Super Rare Games has revealed its latest physical edition release, and this time fans are being treated to none other than Little Inferno from Tomorrow Corporation.

5,000 copies have been printed in total, with pre-orders set to go live on Super Rare Games’ website from 7th May. There’s a standard edition for £29.99 which comes with a 20-page full-colour manual, interior artwork, an exclusive sticker and three trading cards, or you can also get a Steelbook version for £44.99.

The whole colour scheme is just gorgeous, isn’t it?

As you may well know, Little Inferno originally released on Wii U back in the day before being treated to a new release on Switch in 2017. We rather enjoyed our time with it when playing it for review, and it’s nice that the Switch version includes co-op play – a feature not present in the original.

Have you played Little Inferno before? Are you tempted by this physical release? Let us know with a comment below.

If you want to know just how dramatically the world has changed over the last few months, consider how your opinion on working from home has changed since March. Remote work used to be an option that was nice to have if you needed it or if you were getting some extra things done over the weekend—but I don’t think any of us ever anticipated that mastering every nuance of working from home in a climate like this was going to be a critical part of our long-term success.

The challenges of the work-from-home necessitated by COVID-19 will never be forgotten by anyone, especially in our IT community where 100-hour weeks were necessary to make sure everyone else could continue working 40. Here at Microsoft, we’ve probably seen every possible challenge from every industry and point on the map, and we are committed to partnering with you as we all navigate this “new normal” and keep working to ensure the continuity of your business at a time when there’s no precedent to guide us.

As you’ve shared your challenges with us, we have been hard at work to find the answers that technology can provide. Whether it’s enabling remote meetings and collaboration, provisioning and managing remote devices, ensuring the data that’s no longer confined to your network remains secure and compliant, using low-code tools and platforms to rapidly build new business applications, or addressing the latest COVID-19-related threats—we have built solutions and developed the guidance your organization needs to help you make the most of this new environment. I recommend you check out the full set of assets we’ve complied on the Microsoft Together site.

Over the last two months, there has been heavy usage of Microsoft Teams for online meetings, group chat, file sharing, and more—and this has led to an unprecedented spike in active usage that we’ve worked around the clock (quite literally) to support. Today we announced new features to enhance the meetings experience for organizations and schools. For those of you using Teams, we have resources to help you with best practices and tips, wherever you are in your Teams adoption journey. You can access those resources and see what else is new in this Tech Community blog.

Enabling your users to work from anywhere, regardless of the industry you’re in, requires a level of confidence and control over how users access information across different device endpoints and networks. To make this easier for you, today I’m happy to announce several improvements to our products, including:

• A new management experience for Windows Virtual Desktop to quickly provision and manage remote desktops and apps and upcoming support for Microsoft Teams.
• A unified control plane for device and access management, with Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), to ensure all endpoints connecting to corporate resources are secure.
• And the ability to get the insights you need to understand how your organization is working, and make proactive improvements with Microsoft Productivity Score.

Also, we invite you to tune into our Fireside Chat today at 7 AM Pacific, during which Alysa Taylor (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Applications & Global Industry), Bret Arsenault (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Chief Information Security Officer), and I will answer your questions, share best practices, and provide guidance to help you during this challenging time. If you can’t join us live, you can watch the replay here.

Enabling you with a virtualized desktop for remote work with Windows Virtual Desktop

Many of our customers have turned to the power of desktop and app virtualization to empower their remote workers on any device. Windows Virtual Desktop uses the scale and power of the Azure global footprint and network to enable a secure remote app and/or desktop experience wherever your users are.

Today I’m happy to announce that we’ve made some significant updates to help to make it easier for you:

• Updated management experience—Now get started with Windows Virtual Desktop faster with the new management experience deeply integrated into the Azure Portal. You can set up host pools, manage applications or desktops, and assign users—all from the Azure Portal. We have improved the auto-scaling experience through integration with Azure Automation and Azure Logic Apps. Check out the details in this Microsoft 365 blog.
• Compliance and security—Windows Virtual Desktop is already available worldwide and today we are giving users choice on where to store the service data to meet your regulatory and compliance needs. releasing support for service databases distributed across Azure regions for regulatory and compliance needs of data residency—service metadata can be distributed across the U.S. and Europe, with additional regions coming soon.
• Upcoming support for Microsoft Teams—Additionally, we will be improving the remote meeting and collaboration experience when using Microsoft Teams from Windows Virtual Desktop deployments with “A/V redirection” for video calling. This will create a direct path between your users when sharing video, significantly improving the video and audio experience. We expect this feature to be available within a month in Public Preview. Check out the deep dive.

