Sup Bungie, You know, looking at old quotes, at design documentaries, at -blam!-ing everything that existed about this game prior to launch, I can not shake the feeling that I keep playing this because I wish I was playing that. I bought into the Destiny "dream". A Halo, but persistent, and bigger, much bigger. With gear, and classes and specializations. I bought into the "epic" and into "becoming legend". And I am not going to lie, as much as I might complain about what's wrong here, I do not hate this game. -blam!-, I have Bayonetta 2 in its wrapper and a huge backlog, and yet, I keep playing your game. And I do it mostly because it reminds me of the things I liked about you, and about your games. And it made a great first impression, too. There are puddles of Tang and things are colorful, skyboxes are gorgeous, art and modelling are top notch. I can say there are few things that come close. Your world is not brown. Its not Black, or dark green. For all the gloom of the darkness, your world is gloriously colorful. Full of life and promise. -blam!-, just today, doing a mission, I wandered into an area of Venus that is not used for anything. And probably will never be. In it, there is a pillar and some very interesting architecture that, having seen the rest of the game, exists nowhere else. Just like that cave in the coast in Russia. Or all the nooks and crannies in Mars and the moon. And I keep hoping to find something, for something to happen. To find some plot, some fun, some vehicles, some interesting weapons. My whole journey through your game my breath was held for the moment I'd hit the content we both know you can do, and which you have done in the past. "-blam!-, I can't wait till we ride those tanks", I told my brother in one of our first sessions after tackling the Devil's Lair strike at level 7 or so, picking at the health of the Devil Walker with our rifles. We didn't even have heavy weapons yet. But we wanted to explore and see your world and checking the strike seemed more interesting than carrying on, and -blam!-, it took a while but we killed that tank and that black ball. And we soldiered on. We soldiered on until we found ourselves looking at each other with incredulity after the Black Garden mission. Surely something was wrong. No way the game is done. What about Rasputin? And about the hive, and the moon, and the shards? What about Venus? and about the Reef? We thought that, like in many other games, something would change in the post game and we'd find some answers, plot, a story, -blam!-, anything. Your game doesn't start until 20 and we were 18 or so. So we made 20. We saw your real game: Endless -blam!-ing grind for gear that never drops. 300 patrols or 30 repetitive bounties to be able to buy gear that might let us get close to the one Raid you got. Then endless hours spinning in circles to get the materials to upgrade them. And endlessly repeating the same missions which play in much the same ways to get the shards and coins for them. Is this the real game? The game that starts at 20? -blam!-ing seriously? From the guys that gave us ice levels where we'd skate around with our warthogs playing born to be wild, while our little random marine bros filled any spare slots? From the guys that crafted an entire enemy faction with its own weapons and vehicles you could use? -blam!-, remember the Banshees? I remember. What about the Tank level? What about running on warthogs while the Halo falls apart? What about the epicness, the point, the fleshed distinctive factions, the localized damage (remember blowing up chunks of hive in Halo? Pilgrims pride remembers), the interesting weapons, the characters, the sense of exploration, the variety, and so on? Remember back when you blew our mind with that night vision level? What about how you gave us marine bros who'd act like we were Gods and who'd we'd go out of our way to save? Wanna know something funny? We reloaded our saves and repeated every mission until not a single marine died. We felt bad when the array blew up, and with that them. But -blam!-, that world felt so alive. Where are the other guardians? Where is the mission variety? Why do I seldom feel more alone than when playing your online persistent game? Why does it feel like playing by myself, even though there is people all around. Why do we need to go to random websites to make groups, to have a guild, to see what little lore you saw fit to put in there, etc? You said the game started at 20. So where is it? I could tell you of how we used to joke that the ability to talk with our team in our crucible was in DLC. I could tell you of how we stood in front of a cave reloading once in a while. I could tell you of hours spent running in circles looking for shiny green lights. I could tell you of getting shards after a nightfall, and getting chatterwhite after chatterwhite. But I think you know. And I think these days, you laugh anyways. And I am not going to lie, I am disappointed. Your however many year project which would be the end all be all of all projects is nothing but a random reinforcement schedule Skinner box where we peck for hours hoping for a reward which might, or might not ever come. And its not that you don't have it in you anymore. -blam!-, the raid is great. Roles are great. Strategy is great. You did not lie when you said it would be taxing and fun, and difficult. And I can't understand why the rest of the game is not like that. Why every mission consists of waiting on dinklebot to open doors. Why there is little weapon variety, and vehicles are pretty much only a memory. Why there is no story, or plot, or why you didn't even see fit to name your characters. But I do have a problem with the way you are doing things. I have a problem with you stating you'll fix the reasons we stood in front of a cave in the first place while really changing nothing much. And with you replacing strategy and tactics in the Raid with a RNG because -blam!- it, we need more of those. I have a problem with there being no rewards, or sense of advancement, or anything to see, or do, or explore. I have a problem with you treating us like idiots, calling things "bugs" when its clear they were not, calling things "new content" and "exciting events" when you are just giving us the same shit in exactly the same way. Bungie? You are -blam!-ing up. Most of your game is not fun. Its tedious. We get it, you didn't want us to stand in front of a cave firing mindlessly. How the -blam!- are you cool with us running in circles for hours ocassionally pressing X to harvest this or that or open chests in a ghost town where its nigh impossible to distinguish real people from what might as well be bots in any other game. How the -blam!- are you cool with replacing tactics with RNG? How the -blam!- are you cool with prolonging things not with difficulty and interesting gameplay, but with endless tedium? How the -blam!- are you cool with booting people to a 2 minute or so loading screen when they fail a nightfall, which basically consists of going from safe spot to safe spot? And when the -blam!- did you decide that designing content where you stand in a room or corner taking potshots every 10 seconds or so for 10 minutes was hard? Or fun? Remember Halo, and 2, and 3, and Reach? Those were great -blam!-ing games. There was no RNG, and they lived for a long, long time. -blam!-, they are being released again. And they will be great. Bungie? You don't need to toss all this random shit in the pie. You don't need to artificially gate what little content you have. You don't need to make everything so -blam!-ing tedious. You knew this. You know this. The legacy of Halo and Marathon and Myth continues not because it took hours of running in circles to experience the interesting parts. But because the games were fun. And interesting. And hard. You need a lot more of that. And a lot less of /b/. You like saying you listen. So do. People can, and will get tired of this bullshit. You need but look at all the franchises that have fallen off the side never to be seen again. You can do better than that. You can do better than this. So do. Quit with all the random bullshit. Throw some interesting triggers in all those caves and locations where nothing happens. Give us events with rewards and meaning and variety. And stop treating us like idiots while at it. Give us a lot more Vault. And a lot less "too busy to tell us why you are too busy to tell us." You want this to last ten years. So do we. Kind regards, A long time fan.

