In the MMO shooter Destiny , merchant Xur arrives in the Tower on Friday, December 11th. What goods does he offer this time? Are there new exotic items?

What a week in Destiny! We had been waiting for Tuesday for weeks, which would bring us 15 more exotic items and changes to the balance – Who would have thought that the highlight of the week would not be that, but all the drama that unfolded around it?

Bungie’s sudden inability to write in the patch notes what actually happens in the patch. A quirky bug that allowed players to bypass the most expensive item in the cash shop. Or the prevailing drama “Are you actually doing anything other than nonsense in 2016?” These topics were laid to rest yesterday, we can turn back to what Destiny is really about. No, it’s not having fun with friends, but: the loot!

Xur can now sell a lot of new items, tons of exotic armor are back in the game, even a few more than one would actually think. Now the question: What does Xur have? And where is he?

Everything about Xur in Destiny on December 11th, December 12th, and December 13th?

When does Xur come? When is Xur gone?

Xur arrives on Friday, December 11th, at 10:00 AM in the Tower. He leaves again on Sunday, December 13th, also at 10:00 AM.

Where is Xur?

Xur is located to the left of the Crucible Quartermaster.

Glass Needle? Is that something to eat?

With the Glass Needle, you can redecorate armor. In this article, we explain the details.

Where do I get Strange Coins? And as quickly as possible?

We explored Strange Coins in this article.

What exotic items does Xur have on December 11th in Destiny?

Xur is selling the auto rifle Monte Carlo – we have introduced the weapon here. He wants 23 Strange Coins for it. This is very strange, as it was previously thought that he could only sell the 3 new Year 2 weapons.

For Titans, there is the Helmet of the Inner Light. He wants 13 Strange Coins for it.

Hunters receive the Radiant Dance Machines.

Warlocks receive the Handcuffs of Nothing. They are new since Tuesday.

As a legacy Engram, Xur has primary weapons. Here, Year 1 weapons with Year 1 stats can drop. It costs 31 Strange Coins for the fun.

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In Destiny there will be game content delivered even in 2016, not just events.

Bungie has relieved the waiting community in the Weekly Update.

Eric Osborne, the Marketing Director of Destiny, said: Players expected Bungie to announce “Darkness Lurking II: Darker and More Lurking” last weekend, but instead there was an event, the Sparrow thing.

This, and the lot of talk about events lately, has made players nervous, that now nothing will come to Destiny besides events. Osborne disagrees. They have quite a bit planned for 2016: Besides events, also things that can be found directly in the “Director”, in the activity map.

“2016 is going to be great, we are working on stuff!” Osborne had already tweeted on Tuesday. Somehow that wasn’t enough for everyone as reassurance, so they will now be clearer.

The biggest thing you’ve seen since the Taken King

There is a big whiteboard in a conference room at Bungie. There you would find in scribbles and sticky notes the planned development for Destiny’s “near future.” Events, activities, game content, and features are listed there – designed to entertain and reward the player base in 2016.

The first thing they will do “early in 2016” will be about as big as the “Halloween” event. But the second planned thing will be much bigger than anything seen since “The Taken King”. At the time of the second “thing”, they are also planning a noticeable update to the world and sandbox in Destiny.

In year 2 they don’t want to wait 5 months between game content anymore, but deliver “new experiences” significantly faster.

What all this exactly is, they are not revealing yet, they want to let the Sparrow event first have an effect. However, much is already planned from winter to spring – they have prepared announcements across various channels. Osborne also speaks of quarterly “sandbox” updates.

Sandbox updates are likely to refer to balance changes. It is also interesting that Osborne speaks of “winter to spring” – indirectly confirming what the birds are singing from the rooftops: an expansion, code-named Destiny 2, is planned for fall 2016.

What does Bungie say about the 0.04% thing

We reported this afternoon about what was going on with the number chaos during the patch. It was all up and down, patch notes had to be updated, the numbers were not reflected in the game.

Weaponsmith Jon Weisnewski commented and said: This has all gone very badly. They had “outdated numbers” in the announcement and in the patch notes due to an error, but were using completely different ones. The developer team was already thinking about the next big thing – and nobody noticed what exactly was in the patch notes until the community raised the alarm.

And the numbers players see in Destiny are not the “raw numbers” that developers work with – it is modified by activity, light level, difficulty, crit hits, and much more. A small change might not be enough to change a displayed damage value, but the decimals could add up significantly.

The latest patch notes say: Auto rifles slightly improved, pulse rifles significantly nerfed

They have now revised the patch notes from Tuesday evening a second time.

And indeed: The auto rifles were barely noticeably strengthened (under 1%), but the pulse rifles were significantly weakened between 14% (the slowest) and 3% (the fastest). The most popular pulse rifles like Iron Sorrow, Red Death, or No Time to Explain have lost about 10.69% damage, while Bad Karma lost 8.17%.