You can read more about these new Windows Virtual Desktop features in a Microsoft 365 blog I wrote together with Julia White today. In addition, for a robust set of videos from the Windows Virtual Desktop engineering team demoing step-by-step deployments with all this new functionality and more, watch the Virtual Event content.

New features to help you to manage and secure your endpoints remotely

Securing remote work starts with a strong identity foundation. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) enables your remote workers to find and access the apps they need from anywhere without compromising security. Many of our customers use Azure AD Conditional Access policies and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to secure access to their resources aligned with the principles of Zero Trust, and enable remote collaboration with external users with B2B collaboration capabilities.

Today, we’re extending the ability to use Azure AD single sign-on (SSO) with as many cloud applications as you’d like across all pricing tiers, including Azure AD Free. This means any Microsoft customer using a subscription of a commercial online service can connect all their cloud applications to Azure AD for single sign-on, and protect this access with multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a security default at no extra cost. We are also introducing several new features to make it easier for IT administrators to secure and manage access. You can learn more in the Azure AD blog authored by Alex Simons.

With Microsoft Endpoint Manager, we’ve done a lot to help ensure that your people can access information and services securely from almost any device. For broader endpoint management, across your apps and devices, we’ve improved the integration between Configuration Manager and the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center in Azure. You can try the new Endpoint Manager portal yourself at endpoint.microsoft.com.

Other new features include:

• Tenant attach—With tenant attach, you can quickly attach an Intune tenant to your Configuration Manager deployment to enable the two to work together. Starting with the Configuration Manager 2002 release, you can upload your Configuration Manager devices to the cloud service and take actions—like device and user policy sync—directly from the Endpoint Manager admin center. This will help speed up common actions you might take and provide a consolidated view of all your organization’s devices in the web-based admin center. In the near future, searching for a user in the troubleshooting portal will allow your help desk to see all of a user’s device regardless of their management configuration in Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Over the coming months we’ll enable more troubleshooting tools to enable your help desk access to information and capabilities to facilitate their day-to-day actions.
• Unified app delivery—We’ve also been working to bring the richness of Software Center from Configuration Manager and MyApps from Azure Active Directory into our Company Portal app for unified app delivery, so people can get the apps they need across their endpoints. The unified end user experience is expected in the next few weeks. But don’t worry, if you rely on Software Center and MyApps as standalone portals, they are not going away.
• Support for Microsoft Edge for deploying apps and packages across platforms—A few months back, we released the new Microsoft Edge browser, which gives you the most compatibility for modern web and your existing apps, plus you benefit from the advanced security and privacy controls. Today, our endpoint management experiences natively integrate the app and package deployment process for PC and MacOS, and you can distribute the Edge mobile apps directly from the App Store or Google Play. We also have a security baseline dedicated to securing Edge.
• Expanded support for macOS—Microsoft Endpoint Manager is a unified platform for all endpoints, so I’m excited to announce that we are introducing the Intune MDM agent for macOS, which extends the management controls in macOS. For example, with shell scripting, admins can leverage the agent to automate repetitive tasks and attain greater flexibility in configuring Macs. This is just the beginning of new capabilities, and we’re well on our way to giving admins first-class macOS management with Microsoft Intune.
• Prevent cross-account sharing in Outlook mobile—With Microsoft Intune, you can apply app protection policies for Outlook for iOS and Android to help to ensure that work or school accounts can only access approved storage locations. This enables you to mitigate the risk of introducing personal content and potentially malicious content from entering your corporate environment. We’ve also updated the file attachment experience in Outlook to help guide you towards these trusted data sources and further protect mobile communications and collaboration in the enterprise.

