Over the Thanksgiving weekend, intrepid player-investigators caught Bungie misleading players about how much experience they were actually getting for repeated quests in the game. In the wake of that embarrassing revelation, Bungie last night posted a lengthy "State of Destiny 2" development post promising to be "more open" about the game's systems and offering a detailed roadmap of upcoming changes.

"Our team has been reading feedback and working on updates to improve the game," Design Director Luke Smith and Game Director Christopher Barrett wrote in the post. "We’ve also been reading some tough criticism about our lack of communication, and we agree we need to be more open... We know it’s frustrating when there isn’t enough of a dialog with the development team. You have our commitment that we’re going to do a better job going forward."

Addressing the XP system complaints specifically, Bungie explained that the hidden scaling for repeated missions was intended to "keep slower-paced activities as rewarding as high-intensity grinding without confusing variations in displayed XP values." That said, Bungie acknowledged "the silent nature of the mechanic betrayed the expectation of transparency that you have for Destiny 2."

With the scaling system now removed, Bungie also acknowledges that "the newly adjusted 160K XP per level value means that leveling is too slow for some activities, and we have begun the process of collecting data and recalibrating XP earn rates to improve them as quickly as possible."

The full post goes into much more detail on a variety of planned improvements to the game, including expected timing for some features announced back in October. Many of these changes focus on the game's reward system, refocusing it on more unique and useful rewards for completing in-game challenges. That includes a new class of "Masterworks" weapons that improve on the current top-end Legendary weaponry with better stat-tracking, tooltips, and stat bonuses.

Bungie also promises that private competitive matches in the Crucible are still planned for early 2018, and plans to introduce a "quitter penalty" system and ranked PVP play will come around the same time.