btw, what system you play on?

I'm not sure you can make this a story driven game though. Your character is what you make them and they have no back story, let alone a name. How can you get behind a character if its basically a blank slate sent on a mission, which happens to be the same mission as millions of other travelers? The story is a large group of Guardians (or mercenaries, really) are teaming up and attempting to save the Traveler. On its most basic level, its a rebellion involving participants with no identity. Hard to build a story around that.

Ah, but this is the case in every video game. You are asked to do the tasks that everyone else is doing, and if you don't immerse yourself in the game then you say "but I am only one of millions doing the same thing." And yet, you are the featured character in every cutscene. Even if you are in a group, you are alone when you talk to the Queen or the Mysterious Exo. So even if there are other Guardians out there, from your own perspective, you are special. It is you who is the key to fighting the darkness, and the story mode would reinforce this illusion. Consider; You paly out the first arc on Earth and after you complete the last mission you have a cutscene where the Speaker talks to you. You haven't achieved greatness yet, but the Speaker implies that he senses something within you. Now you move on to the Moon. Again you play through the missions, and at the end another cutscene has you interact with the Speaker. Other Guardians are going to Venus on their own missions, yet it is you that he entrusts with finding out the mystery of this stranger from the wild. You don't need to identify your character by name, for you know who you are. The Speaker doesn't (and shouldn't) identify you by name, for in doing so he breaks your sense of immersion. And yet, after each milestone event, it is reinforced that it is you who stands out. Among all of the other guardians, it is your legend that is beginning, and having short, seminal moments with the Speaker would reinforce this. It doesn't matter that every other player is seeing the exact same story, for you don't experience those scenes from their perspective, but instead only from you own. Additionally, you are never introduced to your class trainer. Why? Why not have a short intro scene to play out when you meet them? You got a cutscene when you got your first ship. Isn't your sense of class identity just as important? Why not have a scene where the Cryptarch wants to speak with you during your time on Venus? Isn't Earth's history important enough to warrant his interest? All of these things could have been added into the game to increase the depth of the story. Maybe they aren't all good, and maybe people wouldn't like them, but at least they are attempts to get a bit more involvement in the story, and if I can come up with this in the span of 10 minutes you can bet a real, professional game's writer can come up with more given at least a few days or more.

I agree wholeheartedly that this is a PvP game masquerading as a PvE game with PvP on the side. I, too, wish for the success of the game; however, feel that if they don't do something to make PvE more rewarding then PvE players will simply move on. As it stands, you're wasting your time in the PvE content in this game, because as you pointed out you can earn rewards in PvP at 3 times the rate or better; and you are rewarded for success [i]or[/i] failure [i]and[/i] the many extra PvP vendors offer many more options for gear stats, weapon attributes and appearances. This is in stark contrast to strikes where if your group can't finish you go unrewarded on top of them being far more time consuming. Exotics being gated behind PvP tasks that may prove at the very least daunting and in some cases impossible for PvE players is one of the most ill-conceived design decisions I've seen in 20 years of gaming, too.

In all fairness to Bungie, there is a degree of reward for playing PvE that PvP does not match well, and this is engram and gear drops. In a PvP match, the best you will get for a 10 minute play is 2 rewards, and often a PvP player will not even get that. A PvE player, however, will usually get multiple gear and engram drops. Unfortunately in both of these cases RNG plays an overwhelming basis, so it is impossible to quantify how this benefits one way or the other. Gear which drops is capped at level 20, so most weapon/armor drops are only good for dismantling, and engrams are most likely going to be of the same level, making them also of strictly limited use. I prefer to work with predictable numbers, so I tend to ignore this aspect of PvP/PvE play, however one should keep in mind that this is also an aspect of the game. As pointed out, however, the major reward is given to a PvP player regardless of success or failure. Now, I'm not advocating giving out rewards for failing a strike (that would be silly), and if there was no reward or a weaker reward for PvP then there would be few people who wished to play in PvP, which would hurt Bungie's main focus of the game. If PvE felt more rewarding this aspect of the situation would be easily ignored by most, if not all PvE players. Given the current situation, however, it becomes one more issue of imbalance that can add to the general level of frustration.

But PvE players have the options, if avoiding PvP at all, is to buy the Gear they want and leveling them. Given that Rares and Legendary gear required materials usually found during patrols, the PvE players can do all of this without ever playing PvP, but PvP players have to play PvE at some point to level their gear. It also seems like all the gear, no matter the vendor is all the same for the most part. So while drops are nice, it makes more sense from Bungie's standpoint to make the better gear available mainly through purchases that require the user to play more.