"...the most challenging encounter we've ever created." "This is an activity that was designed to be undertaken by a hardcore team that is ready and willing to adapt and improvise to changing battle conditions" If this is your intention with the raid, then I would agree that adding the randomized element helps you accomplish the goal. However, by making this change, I think Bungie has detracted from the overall Destiny experience in three key ways. 1. To be prepared for Atheon, every member of the team now has to have a loadout that makes it possible to handle the Oracles when you get teleported. But thousands of players have carefully crafted a loadout that does not allow for this, and now they have to go back to square one finding and grinding on weapons that they otherwise would have gotten started on much sooner. This is frustrating and annoying, not improving the experience in any positive way. 2. MORE IMPORTANTLY, you have to complete this raid many times in order to get the gear to ascend to level 30. Until now, players without the time and resources to form and train in a dedicated could do this thanks to reddit, destinylfg, destiny tracker, etc. Now a ton of these players, myself included, are potentially going to be left in the cold thanks to this patch. With the path to Level 30 much further from their grasp, many players may stop playing Destiny earlier. Is that what Bungie wants? 3. Thanks to the raid, an amazing movement happened in the Destiny community: raid sherpas. Generous people willing to donate their time to educating beginners in how to get through the raid. This is almost magical in the way in brings together disparate gamers in a positive, uplifting way. With this change, it will be much harder to Sherpa, and be Sherpa'd, and you are robbing the community of an incredibly positive experience in favor exclusivity and elitism.

My feedback only reflects a myself and a few friends of mine. Most of us are glad that Atheon cannot be pushed off merely because it took us longer than doing it properly. Also, if anyone had to Raid outside our normal group, we would get annoyed at people that had no clue how to do it any other way. That is neither Bungie or Deej's fault. If anything they made this better. The random teleporting thing makes me laugh since Deej said in a previous update that the furthest 3 people would be teleported was not originally intended by design. They intended it to be random. If everyone was running around trying to kill supplicants and put mediocre damage on the boss then without paying attention it would feel random. The next time people run raid, those who have never used the relic should pick it up and get used to it. The majority of players are frustrated with the random loot table and how everything is on said table. I've had great luck (Vex and helmet) bad luck (Chatterwhite and the Ship) and weird luck (Found verdict after Oracles and again after templar, same run making it my 4th and 5th time earning that same shotgun, same stats, same perks exactly equal) I believe most people want a guaranteed chance for a piece of armor since, as of 10/28, it is the only way to 30. I doubt this will be done and frankly, most of us won't care since the rest of the game is fun anyways. I may be one of the few but I do believe Deej is doing his job because otherwise he probably wouldn't have his job. Also, they will never release a transcript or video of a Developer meeting, the same way your favorite TV show won't release their entire season's story arc before the second episode airs. The majority of players do not know the nature of coding or how games work (myself included) and do not understand how long an update takes to create -> debug -> test -> debug again -> test -> release. Not to mention how many departments that takes to do an update, or how a small piece of coding could affect some other seemingly unrelated department and that also needs to be debugged. Maybe a bit of a rant but there are plenty of players, like me, who love this game, can't wait for updates, patches, expansions and just around anything else to do with Destiny. Cows of Chaos Drty Herd

Necrobump this for absolutely no reason

We are all lost in time ...

