Hello Bungie, Sols here. We need to talk. So throughout the evening I've thought about how I wanted to broach this topic.[url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/151218420/0/0] I started getting messages about it as I was making my last post [/url]and quite honestly I was hoping for one week that maybe we didn't have to come to this over a Fluffdate. C'est la vie I guess. So I thought about what is it that I want to try to convey to you. Is it anger? Indignation? Mistrust? Maybe it's all of that and more, but more than anything it's sadness and disappointment. [quote]Character • Character Level Cap for all players will be raised to 34 • Level Cap for The Taken King will be 40[/quote] [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/151225298/0/0]This may or may not be something for people to be pissed off about[/url]. The fact that we don't know exactly what it means is exactly what is wrong with your attempts to "communicate" with us. Just like [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/150851385/0/0]Luke's stupid vague remark about having to beat Oryx to play endgame[/url], this is just another stupid comment that- if written, needed to have clarification as to exactly what it was stating. The consensus from posts I've seen are people taking this to mean that anyone who doesn't buy TTK will be capped at 34 and therefore unable to run ANY endgame content. I've been asked in messages if I thought you'd actually stoop this low and I believe you very well could. What this could also mean is that on the 8th all Light Levels will go away and we will all have actual levels beyond 20 which cap at 34 and then once TTK drops, the new level cap will be 40. The problem is that this shouldn't be hard for you to communicate. I would guess that is more likely what you mean, but your choice of words is astonishingly bad and for someone whose job it is to be Bungie's voice for the community, that is simply unacceptable. In fact this entire year of communication has been unacceptable. The forums have been populated since launch by Guardians eager to be a part of this world and this community and pretty much every legitimate question, concern or debate that has arisen on here over the last year have gone ignored. For crying out loud, the Weekly Updates have been called Fluffdates since at least January and yet the joke doesn't end, it just keeps on giving ever so painfully. [quote]Soon.[/quote] Just like everyone is sick of "soon". It's not funny, it's not clever and it's not ironic. So communication is a huge problem. The Twitch streams, while a really neat concept with community personalities guesting largely fell flat and left more questions than answers. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I've tried telling you for awhile now that you don't sell content by telling people what they're losing or not getting. [quote]Finding a Fireteam will be part of the challenge[/quote] [quote]There won't be a raid, it will come later.[/quote] [quote]Some year one exotics will ascend[/quote] That's not really stuff you want to include in freaking streams set up to PROMOTE NEW CONTENT. I get that we'll want to know that, but that's kinda what the weekly updates and forums should be for and afterwards when you piss everyone off sufficiently, we should be able to comment on the posts and tell you 10000 times how freaking wrong you are. But you disable comments on Bungie posts because if there aren't any 10000 comments saying how wrong you are, then you must be right, right? If you are going to post on the forums, stand behind what you write. Now back to the other possible meaning of your comment, which could in fact be that anyone who doesn't purchase TTK will not be able to reach level 40. Some think it's farfetched, but then no one expected that 3 months into the game (hell, some had owned it a week) that game modes would be locked out unless we bought dlc. This is another BIG problem. DLC should not routinely remove content; it should be adding it and you shouldn't EVER have to sell dlc by withholding game modes. If your dlc is as good as you think it is and you truly believe it is worth what you are asking for it, then it should sell itself. We should goddamn straight be throwing money at our screens because the game should be that kick-ass. When you lockout content in TDB and now in HoW, make sure that either the NF or weekly is locked out every week, you're telling the people that have supported you that you could give two fracks about them if they don't pay up. You’re also sending a pretty powerful message on how you really feel about the value of your product and it is not a very flattering picture you're painting. You want to know how you get people to love your game and WANT to spend more money on it? Give them more. More things to do. More places to see. More battles to fight. More secrets to discover. More people to meet. I've stated before, if you'd just let everyone still run the NF and the weekly, but you'd given additional content (a second NF, PvE events like the Queen's Wrath Event, etc) that was only available to DLC owners, people would WANT to buy it to get the extra content. Again... I should want to buy your DLC to get MORE content, not to NOT LOSE game modes I already have. Your hype machine has indeed been in overdrive since E3, but we didn't have GI cover stories for the first Halo. There were no Twitch reveals. There weren't any weekly updates "holding our hands every step of the way to launch". Yet it was still so massively successful that here you are 14 years later talking to us about Destiny. How is that possible? Because the game sold itself. The content and the story stood on their own and they kicked down every goddam door in America and around the world and said "f Nintendo, f Sony, f school, f MTV, f your job, f your social life, I'm the biggest, baddest f’ing game to ever come down the pike. Now get your controller, tell mom to bug off and let's kick some alien ass." And for the next two years- “Sir, alien asses have been kicked, Sir.” So where is that Bungie? Destiny is not a bad game. In fact, Destiny is a big, bad mother in its own right. But instead of letting it kick down our doors, you're trying to sell it to us a piece at a time on the back pages. I get that Destiny is here to make you all money. I don't have a problem with that. There's a reason that some of us were more than willing to give Blizzard $15 a month for years to play WoW, because it delivered a world that we could go to get away from the bullsh*t that can be real life. We could socialize and gear up and explore a massive world together. Destiny could be that, but right now it's not and for you to throw up pay-walls every 3 months to go on is just low. You don't have the world WoW does, you have big round tunnels. Hopefully the Dreadnaught is more, but it doesn't excuse the planets. You don't have social interaction. If you had proximity chat and we could talk to people we met in the worlds and fighting public events together, it might justify the price of admission because BEING ABLE TO TALK TO PEOPLE IS FUN (yeah there are dirtbags, have a report and mute function. Not hard). You don’t have any in-game matchmaking options to easily play endgame content. There are a massive number of players that never experienced either raid so far, never played ToO or higher level PoE's. Some barely played Nightfalls because they couldn't solo them. For these players the only real endgame is Weekly Strikes, Strike playlists, NFs and Iron Banana. They paid for the full experience, but due to your jacked up "philosophy" they only experienced half the game. And now you want to take away that half unless they pay up??? Well, then try to make it worth their goddam while. If you want us to pay to keep these game modes, then give us matchmaking or LFG or some way in-game to play ALL THE CONTENT if you want us to pay for it. This bullcrap of we have to pay to proceed and then can't even play the sheet we bought without trolling websites is the most rigoddamndiculous thing I've ever seen. So there it is Bungie. That's where I'm at. I plan on getting TTK and I'm hoping beyond hope that when I'm writing the review, year 2 delivers in ways that year 1 never dreamed, but you need to be better. There have been many positive steps lately. Cozmo has been great for the community and most of the upcoming game changes are truly exciting and [b]you letting everyone play the new maps next week is how it should be done. That is letting your game sell itself[/b] and if it is sufficiently badass, you won't need pay-walls because we'll all be subbing up. - Sols out