Destiny now offers microtransactions. It happened, and it's not very likely to un-happen. Right now, the Eververse Trading Company is only selling emotes - special gestures and dances - but some players are dreading what comes next, fearful that Activision and Bungie will start selling items that grant those who purchase them a leg up on their fellow players. After datamining the game and its recent 2.0.1 patch, players found new, unintroduced items that stoked those pay-to-win fears.
Alongside the emotes, players discovered consumable buffs designed to increase loot drop rates when completing the King's Fall raid (the most challenging, most-rewarding piece of content in the recently-launched expansion, The Taken King). They also found consumable buffs that would grant increased XP when killing enemies, "starter packs" that would boost a character to level 25 with a fully-upgraded subclass, and "subclass infusions" which would fully upgrade a subclass. Seems pretty damning, right? Well, don't bust out the pitchforks just yet.
We aren't (nor are we planning) on selling consumables that buff King's Fall drop rates for Silver.October 14, 2015
As you can see above, Taken King creative director Luke Smith tweeted that Bungie has no plans to sell the King's Fall raid buffs for Silver, and wrote on NeoGAF that the plan was for these items to be sold by a different NPC in exchange for a currency other than Silver. Smith noted that the buffs were removed for bug-related reasons and have existed in the game's files since before The Taken King launched.
The Destiny community is split on this. Some have taken Smith's silence on the other buffs listed as acknowledgement that they will indeed be sold for Silver, and are pledging to quit the game if that happens. Others have pointed out such buffs are pretty common in the world of MMOs (which, whether you qualify Destiny as an MMO or not, it's a genre from which it takes many cues), and that items like Three of Coins already boost high-quality drop rates in exchange for in-game currency.
If there were a calm post on the Bungie forums that didn't call someone on the other side an idiot or worse, I'd quote it. As it stands, everyone - no matter their position - is pretty mad. Can't we all just get along and dance The Carlton?
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