"The raid is never supposed to be easy" lol ok.

All hail atheon

"While we've been working on some of the other things for which you've been asking (i.e. better exotics..." But where are they now? Thanks for bumping. Let this quote flow through the forums!

Bump :P

[quote]This is an activity that was designed to be undertaken by a hardcore team that is ready and willing to adapt and improvise to changing battle conditions.[/quote] I think this is where you're losing folks, DeeJ. It may have been [i]intended[/i] to be that, but it [i]wasn't[/i] designed to be that. It was [b]poorly [/b]designed, and as a result it was easy. You write your posts as though the relationship between you and the dev team is adversarial, as though you're our advocate, but then you let them shape the conversation. People notice, and they draw conclusions from it. Bottom line, aspiration has to meet reality before they can claim "we designed it to be X". If the design team says it's supposed to be hard, but for some reason it isn't hard, that's their fault. It's a direct result of their design and their quality assurance procedures, not an act of god or a natural disaster. They know how they designed it. If they're the ones testing it, or giving any information about it to the testers, then there's confirmation bias involved. They will be leading themselves, or others, to approach it in an artificially difficult manner. The community found holes in the design that made the aspirational intent ring hollow. They showed the designers that their approach to constructing a challenge was insufficiently creative, and had been tested with artificial difficulty applied due via player bias or sloppiness. Bumpers and teleportation aside, those sniper perches and the kill-volume response to them were damning. The latest bunch of changes, with no mention at all of fundamentally broken mechanics that people have been begging for changes to, is just another poke in the eye for a lot of your players who already have pretty bruised sockets. [i]"Here is a hard puzzle, figure it out." "We figured out that it isn't hard, and there's a bunch of broken bits." "No, it's hard because it's the end of the game. It has to be hard. You're just doing it wrong." "But..." "You want to complain? I'll give you something to complain about!" [b]*dev changes things*[/b] "Fine, now it's hard, just like we designed it to be." "That doesn't make any sense! And it's still broken!" [b]*dev changes more things*[/b] "Hard. It's HARD. We say so. Do it in a way that feels hard way or we'll kill you! And stop saying it isn't hard! We should know, we designed it to be hard." "-blam!-, FINE! But we're still going to skip everything before the boss fight." "Well yeah, that's cool, we designed that part to be easy. Just pretend that it's still hard, okay? It's important." "If we go along with that crap will you fix the broken stuff?" "Soon we'll let you have an extra bounty slots." "That's pretty clever, actuall...w-wait..what?" "And voice chat for strikes!" "Well yeah that'd be sweet, but..you know what...-blam!- it. Just forget we asked about the raid."[/i] [b]Eventually, people are going to stop asking.[/b] [spoiler]PS. We appreciate the heads up we got on the future plans, and the extra bounty slots are a good idea for many reasons, but throwing them in at the end of this particular set of patch notes was poorly thought out. Good news first next time, and treat it with as much attention to detail as the bad news.[/spoiler]

I've never commented on a game because I think it's bad form to complain when I'm mostly enjoying a game. That being said, it feels incredibly disingenuous to say that the furthest 3 being teleported was a bug. It honestly feels like you guys just got mad that people found a way to circumvent your hardest content and are slapping a quick fix on it. The reason why we aren't giving you the benefit of the doubt as if you had intended this the whole time? It's because you are dishonest with your playerbase. For example, instead of saying "People were abusing the checkpoint system to farm the majors in the Shrine of Oryx mission so we made those into normal mobs" you said "Decreased difficulty by reducing majors to normal mobs." If your strategy is to reframe every issue so there is zero admission that you messed up, that's fine but just expect to lose the trust and respect of your loyal players. I personally could care less about the teleport thing, it's just another mechanic to overcome. But frankly you have shown a track record of insulting the intelligence of your players. It's quite transparent to most people, but especially for those of us who work in development and understand how QA works. I think the loot is fine and have no problem with repeatedly running the raid every week in hopes of getting the stuff I'm missing. However, be consistent with it. You claim to want to build a game that involves no grinding - presumably this is why the loot cave was removed. However, you're completely OK with people spending hours running in circles looking for chests to collect materials. It feels dishonest at worst and insulting to our intelligence at best. You've somehow stumbled into a way to alienate both your most passionate players (by making the top tier rewards lackluster and not even visually superior) and casual players (by making the top content unnecessarily random). You've also implemented bizarre mechanics like automatically scaling damage. A level 30 titan takes 2 melee attacks to kill a level 2 Vandal. A level 2 titan takes 2 melee attacks to kill a level 2 Vandal. There is zero point in having the best gear and equipment in every part of the game except nightfall, weekly, and raid. This will get buried with the rest of the responses but maybe someone will read this and realize that it's better to be honest and consistent with your players rather than deceptive and patch trigger happy.

This is a bad move from the developers, changing the rules after they have been set because it did not suit their views. If this patch was already part of the game at the start, no problem, but to make such changes affecting gameplay to please the developers is not putting priorities straight.