Bungie Explains Why The Loot Cave Was Patched, Divulges ‘Destiny’ Stats

Online-centric games like “Destiny” are constantly getting patched, fixed, updated and re-worked. Sometimes these patches fix grievous bugs and annoying exploits, other times they fix much-loved features. One such feature is the loot cave, patched by “Destiny” to stop players farming loot endlessly. The studio has finally come out to explain why it decided enough was enough.

During a GDC 2015 panel covered by Gamespot, User Research and CRM Lead at Bungie, John Hopson shared an interesting fact about the development of “Destiny.” He states that the team actually knew all about the existence of the game’s now legendary loot cave, but didn’t expect the community to take such a shine to it.

Hopson explains that the reason the team left the loot cave in the final build is because loot caves actually drop less loot per hour than a typical “Destiny” player is able to earn by simply playing the game normally. What Bungie didn’t consider is the fact that players would be attracted to the ease of acquiring said loot.

As Kotaku reports, the team at Bungie began to notice an increase in the number of player-on-player complaints, stemming from the fact that many gamers considered the loot cave to be an unfair exploit. Those players would end up reporting the looters, or stand in the cave to prevent enemy respawns, eventually getting reported themselves.

"The time of the loot cave was the highest peak of players reporting each other for cheating. The loot cave was actually pretty controversial," Hopson said.

Despite Bungie’s closure of the original loot cave, new ones seem to keep popping up. A second loot cave was discovered in a corner of the Rocketyard on earth, in Sept. 2014. Most recently, a new variant of the loot cave has been located on Venus. A video showing players how to get to the “Destiny” Venus loot cave has been posted on the DualShockers YouTube channel.

Hopson went on to share a number of intriguing “Destiny” stats, including the fact that the game is now played by more than 17 million registered players, up from 16 million a month ago. It’s worth noting though that the company remains reticent to share actual sales figures. Hopson added that the average amount of time players spend playing “Destiny” is three hours per session. He notes that this is remarkable because the team initially expected players to spend about 39 minutes per session.

Discussing exactly what “Destiny” gamers spend their time doing while playing, Hopson shared a pie chart that showed Strike’s as the most popular activity. The Tower, Story missions and Patrol missions also had strong showings, indicating players are always looking for new content. Bungie’s next major “Destiny” expansion is the “House of Wolves” DLC, leaked details of which have been previously reported. The expansion is set to launch sometime in Q2 of 2015.