The first week of Destiny 2’s Iron Banner event hasn’t gone quite to plan in Season of the Wish, with the premiere of a new game mode—Tribute—met with a frosty reception from the playerbase. As a result, only a day after launch, Bungie is already pulling the mode out.
“Based on early player responses, we are replacing Iron Banner Tribute with Iron Banner Control for the rest of the week,” the Destiny 2 Team wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) on Dec. 6. “Iron Banner is intended to be a celebration of PvP and we want to make sure everyone is having a positive experience when playing it. Look for an improved Iron Banner Tribute experience when we bring it back in the future.”
The change went live today at 7pm CT, with the Destiny 2 developers specifically citing the number of matches finishing in a mercy or shutout as the key reason for the move. “We created Tribute as a spinoff of Supremacy with a twist on crest collection,” they wrote. “Feedback so far is clear that the new mechanic could use more time for tuning.”
While they plan to bring Tribute back one day, for now, the focus is on addressing issues related to its scoring and pacing to better curate a balanced match-to-match experience. As the announcement went on to describe, this includes “adjusting the score threshold for winning, the crest thresholds for triggering the Hunt phase, dunk times, and overall clarity of objectives.” Anyone who logged into Destiny 2 at reset and gave the mode a shot won’t be too surprised by this list of impending improvements—even just from the matches I played, defeats and victories came swiftly, with snowballs exacerbated by widespread confusion around the Hunt phase and the mechanics of banking Crests.
Destiny 2 has been experimenting a lot with its Iron Banner event in recent seasons, placing a large focus on introducing new modes to liven up an otherwise stale limited-time playlist. The results have been mixed thus far, with modes like Eruption receiving a much warmer welcome from PvP players than Fortress or Tribute. However, the criticisms around Tribute have been uniquely universal from the community, and its quick exit from the live game is proof enough that the negative sentiment was backed up by data on Bungie’s end too.