Improve employee and technology experiences with Productivity Score preview

Remaining productive in this new remote work-centric world can be challenging on many levels. Employees are using new tools to collaborate, meet, and communicate, while needing to securely work anywhere. Enabling this requires a powerful and consistent technology experience. As an IT Pro, you’re responsible for ensuring both the employee and technology experience. Productivity Score can help by delivering visibility into how your organization is working, insights to improve productivity, and recommendations actionable in Microsoft 365 to fix issues and impart helpful changes.

Available in preview, Productivity Score is an analytics solution that measures employee and technology experiences versus benchmarks and your own business goals. These goals are flexible and personal to your organization, making it a key tool to maximize your IT investments as you adjust to new remote workstyles and needs now, and in the future, when onsite work begins to restart.

Based on feedback from our initial November announcement at Ignite 2019, we are moving beyond providing tenant-level information and can now give you more granular insights in critical categories, including:

• Content Collaboration, so you can understand how people are reading, authoring, collaborating, and sharing content though OneDrive and SharePoint.
• Mobility, to help you see how your employees work from any device, anywhere though their use of email, documents, and Microsoft Teams across the web, mobile, and desktop versions.
• Communications, a new category designed to drive awareness and action so people can easily communicate via email, chat, and Yammer posts.

At Ignite, we also talked about how technology is critical to productivity. Today we are adding to Productivity Score, insights on how endpoints and your network contribute to your organizational productivity. The Network Connectivity category provides visibility into which worksite locations have network challenges that may inhibit access to critical workloads such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and in the future, Microsoft Teams.

Endpoint Analytics helps you measure and improve one of my favorite things—time to productivity. In other words, the time it takes someone to get up and running. Lag time leaves your employees waiting—and unproductive. For example, people are surprised when I share that my managed device cold boots in under 15 seconds with all the security and policy controls applied. I strongly believe this can be achieved in any environment and I want to help you get there. Endpoint Analytics can help by identifying policies or hardware issues that may be slowing down devices in your estate, and proactively make changes without the need to disrupt end users or generate a help desk ticket.

To learn more about what’s new with Productivity Score, check out this Tech Community blog.

Investing in resources to help you through this time

We also understand that there’s never been a more important time to ensure you are securing and governing your most critical data. Check out today’s Microsoft Security blog from Alym Rayani as he shares some new research and product innovation that will help you to more easily secure and govern your most critical assets.

We understand what a challenging time this is for you—both professionally and personally. We remain committed to innovating in ways that will make your job easier and help you empower your people to be productive and secure in this new world of work. For more information and detailed guidance around empowering your employees, securing your environment, and more, check out the COVID-19 Remote Work resources page.

Update (Fri 1st May, 2020 12:45 BST): NIS America has revealed that the Little Town Hero Big Idea Edition – the physical edition set to launch on Nintendo Switch this spring – has been delayed due to “current events”. It will be postponed to 23rd June in North America, 26th June in Europe, and 3rd July in Oceania.

Original Article (Sat 18th Jan, 2020 02:30 GMT): Apart from Pokémon Sword and Shield, Game Freak actually released a few other games last year. One of them was Little Town Hero in October. It ended up being a rather low-key launch and was made available exclusively on the Switch eShop.

That’s all set to change now, though, with NIS America revealing the ‘Big Idea Edition’ of Little Town Hero is coming to the Nintendo Switch this Spring as a physical release. It includes the game, an art book, poster, pin set, official soundtrack, and a collector’s box:

Think big and save the day! Little Town Hero Big Idea Edition is coming to Nintendo Switch in Spring 2020 as a physical release! #LittleTownHero

You can pre-order the ‘Big Idea Edition’ right now from the NIS North American online store for $49.99.

When Little Town Hero was released, we gave it seven out of ten stars in our review and said Game Freak proved that a casual style RPG could still have plenty of imagination, even on a smaller scale.

The game itself is about a boy named Axe who must help protect his village after monsters attack. It also features music by the Undertale creator, Toby Fox.

Have you been holding out for this physical release? Comment down below.