Auto Rifles

• Small increase to base damage
  • Low RoF (Suros Regime, An Answering Chord): 0.30% increase from previous base damage
  • Med RoF (Zhalo Supercell, Paleocontact JPK-43): 0.78% increase from previous base damage
  • High RoF (Arminius-D, Necrochasm): 0.04% increase from previous base damage

 

Pulse Rifles

• Reduced base damage
  • Low RoF (The Messenger, Spare Change): 14.23% base damage reduction
  • Med RoF (Hawksaw, No Time To Explain, Red Death): 10.69% base damage reduction
  • High RoF (Bad Juju): 8.17% base damage reduction
  • Highest RoF (Grasp of Marok): 2.97% base damage reduction

My MMO says: Yes, again a few snippets of information. Even if one generously overlooks the patch notes chaos, it is a bit puzzling why Bungie isn’t revealing more information about the new game content. Maybe they have a cover story like before The Taken King, promised someone an important interview. Maybe they just want to stay on PR schedule and announce nothing “great” now when the next content is more of a cosmetic event. That would be the most banal and likely explanation.

There was one for insiders: The now also scruffy community DeeJ praises, as he says, “for inexplicable reasons” the lush facial hair of his boss Eric Osborne. Maybe DeeJ is hoping to get a career boost from the lumberjack look.

Instead of a beard, Xur has facial tentacles. He will appear on Friday, December 11th, in the Tower (they probably won’t let him into the Reef anymore). We will be there at 10:00 AM on December 11th to welcome Xur.

More on the tedious “What is Bungie doing if they don’t make paid DLCs” topic can be found in this article: No paid DLCs for year 2

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In the MMO shooter Destiny , the patch continues to cause problems. Instead of certain weapons dealing 4% more damage, they are only dealing 0.04% more. Bungie refers to it as an extremely unfortunate typographical error.

Update: Clarification about the patch chaos was provided last Thursday night. Here is the link to our article about it.

For weeks, the changes to the weapon balance in Destiny have been clear. In a lengthy post, Bungie’s weapon designer Jon Weisnewski explained it. The changes mainly focused on the two primary weapon types: pulse rifles and auto rifles.

Auto rifles were supposed to deal between 3% and 7% more damage, according to the post back then – depending on the rate of fire. For pulse rifles, the damage was supposed to decrease by between 2% and 9% depending on the archetype. Quite significant changes that one would particularly notice in the Crucible.

The numbers could be read on November 20 in a lengthy article, which we summarized in German.

Community notices: Something might be wrong with the changes to auto and pulse rifles

These changes were actually supposed to be active since Tuesday evening. Then the patch came. But the community noticed: something doesn’t seem right. While pulse rifles deal less damage, auto rifles hardly deal more. Something is off.

Bungie has now retroactively changed the patch notes to display the “correct values,” and it suddenly read:

For auto rifles, the damage increased by 0.3% (slow fire rate), 0.7% (medium fire rate), and 0.04% (high fire rate). Far from the announced percentages: those were 3, 7, and 4%. So ten times or even a hundred times the actual amounts.

The same applies to pulse rifles: here the damage is said to decrease, according to the new patch notes, by only 0.9% (slow), 0.9% (medium), 0.9% (high), and 0.97% (highest fire rate). Values of 9%, 8%, 8%, and 2% had been intended.

The reduced damage “falloff” value for pulse rifles, which was supposed to come, is also found in the updated patch notes – they now do less damage at longer ranges than before, especially pulse rifles with low range.

Unfortunate typographical error, they only meant to implement these minimal changes in Destiny from the start

Weapon master Weisnewski talks about an “extremely unfortunate typographical error,” but the changes that have now occurred were always planned this way.

@DattosDestiny It was an extremely unfortunate typo, but the change was intentional. We’ll have more to say in the BWU.

— Jon Weisnewski (@sharkeatsman) December 9, 2015

Among the fans, this raises serious doubts: For 3 weeks we have been counting on these numbers – and now it is supposed to be a typographical error that no one noticed? And did you really intend to give one type of weapon 0.04% more damage from the start?

You can tell that to the fox.

“Please, mistakes happen, but don’t treat us like fools,” says a post on reddit that is gaining a lot of attention. “Tell us the truth. What’s wrong with you? What happened?”

Or are the new patch notes also incorrect?

Other Destiny players calculate: The “0.9%” less damage with pulse rifles doesn’t add up, as there is already more damage missing from the pulse rifles. We see that here in the numbers. These new values cannot be correct. No matter how we calculate, we cannot arrive at the values you have specified.

