Destiny 2's Guardian Games event is soon entering its second week, and this year it came with lots of changes to make it more appealing and potentially rewarding based on how players engage with the mechanics. The more Medallions that players manage to obtain, the more they will help their class of choice by depositing them at the Podium in the Tower, and the more Guardian Games rewards they will obtain. This year's edition of Destiny 2's Guardian Games also comes with an old feature being reprised in the form of Strike Scoring.
Strike Scoring was first introduced back in Destiny's Dawning event, and it makes players earn medals - as in, more points within a given activity - based on what they do, how many enemies they kill, and how they kill them. This is used as an incentive for playing the game in a specific way and coming up with strategies that can effectively increase the total score at the end of a Strike. Essentially, the more medals players gain, the more points they score. In Destiny 2's latest Guardian Games, this doesn't directly impact the rewards at the end of the Strike, but instead the top 10 percent of scorers will all get an exclusive emblem to celebrate the event. This quickly escalated into unhealthy cheeses.
Why Destiny 2's Strike Scoring Leads to Unhealthy Behavior
Strike Scoring is something that the community is often vocal about when it's gone, but it is inevitably broken to the point that the whole Guardian Games event is now seemingly rigged. Strike Scoring was brought back as a feature for Guardian Games because it allowed Bungie to determine the top 10 percent of players who would be awarded the new event-exclusive emblem. This makes sense to a degree, because it is supposed to encourage participation in Guardian Games and sticking by a class in order to optimize their score through training in the corresponding Strike.
However, this addition ended up creating a meta where Destiny 2 players are coming up with ways to increase their points throughout the Strike by dragging it out, for the most part, only finishing it when they reach a score that supposedly grants them the top 10-percent status. This defeats the purpose of the Guardian Games event, which is supposed to be healthy competition among classes, much like the Olympics.
Strike Scoring is not a bad feature per-se; it can be used to empower those players who successfully build their characters in ways that allow them to generate more medals. This could be used in multiple ways by Bungie, such as increasing the overall drops of a given Strike or Nightfall, or it could be tied to some form of less tangible in-game reward. However, its current iteration demonstrates that Destiny 2's activities can and will be cheesed to a point where the original purpose needs to change, or a given feature needs to be removed.
In the case of the Guardian Games event, players are abusing a ridiculous cheese that makes it so rapidly reviving two allies earns the group a medal and a lot of points. This is currently achieved by lowering one's Power Level down to less than the 1350 base, entering the Strike, shooting a wall with a Ricochet Rounds weapon to kill the user, and waiting for an ally to revive the fallen Guardians. This way, most Destiny 2 players who just go through the Strike as intended will score a third of their opponent's points, leading to a system that needs a second pass.
Destiny 2 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