Short answer: To print a list of lists in Python without brackets and aligned columns, use the ''.join() function and a generator expression to fill each string with enough whitespaces so that the columns align:

# Create the list of lists

lst = [['Alice', 'Data Scientist', '121000'], ['Bob', 'Java Dev', '99000'], ['Ann', 'Python Dev', '111000']] # Find maximal length of all elements in list

n = max(len(x) for l in lst for x in l) # Print the rows

for row in lst: print(''.join(x.ljust(n + 2) for x in row))

I’ll explain this code (and simpler variants) in the following video:

As an exercise, you can also try it yourself in our interactive shell:

Step-By-Step Problem Formulation

Do you want to print a list of lists in Python so that the format doesn’t look like a total mess? In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to orderly print a list of lists in Python—without using any external library.

Before you start to think about the solution, you should understand the problem. What happens if you print a list of lists? Well, let’s try:

lst = [['Alice', 'Data Scientist', 121000], ['Bob', 'Java Dev', 99000], ['Ann', 'Python Dev', 111000]]

print(lst)

The output is not very nice:

[['Alice', 'Data Scientist', 121000], ['Bob', 'Java Dev', 99000], ['Ann', 'Python Dev', 111000]]

Instead, you’d would at least want to see a beautiful output like this one where each row has a separate line and the rows are aligned:

[['Alice', 'Data Scientist', 121000], ['Bob', 'Java Dev', 99000], ['Ann', 'Python Dev', 111000]]

And maybe, you even want to see an output that aligns the three columns as well like this one:

Alice Data Scientist 121000 Bob Java Dev 99000 Ann Python Dev 111000 

I’ll show you all those different ways of printing a list of lists next. So let’s start with the easiest one:

Print List of Lists With Newline

Problem: Given a list of lists, print it one row per line.

Example: Consider the following example list:

lst = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]

You want to print the list of lists with a newline character after each inner list:

1 2 3

4 5 6

Solution: Use a for loop and a simple print statement:

lst = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]] for x in lst: print(*x)

The output has the desired form:

1 2 3

4 5 6

Explanation: The asterisk operator “unpacks” all values in the inner list x into the print statement. You must know that the print statement also takes multiple inputs and prints them, whitespace-separated, to the shell.

Related articles:

• Unpacking Operator *
• How to Print a List Beautifully
• Python Lists of Lists

Print List of Lists Without Brackets

To print a list of lists without brackets, use the following code again.

Solution: Use a for loop and a simple print statement:

lst = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]] for x in lst: print(*x)

The output has the desired form:

1 2 3

4 5 6

But how can you print a list of lists by aligning the columns?

Print List of Lists Align Columns

Problem: How to print a list of lists so that the columns are aligned?

Example: Say, you’re going to print the list of lists.

[['Alice', 'Data Scientist', 121000], ['Bob', 'Java Dev', 99000], ['Ann', 'Python Dev', 111000]]

How to align the columns?

Alice 'Data Scientist', 121000], Bob 'Java Dev', 99000], Ann 'Python Dev', 111000]]

Solution: Use the following code snippet to print the list of lists and align all columns (no matter how many characters each string in the list of lists occupies).

# Create the list of lists

lst = [['Alice', 'Data Scientist', '121000'], ['Bob', 'Java Dev', '99000'], ['Ann', 'Python Dev', '111000']] # Find maximal length of all elements in list

n = max(len(x) for l in lst for x in l) # Print the rows

for row in lst: print(''.join(x.ljust(n + 2) for x in row))

The output is the desired:

Alice Data Scientist 121000 Bob Java Dev 99000 Ann Python Dev 111000 

Explanation:

• First, you determine the length n (in characters) of the largest string in the list of lists using the statement max(len(x) for l in lst for x in l). The code uses a nested for loop in a generator expression to achieve this.
• Second, you iterate over each list in the list of lists (called row).
• Third, you create a string representation with columns aligned by ‘padding’ each row element so that it occupies n+2 characters of space. The missing characters are filled with empty spaces.

You can see the code in action in the following memory visualizer. Just click “Next” to see which objects are created in memory if you run the code in Python:

Related articles: You may need to refresh your understanding of the following Python features used in the code:

• List comprehension and generator expressions
• String join()
• Printing lists

Print List of Lists with Pandas

Last but not least, I’ll show you my simple favorite: simply import the pandas library (the excel of Python coders) and print the DataFrame. Pandas takes care of pretty formatting:

lst = [['Alice', 'Data Scientist', '121000'], ['Bob', 'Java Dev', '99000'], ['Ann', 'Python Dev', '111000']] import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame(lst)

print(df)

The output looks beautiful—like a spreadsheet in your Python shell:

 0 1 2

0 Alice Data Scientist 121000

1 Bob Java Dev 99000

2 Ann Python Dev 111000

Where to Go From Here?

