP the game will drop most of your XP (in testing, I managed to lose ~95% of the XP during an ‘enemies moving against each other’ event)

Recently there have been a few threads here discussing a supposed ‘XP cap’ or XP scaling. I saw posts from a few people who had looked at what happened across a couple of public events, or screenshots showing a large “+12345 XP” number, with a miniscule amount of progress in the bar. Seeing as grinding for Season 1 exclusive items from bright engrams was my only real motivator to play Destiny 2 anymore, I decided to do my own investigation.

Method

I went about my testing by recording all of the gameplay on my Hunter for last week. Periodically, I would also record the current amount of ‘XP to a bright engram’ using DIM. Afterwards I would watch through the gameplay, and record every chain of XP I earned into a spreadsheet, along with the timestamp of when it was banked (when the text disappeared from the screen ingame), and how many pixels it contributed to the ingame XP progress bar.

I then created some graphs to overlay what I earned ingame with what DIM showed. Since the XP bar ingame is 360 pixels long, I calculated that 80000 XP/360 pixels= 222.8 (rounded to 225) XP per pixel could be used to estimate how much XP was being recorded in the backend, at a higher frequency than I could get data from DIM.

Many of my values (especially the pixels of progress in the XP bar) have a decent margin of error associated with them, I accept that, but they should be able to be compared among themselves to show trends. Or as a ballpark figure to show that the progress bar does correspond to the XP as shown by the Bungie API via DIM.

All data was recorded during the clarion call.

Test 1 - First 10 minutes of the week - See graph

Initially I decided to just play the game how I normally would. Go into patrol on the Flashpoint destination for the week, and do some patrols while hitting up public events. Well Rested buff was active, and I had a +10% ghost.

Where all the XP graphs are flat, or at low gradient, they’re all roughly parallel, meaning that almost no XP is being lost.

Where there’s a sudden jump between 9:22 and 10:48 is when I completed a patrol mission. Note that the Estimated Recorded XP jumps by only half as much – 6000 XP : 3375 XP (56% recorded)

When the public event ended at roughly 13:41, again the yellow Estimated Recorded XP only rises by half the value that was displayed ingame -19800 XP : 9450 XP (48% recorded)

Note that the DIM XP went up by slightly more than my estimation, meaning that my pixel measurements were on average smaller than they should be, but not by much.

It’s also worth noticing that the orange XP per Pixel line stayed between 200 and 500 XP/pixel.

Test 2 – Lots of XP during Public Events? - See Graph

Later on in my playtime I was doing a Glimmer Drill public event, immediately followed by an ‘Enemies Moving Against Each Other’ event. This was the period where I was consistently earning lots of XP, and banked two of my largest chains back-to-back. During this period I had Well Rested, but no ghost.

The biggest thing to take from this is that the Estimated Recorded XP was roughly flat for the duration of both events, while the Ingame XP skyrocketed. Across the two events I earned nearly 7.5x more XP ingame than was recorded in DIM – 53832 XP : 7200 XP (13.4% recorded)

For the Public Event completion XP and the chain of almost every enemy I killed during the ‘moving against each other’ the ratios were – 17070 XP : 1125 XP (6.5% recorded) and 17046 XP : 675 XP (4% recorded) respectively

The XP per pixel measure peaks at 5682, compared to <500 for Test 1, then drops back to <500 as soon as the events finish, and I stop earning XP at the high rates. The scaling rate dropped back to ~50% across 60 to 90 seconds, during which I died, and then banked a couple of smaller XP chains.

After it dropped back, I earned more real progress with those 3 small chains in 2 minutes than I had throughout the preceding 6 minutes of public events and crazy killing.

Test 3 – Earn it slow. Get what you deserve? - See graph

After seeing the above cases I was wondering… what happens if I intentionally earn XP at a really slow rate… will DIM still show less earned than ingame?

This time I killed one enemy at a time. Waited for the chain to bank, then moved on to the next enemy.

No estimations required this time. Across a 9 minute period the ingame tally and DIM lined up EXACTLY – 4149 XP : 4149 XP (100% recorded)

So the XP ingame is correct, and at the same scale as in the API and backend… until you start earning it too fast.

Conclusions

The XP displayed ingame is at the same scale as in the API and 3rd party apps.

There is a hidden scaling factor that ramps up as you earn XP more quickly.

The scaling factor will increase at least to the point where you’re only really earning 4% of what you should.

Public Events will only ever earn you 50% of what they say, as the end of event XP alone is enough to trigger a 50% scaling factor.

To get one thing clear: There is no cap to XP. You can keep earning XP as fast as you want, and you will always be making progress towards that next bright engram. You will just face dramatically diminishing returns the faster you go.

This final graph covers my XP earnings across nearly 3 hours of playtime

Total Playtime Graph

Note the “Adjusted Ingame XP Cumulative” is what I would have earned if the Well Rested buff expired when I actually earned 240,000XP, instead of when Bungie’s scaled XP finally reached 240,000. The Calculated Lost XP is then based on that number.

Over the 3 hours I should have earned ~1.5 more bright engrams than I did (129,825 XP).

At the best conversion rates of AUD$76.20/5000 silver and 800 silver for 5 bright engrams, that is the equivalent of AUD$3.96 lost across 3 hours of gameplay.

Spreadsheet with all the data is here if people want to look… no I’m not going to make it clean, I already spent enough time on this (even though I will admit I enjoyed getting stuck into some ‘science’)

Also many thanks to my clan-mates for sticking around to give me the Clarion Call double XP... made this process go MUCH quicker than it would have