Destiny 2 players say its transmog system is worse than feared
Resources are time-gated, as well as a grind.
Destiny 2's new transmog system to change the appearance of items has come under further fire from fans, following its general release.
In the run up to its long-awaited launch, players despaired at the announcement of its grind-heavy mechanics. Now it's actually out in the wild, the criticism has continued.
Chief among the complaints is the fact that Synthstrand, the base tier of three transmog currencies, appears to be time-gated.
Whatever you do in-game, however many enemies you defeat, Synthstrand will not drop more than once every two minutes. This development was first spotted by alonie-homie on the Destiny reddit r/raidsecrets and has now been widely tested. (Eurogamer's Matt Reynolds has also spotted it in his own gameplay.)
With this information detailed, players began to run the numbers on how long it will actually take to grind out enough Synthstrand to spend on bounties which award Synthcord, which you can then convert into Synthweave.
A separate, enormous thread by I3igB on the main Destiny reddit works out that it would take nearly seven days of non-stop in-game play to reach this season's transmog cap for an account with three characters, or 53 hours of gameplay for one character. Polygon, meanwhile, broke this down to 25 hours of gameplay to transmog a single outfit.
"The real time here is even longer than what I listed when you consider how people actually play the game," I3igB wrote. "I computed the time with the consideration that you're being completely optimal and doing nothing but efficiently farming transmog tokens.
"When viewing it all this way, there may as well not even be a cap because no one, unless you no life the game, is going to reach it."
The other point here is that while Bungie has set caps for the amount of transmog material you can earn over the course of this season (and this season's cap is actually higher as an introductory one-off), you can spend real-world money on further Synthweave from Destiny 2's in-game Eververse microtransaction store - skipping this grind completely.
"There's a compromise to be reached between what they're trying to monetise and respecting our time investment," I3igB concluded. "This isn't it."