Enough theory, let’s get some practice!

To become successful in coding, you need to get out there and solve real problems for real people. That’s how you can become a six-figure earner easily. And that’s how you polish the skills you really need in practice. After all, what’s the use of learning theory that nobody ever needs?

Practice projects is how you sharpen your saw in coding!

Do you want to become a code master by focusing on practical code projects that actually earn you money and solve problems for people?

Then become a Python freelance developer! It’s the best way of approaching the task of improving your Python skills—even if you are a complete beginner.

Join my free webinar “How to Build Your High-Income Skill Python” and watch how I grew my coding business online and how you can, too—from the comfort of your own home.

Join the free webinar now!

This week at Bungie, Titan domination continues.

Guardian Games continues into its second week and, after a good showing by Hunters on Day 1, it’s been all Titans all day every day. The book readers haven’t scored a win yet, but are optimistic they can rally.

After Day 1, we saw a lot of players asking about score weighting since the results seemed to play out like the population of classes predicted. Since Titans have been relentlessly destroying the other classes, we have seen players asking if there may be some other issue going on. As a Hunter, I too am in disbelief as I watch our flag try to bury itself into the ground. We’ve been double checking behind the scenes and digging into the data to get a better picture of what’s going on. Here is Senior Designer Peter Sarrett to share some of our findings.

Peter Sarrett: When we first started planning Guardian Games, we knew there were more Hunters than other classes in the population and we’d have to do something to account for that so that the competition would be fair. “Fair” can mean different things. Our goal was that each class should have an equal chance to win regardless of its size, and that participating in the event should never hurt your team.

That last part is important, because it ruled out the simplest approach of basing results on the average contribution per class. While this would effectively normalize the classes based on how many people participate, it would also create a situation where participating at anything but a maximal level could actually HARM your team by bringing its average down. Dipping your toe into the event by depositing a single bronze medal per day would be worse for your team than just staying home.

So instead of normalizing based on participating players, we decided to normalize based on the pool of potential players. For each class, we counted every character who played at least one activity over the 30 days prior to the event and then divided that result by the total across all three classes. The result is the scaling factor that we apply to each medal deposited. This method means that medals from Warlocks and Titans count more, counteracting Hunters’ population advantage, and ensures that even a minimal level of participation helps your team. The more members of your class that show up to play, the better your class will do. It also means we don’t have to worry about players creating tons of dummy alt accounts once the event begins to try to tank a team’s chances.

On Day 1 of the event, Hunters won not simply because there are more of them, but because a greater percentage of them showed up and contributed. On Day 2 Titans arrived and began outperforming the Hunters. Warlocks are, no doubt, considering all the angles and planning for the right moment to strike.

This graph shows how many of each class actually participated, relative to how many characters each class had active during the prior 30 days of the event beginning. You can see the tight correlation between more bodies in the game and the outcome of the competition:

But that’s not the whole story. Titans haven’t just been overwhelming the competition with a flood of muscle mass. They’ve also been out-depositing the other classes on an individual basis. On average, each Titan has contributed more medals to their cause than each Hunter or Warlock. This was even true on Day 1 but, on that day, there were enough Hunters participating that they made up in bodies what they lacked in output.

 

So we can see that Titans are outperforming on two fronts: a higher percentage of their ranks are showing up to participate, and when they do, each of them is depositing more medals than their competitors. If Hunters or Warlocks up their game and get more of their compatriots to pitch in, there’s still time to steal the momentum.

We’ve seen the reports of shenanigans with players finding glitches to turn in more medals, or even be dedicated enough to delete characters to be able to put in extra medals for their team. We dug into the data to see if this was something to be concerned about and found neither case was having any impact on the results. 

