Destiny 2: Those rare Dawning Emblems might have been bugged too

If player accounts are anything to go by, it seems there was another Destiny 2 bug amid the recent deluge of issues that accompanied the Dawning holiday event. Bungie created three limited-time Emblems for the event featuring Commander Zavala, Ikora Rey, and Crow. The Emblems were supposed to be extremely rare at the event’s launch and progressively become easier to earn as the event went on. However, it doesn’t seem like that’s how everything played out in-game.

Destiny 2 has been having a rough go lately. The current Episode, Revenant, has been rife with issues. First, players realized weapon Perks weren’t being distributed correctly in what became known as Weightgate, and that was followed shortly after by Tonicgate, where players revealed that Revenant‘s primary loot system, Tonics, wasn’t working as intended. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Destiny 2 soon started its Dawning holiday event, which similarly was riddled with issues.

With everything going on, especially with the mass of buggy Dawning features and Quests, the limited Emblems not behaving as Bungie described might not have been on the community’s radar. That said, looking at some of the online discourse, it seems something was definitely up with Destiny 2‘s first Dawning bake-off.

The Bake-Off was a bust

Bungie explained how the 2024 Dawning bake-off would work in a This Week in Destiny communication a few days before the event started. The team explained that the three Emblem rewards would be extremely rare when the event started, but as the community engaged with the bake-off, chances of earning the limited flair would increase. Accompanying this explanation, Bungie shared a schedule detailing which NPCs would be featured during each week the Dawning ran for.

“During the Dawning, baking a certain set of cookies starting on a given week will give you progress towards the community-wide goal: a significant drop-rate increase for all three emblems,” Bungie noted. “If we all bake enough of them, we will sooner than later reach the threshold, significantly increase our drop-rate chances, and earn the emblems. All three drop on every week of the event, so don’t worry if you are out during one of them.”

In practice, however, it doesn’t seem like the bake-off worked as intended. There are countless examples of players commenting about the iffy drop rates online, with one player even noting that they’d opened something like 130 A Gift in Return packages before earning a single limited Emblem. Even odder are examples of players who quickly and easily earned all three of the Emblems within their first few packages early in the event, when the rewards were supposedly the rarest.

From Christmas to Krampus

Of course, the bake-off and progress toward better Emblem drop rates were contingent upon players participating in the event, baking treats, and delivering them to the highlighted NPCs on any given week. It’s certainly possible that player progress simply wasn’t enough over the three-week event, but player engagement is no secret to Bungie, and it wouldn’t make sense to set a participation goal too lofty for the existing player base. Couple that with the accounts from players who earned their Emblems bizarrely fast, and it seems more likely that another bug (or RNG issue) affected the Emblem drop rate or the bake-off interaction bonus.

Making the whole situation all the more egregious is the process players go through to earn a single A Gift in Return and a chance at what seems like an unreliable system. The A Gift in Return item is earned from NPCs after giving them a treat. The only thing is, the A Gift in Return is only one potential reward and it’s by no means the most common. Guardians are much more likely to earn some Glimmer or a random throwaway weapon. After turning a couple dozen cookies into three or four A Gift in Return parcels, it can be frustrating to have all that work amount to a handful of Enhancement Cores. It’s even more annoying when you realize those same A Gift in Return packages can be spent on guaranteed Dawning weapons from Eva, which also have a chance to reward Dawning Mementos.

Personally, I was able to earn two out of the three rare Emblems within my first five A Gift in Return packages on the first day of the Dawning. From there, I could not earn the third throughout the rest of the event, even with near-daily participation — and I must have opened somewhere between 10-15 A Gift in Return parcels in the last three days of the event alone.

Between some early birds getting the paid Event Card for free, all of the other bugs, and potentially even the bake-off Emblems, 2024’s Dawning has not left the community in a particularly jolly sentiment. Hopefully, Bungie can reignite passion and earn back player trust in the new year, but 2024 ended with more of a holi-don’t than a holiday for Guardians.