People often ask me what the end game to destiny is like. The best way I could describe it is as follows. Get home from work Notice a few friends online, its a fresh week, raids have been reset Send a few messages, interest in raid is ready. Start PS4 party chat. Fireteam has 4 people in it. Other members are looking up lfg and sending messages to find the other 2 slots. Though we can 4 man a lot of the first parts. <20 minutes go by> Finally all 6 people are found and willing to do the raid. Player A joins the chat, claims they have to switch characters. Player B joins the chat. NAT issues. 2-3 people start asking if they can hear each other. Party is disbanded and we go to game chat. The person switching characters then has to be messaged and friended or re-invited. <10 minutes go by> PlayerA rejoins. Player C who was waiting on PlayerA and PlayerB realizes he needs to go to tower to get heavy synth. Fireteam leader loads into tower. Notice: At this point in time random members are at all kinds of various vendors, browsing bounties and shit. Notice 2: Other players are filled on vault space so they have to relog to various characters to also juggle items to make enough room sp they can grab the weapons they want. PlayerD takes this opportunity to talk about different weapon loud outs and claims the gun he WANTS to bring is on another character despite having enough time to do it. PlayerD leaves fire team. <15 minutes later> All players are ready. All players have their alts, or the characters they actually want, and the weapons, and the synths. At this point in time an hour of the night has most likely passed. Also note, some of the players don't know if the character they are on has already done it, and will likely switch at the first chest. This is really a toss up. <RAID STARTS> Some random player dies, but the check point is done regardless. The random player will 'seed' the death by complaining about lag and things not being exactly where they were last time they did the raid. Also note at this point: 3 equally viable strategies are discussed ad naseum before the raid leader gives up and forces everyone to choose one. This normally causes a little grumbling but often fades when he encounter is won. <1st check point done, 15 minutes later> A lot of bitching about only getting shards. Some chat about weapons people currently got, often bragging. <Heading to 2nd checkpoint> The random lagger complains so much, we often orbit and re-enter the raid. Somehow this magically 'baptizes' the play style of the random player and all is good again. Complaints about glitches when clearly there are no glitches. <15 minutes later past 2nd checkpoint> One player randomly leaves without saying why. <5 minutes go by> We invite a new 6th person. More discussion about how new 6th person strategy is the smoothest and easiest to do. <5 minutes go by> Player comes back claiming disconnected. Awkward situation where one player has to now volunteer to leave or be kicked. New 6th person leaves. Old 6th person comes back. Raid continues. Next checkpoint. Some players ask if they can switch characters. Sometimes players will ask if they can switch characters just to have a check point for alt cheesing purposes. Some of these players have to go to tower since their alt is the same class, and drop off all their gear. In order to do this they need to make vault space first. <15 minutes go by> Raid continues. The actual raiding time has been minimal, but despite this a lot of time has gone by. Someone has to leave. Another search for the 6th man continues while we decide to 5 man the next part. We come close to 5 manning it, but are always 5-10% away. Various pitches and cheeses are tossed about to attempt the 5man. Usually fails, sometimes succeeds. In the end, another person is invited up and joins. This person has their stuff together since we mentioned it was a later check point. So there is no down time. We have talked about strategies so much that we forgot there was a new person with us. We wipe once. Sometimes not. Somehow the wipe causes a complete re-evalution of all the strategies. <15 minutes go by> We clear the next check point. Onto raid boss. People are going to bathroom, ark, smoke breaks, etc... <10 minutes go by> People are claiming they are out of ammo even though we spent almost 20 minutes at the tower prior to starting. We struggle due to the lack of proper raid syth inventory. <10 minutes go by> We beat the boss. Everyone talks about how they already have the drop they want and complains that all they want is the Gjallahorn. They only want this weapon because Bungie has made it so critical of an item to have when doing raid content at the higher end of the raid curve. Others bitch about how they have over 200+ shards in the vault. I now have to debate wether this raid legendary is worth keeping as I only have about 2-3 more slots left in the vault. Usually I dismantle within the last month as HoW would likely put some of the raid weapons to rest. That and the weapons are really only used in nightfalls since all the raids have the exact same weapon load out: Primary: Weapon of choice. Secondary: Icebreaker or black hammer Heavy: Hunger or Gjallahorn All other weapons are for collections only or crucible.