It’s also worth mentioning how the flags in the Tower work. At the start of the day, all the teams are even and so the flags begin at the midpoint of their poles. This represents equilibrium, where all teams have an even 33.33 percent of all accumulated points for the day. As medals get deposited and teams move away from equilibrium, the flags adjust. We expected that teams would stay fairly close to each other, and that all the action would occur in a narrow band around the equilibrium point. If a team ever pulls 5 percent ahead (with a total of 38.33 percent or more of all points), their flag will hit the top of their pole. Likewise, a team dropping 5 percent behind (at 28.33 percent or less) will hit the bottom of their pole. If a team goes beyond these values, their flag will just stay pegged at the top or bottom until the values come back into that +/- 5 percent window.

We don’t plan on making any changes that will affect the results in any way. Our goal has always been to create a competition that is decided by how much each class engages with the event, and not which class has the largest roster. Titans are currently engaging the most, but we will see if they keep it up.

Evolving Seasons

Evan Nikolich: Hey everyone,

The Story Continues

We have been making progress carrying the overarching narrative Season over Season in Destiny 2. Saint-14 and Osiris led to the Warmind which leads to… [REDACTED]

It’s not perfect yet. The bridges between Seasons can definitely be improved, and we could do a better job of recognizing prior Seasons’ narrative threads in the active Season.

In Year 4, we are going to build a better interconnected narrative and, more importantly, let players be a part of that narrative no matter when they enter the current year. This means if you start playing in March 2021, you could go back and experience the Season 12 and Season 13 narrative content. We want our stories to feel more cohesive, flow with meaningful momentum Season over Season, and lead to an exciting climax each year.

That said, for a narrative to have weight, there needs to not only be meaningful change but also a meaningful way to experience the history of the world.

We haven’t preserved enough history for a player who comes in mid-year to have any concept of what came in that year’s prior Seasons. As a result, players can feel left behind later in the year and unable to experience the stories or to acquire prior Seasons’ weapons and gear. The Forsaken Season Pass allowed its content to build up over the course of the year, and that’s where we’re heading in Year 4.

Activities will last the entire year

Beginning in Season 12, the core parts of the activity experience will live on after the Season has ended. For late players joining in future Seasons, we want to give you the opportunity jump straight into the heart of the older activity experiences without all of the previous Season-specific requirements. We want to remove any competing and distracting elements with the new active Season, which has its own ritual progression, but the actual activity experience stays.

Let me give an example of how this might work in the future using Season of Dawn to illustrate. With our new approach, when Season of Dawn concluded we would have left behind the “Saving Saint-14” quest, the Exotic quests to acquire Devil’s Ruin and Bastion, and the Sundial activity. We would sunset the Obelisks experience to reduce clutter in the quest log and to keep bounty quantity from inflating across the game, and deprecate the Fractaline currency so it could be safely removed from the player’s inventory. The Obelisks were time intensive and we do not want to overload a player’s choices in engaging in the current Seasonal ritual versus the past Seasonal ritual. This is our current plan for Year 4 but, like everything else, these plans and exactly how content persists will change and evolve as we work.

Destiny 2 will still have moments woven into the overall universe narrative where we remove old content and allow for new content and stories to grow in its place. As we’ve said in the past, we cannot continue to grow the Destiny universe infinitely. There’s lots of reasons for this – technical, resourcing, as well as from an overarching universe design standpoint. Finding the balance of creating and maintaining content in our ongoing narrative is a necessary part of continuing to build on Destiny 2.

Rewards Remain

With the Seasonal activities persisting, a player will need a good reason to go play them. The reason is in the rewards and we are planning on carrying a Season’s rewards forward throughout the year. In today’s Destiny 2, history is expressed by the things you have collected. We want players to be part of that chase no matter when they enter the year and to reduce the pressure to collect everything during a single Season. In the short term to acknowledge this step forward we are taking, we are adding some selected weapons from Seasons 8, 9, and 10 to an engram that will drop during Season 11.

Long term, we want to make sure that the rewards we release each Season are available to players throughout the year. Continuing with our Season of Dawn example, the rewards that came out of Sundial would continue to drop from Sundial. How the drops will occur will change (as, narratively, Osiris has left and we have removed the Obelisks), but weapons and gear would still be present. This is the obvious solution, but it suffers from a design perspective in creating a narrow pursuit focus. Having the rewards in just one location oversimplifies the pursuit game and has the same effect of limiting the ways you can play Destiny.

