[b]Today's Topic: Merciless Bounty and Strike Scoring[/b] In my personal opinion, keeping strike scoring in the game was a bad idea. I was one of the few people out there who actually runs strikes often. I enjoy strikes, and I enjoyed the Skeleton Key/3oC farm that we had before December. They went quickly, roughly 8-10 minutes average and I would get a key every 3-5 strikes. It was fun learning all the strikes front and back, knowing which enemies to kill quick and which ones could be skipped. [u]1. No Revives/No Help[/u] There is a huge increase in players not going to revive their teammates. Players know if their teammate is dead, then there is more ads for them to kill to try and finish the bounties for themselves. There are also the new wave of players who just go into the patrol area off the start and farm the ads that have nothing to do with the strike. They do not help progress the objevtive and they get spawned into the boss fight to still earn the same rewards. Why would someone farm ads in patrol? BOUNTIES. [u]2. Not enough enemies for the bounties[/u] It's simple, on a majority of strikes there just is not enough ads for 3 players to be trying to kill 9 enemies rapidly, each. The rainbow medal bounty was bad but this rampage medal bounty is infuriating. Like I mentioned above, some strikes won't even have 9 ads for you to kill at one moment. Take into consideration it AUTO MATCHMAKES YOU with 2 other players trying to get the same bounty done... You would need 28 enemies on the map for all the players to get ONE out of 6 medals they need to finish the bounty. That just doesn't happen, there isn't 28 ads to be killed rapidly. At most given ad spawn-ins, there is 9 enemies, with 3 people killing them. At that point its not PvE anymore, its PvP with PvE enemies. [u] 3. Fight with own team instead of work with. [/u] It is a toxic place to be now. It isn't about getting the strikes done anymore its about getting the bounties done. Even for players playing with friends, its extremely unenjoyable. You have to manage who is killing what ads, and say things like "dont kill that Dreg I need 2 more kills", its unenjoyable. Then you're doing 3 times as many strikes as you should need to because you're essentially going in with 2 friends so you can solo most of the strike and get a bounty done. It doesn't take rocket science to see that as a Solo player its hell. Getting auto matchmade with others trying to do the same thing, often just ends up full strikes of everyone getting 7-8 kill sprees and looking around the room to see no more ads and your teammates looking around doing the same. Which is why point number 1 is factual. If your teammate dies its before for yourself to let him wait out his timer and rez himself because thats 30 seconds that you might get to kill ads that he would have killed. Its toxic. I shouldn't run 3 strikes and look at my progress to see that I have 0 of the medals even though I only ran my primary and had by far the most kills on the team each time. There is no chance those teammates I got matched with even got close to a rampage medal. That cannot be enjoyable for them. They are looking at easily 10-15+ strikes just to maybe have gotten a couple rampage medals? The bounty has to have a higher reward if that is what Bungie's intentions were. No person(hypothetically) should run 15 strikes to finish a bounty that gives them the same Veil of the Dying Star that the bounty gave them the last two weeks. What happened to smart looting. I am not going to come here and just complain about the game without any solution, that is called complaining and I am going for constructive criticism. My solutions to this problem would be: 1. Remove strike scoring and bounties that go with them. (Keep Sunrise for Nightfall, with 30 minute timer) 2. Remove automatic matchmaking from Vanguard playlists. The bounties were a good idea but overall a miss because most of the time it turns teammates against each other instead of with each other. Being able to go into the strikes solo makes it more challenging and also makes the higher level bounties achievable in a realistic time/manner. I get that they were making an attempt to give PvE players a challenge, but it's the wrong kind of challenge. The reason us PvE players like PvE is the relaxing nature of it. It can get sweaty, but it gets sweaty WITH friends. PvP brings toxicity, its just a fact. Strikes were my place to get away the sweats and now I gotta compete with them in there too. Not that I can't compete with them but its more or less just everyone stopping everyone from progressing in bounties. Strike scoring would be more fun if the scores actually meant something. As of now, nobody cares about the strike scoring leaderboard. There is no reason to care about it and even if someone has a high score, nobody is going to care. Any Joe Blow can walk into the patrol area and shoot ads for 5 hours then go finish the strike to have like a million points. A solution? Make it so the only ads that can give you points are the ads that are actually part of the strike. Probably what they wanted to do but I assume it was a coding nightmare that they didn't have the manpower to deal with in the time frame they had. I don't mean to come here with negative vibes, I am just here writing this because I love Destiny and I am just a little tired of watching Bungie in some ways killing off their own player base with the decisions they make. In my opinion strikes should have been left alone. - Tocosamurii Edit: If you think being a troll is going to work you're very wrong. I put in time writing this with lots of thought, any comments that are trolly or don't contribute to the discussion are getting deleted and reported. We're all here because we love Destiny, think before you make that dumb trolly comment becauase you're part of the problem.