The first step of The Lie challenges players to nine million completions of the Seraph Tower event, three million each on Io, the Moon, and the EDZ. The event involves keeping points clear of enemies until it spits out orbs, then tossing them to charge a machine. It’s, like, fine. But half-way through the season, Bungie jacked up the difficulty by making multiple points active at once. I’ve only seen this tougher version completed a single time. They require just enough skill, awareness, and decent gear to be a mess when you’re relying on random players entering the public zones where it happens. Without matchmaking, with so many failures, with the same ol’ not-great rewards, and coming so soon after the boring grindfest of the Guardian games, it looked like a flop. After the first day of the challenge, players were barely 2% towards the target. The season will end in less than four weeks so, ah, clearly Bungie expected more. So they’re giving more. Bungie announced last night that they’ve adjusted the challenge. Quest progression now has a 5x multiplier, and on weekends that’ll go up to 10x. Yep, that’ll help. They’ve also slightly tweaked the event difficulty by making each charge cycle give 10% progress instead of 9%, so you only need 10 complete cycles instead of 11. And while the Champion bosses after charging are by no means the hard part of the event, they’ve made those weaker too, for the hell of it. Datamined leaks say The Lie is leading to us getting a decent shotgun returning from the first game, Felwinter’s Lie. I’m up for that. More story bits will come in across the quest too, though it looks like loads more grinding as well. At least now we’ll actually be able to reach the next step and see that. Bungie community manager “Cozmo23” explained there were a few ‘switches’ they could flip to quickly make changes to the event. Hence the curious Champion change. “Yea, it was one of the switches we had so we flipped it,” he explained on Reddit. “The progress one should be the one that is more impactful.” But they have no option to so easily change the event’s time limit, he added, “or we would have likely also utilised it.” He also recognised some of event’s problems. He added, “The point of this step wasn’t to challenge the community to complete something, and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t get something. It was to rally everyone to a single event to kick off ‘The Lie’.” Bungie have become good at recognising mistakes they’ve made. They talk a lot of good talk about future changes. But man, they keep making mistakes and some seem real obvious.