Our focus is to broaden and provide multiple ways for you to earn past Seasons’ rewards. In addition to the rewards coming from the Seasonal activity, we are thinking of having the Seasonal rewards be available to earn in the core modes of play as well (Strikes, Crucible, and Gambit). If you’re getting tired of playing Sundial, you’ll have the opportunity to jump into Crucible or Strikes and pick up a couple of the Season of Dawn weapons we’ve handpicked. As the Seasons roll on, the rewards will continue to get added to these core activities and, as a player, you can tackle the pursuits at your own pace in your preferred mode of play and feel the world growing in terms of rewards.

To summarize, we’re going to move toward Seasons that can be experienced all year. The Destiny experience should grow each year after an expansion, have a meaningful evolving world, and a bunch of reasons to play. And then each year, we should take a step forward into a new expansion.

We’ve done this better in the past and we’re going to mine from that going forward to make our future Seasons that much more compelling. There will be much, much more Year-4 talk in the coming months.

Bounty Hunters

Last week, we also told you we would address the growing concerns with the role bounties play in the game and what our plans are to make changes. Here is Design Lead Tyson Green to tell you more.

Tyson Green: Bounties have come to be a central mechanic for any repeatable activity content in Destiny, so much so that we’ve seen them move towards being mandatory chores rather than opportunities to optimize. We have some changes coming to help bring things back into balance.

Shifting Away From Weekly FOMO

XP and Season Rank gains are currently balanced around large contributions from Weekly Bounties. The intent here was to provide a large amount of progress for a small amount of focused play every week, but Weeklies fall down here because you lose out on big chunks of progress if you miss a week, and they are strained between too little progress for single-character players and too much repetitive work for triple-character players.

While the specifics are still under development, as early as Season 12 we want to make this better by replacing Weekly Bounties with a mechanism that provides players with a set of non-expiring and account-scoped objectives each week that grant lots of Season Rank progress (more than the Weeklies they replace). That way the return on effort is better, more consistent between players.

Optional XP Optimization, Not Critical Path

Bounties have found their way into the critical path of some Seasonal pursuits, becoming primary sources for Seasonal progress. Starting in Season 12, we plan to steer away from this model in general. Bounties should focus on being an optional way to optimize for more or faster core progressions, like XP or Powerful gear by way of Challenges.

When it comes to optimization, we recognize that there is a very blurry line between “optional” and “mandatory”, and there’s no perfect balance that works for everyone. But we think the balance is tilted too far towards feeling like you need to do bounties to unlock Seasonal content, so we’re going to take this step to tilting back.

Event Bounties

Our Seasonal free events are also currently heavily utilizing bounties in their design. We have seen the feedback around Guardian Games being the most recent source of frustration, with too much emphasis on completing bounties to participate in the event. We don’t plan on making any changes to the current event as it’s ending in a few weeks, but are already looking at plans to adjust the role bounties will play in future events.

QOL Improvements

We don’t like that every play session starts with 10-15 minutes of loading up on bounties. We want to make it easier to grab bounties when you want to do them. To that end, we are looking at mechanisms like allowing bounties to be accessed directly from the Destination Map. These are a bit further out (think Season 13), but are on our roadmap.

We also don’t like it when a bounty you’ve nearly completed in the middle of the previous day’s play session expires right in the middle of today’s session. While we still see expiration as a necessary mechanism to keep half-completed bounties from hanging around forever, we’re going to relax some of the expiration times in Season 11 to give more time to close out yesterday’s “19 out of 20 grenade kills.”

Speaking of grenade kills, in general we’re dialing in the time to complete bounty objectives to be more consistent. Unexpectedly time consuming objectives sneak in from time to time, and we generally want objectives in upcoming Seasons to be a bit less restrictive in terms of how you play.

Guardians to The Rescue

The Bungie Foundation is our way of making the world a better place. We feel very fortunate to be making games that bring people together. It’s also rewarding to share some of our good fortune with people who need it. Right now, the world needs all the goodwill it can muster, so our community has been invited to share in that mission.

