I like crafting. In a game about builds with weapon perks, armor stats being purely rng, it sort of made builds a bit more reachable. I’ve grinded my -blam!- off destiny 1 and some of destiny 2. The weapons I wanted barely dropped in d1 and the rolls I wanted never came close. So I look at that as a waste of time. Destiny 2 I grinded for mediocre guns that weren’t worth the grind, redrix broadsword. Drop rates are abysmal combined with activities that can’t keep your interest long enough to keep grinding. How long should someone grind for a weapon roll? Weeks? Months? Years? The grind draws a fine line between forever and never.

Can’t say I understand catering almost exclusively to the portion of the player base whose mentality seems to be “I stop playing when I get what I want.”

Crafting is only a way to address the symptom of too many bad perks and perk combos. To much bad RNG because there are way to many possible drops for any given weapon. Engagement has not been on their radar for a long while. They don't care. They lost too many players during into the light. If they cared they would have done something to fix it by now.

They don't care. They haven't nor will they ever listen to the.community..

yes they are. trials weekend with new weapon and it drops to place 40 on steam with 30k peak from 70k+ LMAO

Crafting is just a small, small portion of the low player count. This game has a lot bigger issues.

The most likely answer is the simplest: the presence of seasonal weapon crafting did not have a significant push or pull. Some players will enjoy the increased grind and others won’t but the majority will be indifferent: most players have dealt with both systems and stuck through the game this long regardless of the presence of crafting. Crafting is likely so far down the list of major impacts to the game’s players they likely don’t feel anything. If it were so significant, they would have quickly backpedaled. I’d put much of the decrease of the playerbase on three core reasons: -Lack of a good onboarding/new player experience (no new players to replace the players leaving after TFS’s satisfying conclusion) -Narrative/thematic aimlessness after the Witness’s defeat -Lack of drastic system innovations This is why people say they’d rather a Destiny 3, knowingly or not. A Destiny 3 would definitionally fix all of these issues; even if it doesn’t execute them well, this would be the bare minimum expectation for a new title. The amount of people who say they’d come back for a “Destiny 3” is significantly more than those who would for “seasonal crafting’s return,” although admittedly this is completely anecdotal.

All I can say is that Revenant saw the lowest play time from me since Worthy or even Drifter. The story of Heresy and Nether kept me a little longer but not by much. Most engaging thing for me since Echoes is going for raid red borders and helping other people go for their raid red borders. Drops are not suddenly exciting again “because RNG.” On demand weapon experimentation is gone now and so replaying the same activity without that and with no meaningful agency or bad luck protection only goes but so far. We had it for three years and to see it needlessly removed when we could have just had it both ways is incredibly disappointing and has soured my view of Bungie and the community. The tiered system doesn’t do much for me because double garbage perks is still garbage. Adept garbage is still garbage. When this system is fully integrated it’ll just mean the highest tier is what people want and the lower tiers will be auto dismantled. You can’t escape weapons being auto dismantled at some point. May as well let people get and have fun with what they want through a reasonable amount of time and effort. Meaningful agency and bad luck protection is how you do that. Crafting was both of those. It only needed balancing. Not removed.

Nothing to do with crafting. Christ , I’ve any number of weopons as good as any other. The difference between stuff isn’t worth drooling over. Sure you get the odd one or two that seem a little better but they’ll get nerfed eventually. I’ve stopped doing raids/dungeons because there’s always a weapon just as good as those being offered.