‘Destiny’ Loot Cave Farming Explodes; Exploit Or Smart Counter To Bungie’s Endgame Grind?

Since Destiny is a hybrid between a first-person shooter and a MMORPG, high-level PlayStation and Xbox players find themselves grinding to obtain gear needed to level up to allow them to tackle endgame pieces like Heroic Strikes and Raids. This has inevitably led to an explosion of “farming” methods to snag the best loot as quickly as possible, and why you may see players standing around firing into caves on Patrol Missions. But is this an exploit or the inevitable result of Bungie’s endgame?

I’ve actually been watching farming techniques get sorted out in the Destiny sub-Reddit over the past week, but was unfortunately too busy to actually write about it. Farming loot from a single cave on the Old Russia map that spawns Hive minions started with the following YouTube video by Completionist posted on Monday, September 15.

As you can see, players figured out that if they step back far enough, the Hive minions will continue to spawn while they fire into the narrow opening and drop loads of loot including the coveted Rare and Legendary Engrams. It’s Destiny‘s version of shooting ducks in a barrel.

The technique was posted on Reddit and quickly spread on other forums and in Destiny itself. A second “treasure cave” was eventually discovered on Venus by Redditor DannyKage. The enemies don’t spawn as fast, but it’s much closer to where players spawn than on the Old Russia map.

Since that time, players have devised and shared more techniques and tips to handle public events dropping nearby, and it’s not surprising to see groups of players competing for the same camping spot. I also have to give credit to Redditor nyteryder79 who thought out of the box and brought in a Pike from the Forgotten Shores part of the Old Russia map. This allows him to shoot continuously into the cave without worrying about reloading or running out of ammo.

Interestingly, Joystiq calls farming the cave in Destiny an “exploit.” Is it though? This kind of camping farming of spawn points is extremely common in MMOs since the early days of Ultima Online and Everquest.

This following video showing how to farm the Venus Strike seems much more of an exploit to me than the Old Russia cave.

Here, YouTube poster ThePwnstar4hire shows how his team of Guardians gets to a certain point where a mob of Vex come pouring up a narrow path. They are actually easy to kill with grenades, rocket launchers and supers. However, all three players jump off a cliff and kill themselves instead of continuing.

The reason behind this suicidal act is that the entire mob of Vex respawn when the three Guardians respawn at the checkpoint. This allows players to continuously farm off this one section of a Strike mission to quickly nab high-level loot. This seems like more of an exploit than camping a cave spawn.

Now, we need to wait and see how Bungie responds to these farming techniques and if they will find ways to nerf the cave spawns or patch the Venus Strike respawn exploit. This information was quietly simmering Reddit and other forums over the past week, but began hitting major gaming news sites like Polygon and VG247 on Sunday.

What do you think of the loot farming on Old Russia? Is it an exploit or just the usual spawn camping that goes on in loot driven games? Let us know in the comments below.

[Image via YouTube]