Destiny 2has made plenty of both wild and mild changes in the Lightfall era of the live service game. Season of Defiance is now more than halfway over, and it recently got its mid-season patch. The update was mainly focused on improving Kinetic weapon performances alongside the recent surge inDestiny 2’s difficulty, but the patch also introduced a feature that may come back to bite itself.
Players have been far from shy to voice their problems withSeason of Defiance’s final missionand the changes since Lightfall on social media platforms, and one feature has been at the frontlines of most arguments until very recently. The Commendations system introduced in Lightfall proved to be quite shallow at the beginning, so it has been the recipient of plenty of adjustments since then. However, the latest change to Commendations may prove to do more harm than good to the Commendations system sometime down the road.
RELATED:Destiny 2’s Mid-Season Patch Did More Harm Than Good
The Current State of Destiny 2’s Commendations System
TheGuardian Rank requirements inDestiny 2and the weekly Pinnacle Engram reward from Hawthorne are the main driving forces for players to give Commendations in casual and random-matchmaking activities. In solo activities, Commendations simply don’t exist by the nature of requiring voluntary external participants. Smaller team-size activities that are more intimate are where Commendations still hold their meaning.
Ultimately, once players meet their reward thresholds, there are no further rewards or incentives to give additional Commendations, so the Commendation system already has a troublesome lifecycle before it has even been inDestiny 2for a full season. Commendations have seemingly dropped in usage now that veteran players have had a chance to reach the higher Guardian ranks. Additionally, Commendations have a tendency to become less common as the week grows further away from the reset and players have already earned Hawthorne’s engram. With all this in mind, Commendations will likely face some major adjustments in the near future.
There have already been plenty of changes to Commendations, but this hasn’t been enough to redeem what is known as one of Lightfall’s most divisive features. Some inevitable changes to Commendations consist of removing exploits, but like mostexploits inDestiny 2, they are instead a symptom of a bigger problem within the game. An underlying reason that caused players to exploit Commendations is that they don’t really have spontaneous importance in the game. Commendations have also seen reductions to the Guardian Rank requirements which was a well-deserved change. Further, a new Commendation award for players to give out has been added to the list of available Commendations, though it is somewhat of a double-edged sword.
The Pros and Cons of Destiny 2’s Best-Dressed Commendation
The newest addition toDestiny 2’s Commendation system is the Best Dressed award that was released inSeason of the Defiance’s mid-season patch. The Best Dressed Commendation is a welcome addition because it was highly requested in the community. Many players were already using the pre-existing Commendation awards for this exact purpose, except without the proper tool for the job. This is now a problem of the past, as players can very clearly communicate that other players are worthy of praise concerning their fashion choices.
The issue withDestiny 2’s Best Dressed Commendationthough is that it undermines the entire Commendations system by priming subjective discourse and simultaneously failing to recognize other players’ performance. The pre-existing Commendations point toward the whole meaning behind the system, which is to recognize productivity, helpfulness, and participation. Best Dressed disrupts the intended purposes of Commendations by not highlighting cooperation, but rather one’s armor set. Best Dressed not only emphasizes subjectivity within Commendations, but it additionally reintroduces an issue that Bungie already solved. Since Best Dressed applies to those who look fashionable to others, the opportunity for exploiting the system is partially revived in the context of farming Commendations.
Destiny 2is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
