A bit of backstory: I've been playing emotional tug-of-war with this title for some time now. Pre-open beta, I was against this game. The hype-train was on a fast-track to destroy this game's image, and closer to the end of all of it, it was looking more and more like another Halo from gameplay videos. While I loved Halo CE through Halo 3, this was still upsetting because Bungie initially claimed they wanted to break away from the Halo franchise. And then the open beta came, and while tons of concepts within Destiny scream Halo from the top of their lungs, it doesn't feel like Halo. This is a good thing to me. I loved the beta and leveled all 3 classes up into the 2nd row, past 8 on the talent / ability grid. I had avoided the hype-train and my faith was restored. Upon release, however, I had quickly come to realize that the full title felt hollow. They had removed our beta characters which is understandable but damnable at the same time. Only giving beta players an emblem which you wouldn't want to use anyway is rough. Playing the beta allowed you to take a huge bite out of this games expectations and when the game initially launched, you come to discover that the huge bite you already took is roughly half of the full meal. Not the worst thing ever, but it stung a bit. Continuing on through Mars and Venus, however, and you come to realize that every different mob variable feels like a reskinned version of the last. The lack of mechanic diversity makes even the different planets feel rather boring and predictable after playing through a few times, and every strike currently in the game feels about the same. You can bump up the difficulty for additional challenges but the rewards of drops feel stagnant as if it doesn't matter if you play 26's or 24's. Another last note is that mechanically, this game is quite phenomenal. There are a few elements I disagree with but the gameplay and engagements feel smoother than Bungie has ever made them before. This is a great start. But I digress. There are three main problems that affect the game too much to ignore. If they aren't fixed soon, I'm sure many will abandon Destiny and come back months later hoping the same problems are fixed. 1: The drop tables are inconsistent and tough to cope with. In PvE, once past 23, the grind is a little too real. You can spend roughly 3 hours running missions, patrols, or strikes, and you're lucky if you see a rare gear drop better than one you already have. You're getting way too many guns and engrams instead. At this point I could have filled my whole stash up with repeats of the same weapons that I'm dismantling. I'm already personally at rank 4 cryptarch and am still getting 50% green gear out of my blue engrams which is also disappointing. The fix would be to increase the data values across the board because even though players realistically are sloooowly crawling their way up, it never feels like it. Make the drop rates better for better gear and make the level caps a little higher and this problem is solved because seeing a number higher than the one you already have is what players want. They don't want to see a hundred pieces of gear with one light while they have a piece of gear of two. These small numbers make the game feel like you aren't even doing anything right when you're grinding, so why even play PvE? Once bored of the grind fest, let's try PvP for a bit. 2. PvP doesn't feel like it matters. Not at all. You get (seemingly) better gear drops the worse you do. If you win, you get rep and marks. If you lose? You get rep and marks. The gameplay itself is cool, but it's hard to bring yourself to play for long when you don't feel like you're getting anything out of a good performance. Especially when the community has already figured out that you get better drops than PvE if you just leave your player in the crucible and don't touch the controller. These people are the ones getting the drops you want and are also ruining the gameplay experience for the rest of you by throwing the game. This NEEDS to be fixed. Crucible is a wonderful player versus player experience but it's ruined by giving players a lack of accomplishment. It just doesn't feel worth the time of day for this reason alone. But let's say we're now done trying to get better gear with RNG / luck and instead focus our efforts on legendary vendors with marks and rep. Let's go try that. 3. 100 marks per week cap. Let me put this into perspective: a full set of BASIC vendor gear from your trainer costs about 250 marks. This takes roughly 2.3 weeks to collect the marks alone because of the cap. Even if you were to invest that time to get the marks with the cap in place, by the time those two weeks are up, that set of gear you have will be outdated. That's sad and should be gutted as soon as possible. All in all, I guess the tl; dr would be that this game is fun to play from a mechanic programming standpoint but when your only hope to play new content (and you're already bored of the old content because of the lack of variety and awards) is to get better gear, the reasons above make that quest one that is taxing on a player's patience and the game feels like everywhere you turn you're getting screwed with the world's largest peen. I like this game a lot but I can only hope that one day I won't have to bring anal lube when I want to play it.