Weisnewski wants to comment on the matter again today in Bungie’s Weekly Update.

There seems to be a bug at Bungie. Just this morning they fixed a serious issue with the December patch.

Regarding pulse rifles, we recommend our pulse rifle guide for The Taken King.

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The Sparrow Race in Destiny. What does it feel like to ride a Sparrow? A report.

Today is not a good day to die. Today, Oryx and his Taken are laughing, for today they are spared by my usually ruthless hand of justice. Today, the gun stays in the cabinet. Instead, the racing shoes are laced up and the sleekest helmet is put on. Since Tuesday evening, the “SRL” event is live and is attracting numerous Guardians from the raid to the Sparrow. Like me, for example.

I still regularly fulfill my duties as a Guardian, but – and I have to admit this – not nearly as often as before. After Oryx has fallen for the thirtieth time, the Strikes have been completed for the hundredth time, and thousands of Taken have been sent across the Jordan, one tends to prefer playing Fallout 4, the new Star Wars, or even FIFA. There really hasn’t been much new since the release of The Taken King.

The Sparrow Racing event comes at just the right moment, even bringing clan members back who have let their Destiny game gather dust for weeks. But how does the “SRL” event play? Can Destiny convincingly present itself as a racing game?

Where is the racetrack here?

As on most of my evenings, after the day’s work, I put on the most comfortable sweatpants and turn on the PS4. Like a schnitzel, I’ve been excited all day for the upcoming Sparrow race. Curiosity, but surely also doubts, drive me with the thought of this event. Nevertheless, I have decided to approach it completely unprejudiced.

Okay, the download is finished, the game starts, everything seems normal so far. In orbit, a notification informs me that the Sparrow event has now started. Pah! As if I didn’t already know that. Off we go to the Tower to Amanda Holliday, who will now probably have more to do than just chill in the hangar and look good. She gives me a quest to acquire the C-license in the SRL. Aha, presumably it all comes down to racing enough until you get the A-license. Let’s see. The bounties are also taken along without reading exactly what to do. Never mind. I’m excited, I’m already itching to get going, let’s get racing!

But hold on a second. How do I actually start this? Allegedly, the races are supposed to take place on Mars and Venus. However, I can’t find a new location to fly to on these planets. There’s nothing in the Crucible that looks like Sparrows. I scratch my head, whip out my phone to shamefully google it. But just in time, I notice a new icon on the bottom left of the screen. Well, look at that, I’m not too stupid to find the event, I think to myself, and start the player search. Five more players are found immediately.

Let’s go!

Let’s go! And off to Venus. “Infinite Descent” is what the track is called. At first, it sounds like it’s not going to be a very pleasant Sunday drive. First, the racers are shown and cool camera angles of Sparrows and Guardians are displayed. A few snappy remarks and questionable tips are given, a text on how to control the thing is crammed at the bottom of the screen, and the signal that the race has started sounds. I’m as excited as frying fat! But… I’m not moving!

Will our daring daredevil get his ride going? More on the next page!

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In the MMO shooter Destiny there is an exploit that simply bypasses the SRL Book.

Update: In the early hours of Thursday, December 10th, a hotfix was deployed in Destiny. It fixes the problem with the leg engrams and addresses the SRL Book. Players now need to own the book to equip items that come from it. Additionally, the “Preview” bug has been fixed.

Original article:

It should actually work like this: Everyone can use the Sparrow event for free. Anyone who wants more of it buys the SRL Record Book for 1000 Silver (about 10 Euros). This book contains certain tasks and records that a player can fulfill over time while racing with sparrows. Then he clicks on the book and receives “bonus items”, which are mainly supposed to be cosmetic items or reputation with Miss Holliday.

So far, everything works well. Maybe a little too well. Because the problem is: A player doesn’t actually need to own the book to reap all the benefits from it. It’s enough for him to go to the Silver Shop vendor Tess Everis and click on the preview of the book, then he can complete the bounties he has finished and receive the rewards.

Let’s take a short break here to let that sink in.

The news of this exploit spread within hours like a virus disguised as a cute cat picture in the Destiny community. Now US gaming sites are also reporting on it, so there’s no reason to pretend it’s still a secret or a limited phenomenon (especially since it was also mentioned in our comments under an article).

Bungie is aware of the problem and has stated that they want to fix it. They already announced it through their Twitter channel.

We’re investigating a bug with the SRL Record Book, with the intention of fixing it. Please stand by.

— Bungie Help (@BungieHelp) December 9, 2015

Meanwhile, angry players who bought the thing are calling: Hey, Bungie. Please give us back the 1000 Silver. If we had known you messed up, we would have never bought it.

By the way, Bungie is also working on the problem with leg engrams. Since the patch yesterday, a handful more issues have arisen.

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