Guardian’s Heart

Kilts for Kids

It’s time to don our tartans and raise money to bring families back together in their time of need. Bungie Foundation Manager Christine Edwards has the details on how you can help:

Christine Edwards: Social distancing won’t keep us from upholding our annual tradition of supporting Seattle Ronald McDonald House! This year, we present Kilts for Kids: Stay at Home Edition. We bring you our usual suspects – Mark, Forrest, and Yours Truly – as we highlight how we are passing time and keeping sane at home these days.

While we all do our part to keep each other and ourselves safe, children and their families continue to battle with illness. Now more than ever, RMHC families need our help as they are even more isolated and face greater economic hardships. Help us achieve our $77k goal and cast your vote for Team Bungie by donating $10 or more. Every $30 donated will pay for a family to stay at the House for one night. Head to the RMHC Donation Page to cast your votes by Friday, May 15 at 5 p.m. PDT!

 

Need a sweeter incentive? Check out these backer rewards* for donating to Kilts for Kids!

• $50 and over – Receive one Plaid Pride Destiny 2 Emblem per valid e-mail address.
• Donations over $50 are welcome but will not grant more emblems

• $100 – The prize above, plus receive a postcard, signed by our K4K team and mailed to you.
• $250 – All prizes above, plus receive a digital print of exclusive art made by Mark Flieg.
• $500 – All prizes above, plus receive a physical print of Mark’s exclusive art.
• $1000 – All prizes above, plus participate in a virtual “Date with Destiny”**
• Spend time with Bungie employees via virtual call to chat about all things Destiny, followed by a Destiny play session with you and your fireteam.

*Rewards will not be automatically redeemed, as we must receive donor data from RMHC before reward distribution. An email will be sent to donors at each prize tour at the end of the event, no later than Friday, May 22, with instructions on redeeming each prize.

**No secrets will be revealed. Bungie employees may not be able to answer every question you have.

Hotfixed

The DPS team is hard at work staffing our help forums and making sure known issues are known.

This is their report.

SEASON OF THE WORTHY WRAP-UP

When Season of the Worthy ends at the weekly reset on June 9, 2020, there will be a number of items, activities, and triumphs that will no longer be available to players. A full list of items being removed at the Season’s end can be found here.

Please note that this list is subject to change as more items are added towards the end of the Season.

ERROR CODES

Destiny Player Support is continuing to investigate increases in connection-based error codes such as ANTEATER, BEAVER, and RABBIT.

The team has prioritized investigations into WATERCRESS and NEWT errors. As we are still trying to understand the root cause of this issue, a more detailed updated will be given in next week’s Player Support Report after more investigations have occurred.

RESOLVED ISSUES

Below is a list of issues that have been resolved with Hotfix 2.8.1.1 on April 29:

• The Level 32 PDS upgrade can now be used to clear the Bunker by any character.
• Rasputin’s Daily Seraph Weapon can now be claimed on any character.
• The Grasp of the Warmind mod no longer allows for infinite ability energy.

CURRENT KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:

• Players are having difficulty completing the Hunter Chain Reaction Guardian Games daily bounty. Nightstalker Hunters using the Way of the Pathfinder must defeat groups of at least five tethered enemies twice. This count will reset when the Shadowshot Super is activated, so if a player is wearing Moebius Quiver it will reset their count every time they fire Shadowshot.
• Players who are unable to pick up the Show Your Laurels Exotic Ghost quest from Eva Levante can still gain progress towards quest – once progress is complete, Eva will offer the player the Exotic Ghost of their choice.
• Localization changes regarding the Hard Light Exotic Auto Rifle adjustments will not be available until a later date. Rounds fired from this weapon have reduced damage falloff instead of no damage falloff.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

Epic Chase Scene

Now let’s dim the lights and fire up the reels. It’s movie time.

Every week we pick our favorite community-created videos and share them here for the community to gaze upon. The creators also get to take home a special emblem for their effort. Here are this week’s winners.

Movie of the Week: Community Speculation

Honorable Mention: Odyssey 3

We hope we were able to give you a better understanding of Guardian Games and our plans for improving Seasons and bounties in the future. Next week, we plan to talk about Eververse feedback and some changes we’ll be making to the store in future Seasons.

<3 Cozmo