Before the Destiny alpha I had zero people on my friends list that I could play with. I don't know a single person in my real life friends that even own a ps4. If I can figure out how to raid, knowing nobody, and having a job and family to juggle anyone that is serious about wanting to should be able to.

That's fantastic. Good for you. But your being able to do something doesn't give you a mandate to demand everybody else do the same thing. Insisting that players put a specific kind of effort into their games and then calling them selfish when they don't is not going to get anybody anywhere.

You're right, everyone just just be able to solo it, and Bungie should include God mode. Insisting people put effort into the challenges the game provides, how selfish of me. Maybe that's even asking too much of people, maybe Bungie should just mail everyone exotics through the post master.

Well, a system where the strike missions scale in difficulty depending on the number of players present DOES sound like a much better system than designing it just for a team of 6 to tackle. Granted, that would make the feat of completing such a mission solo all the more impressive. But, this is giving me bad memories of Halo 3: ODST's take on Firefight: no matchmaking, and the gametype is designed for four people to tackle at once. In that situation, if somebody had a bad connection, everybody had a laggy experience, or the player gets dropped, leaving the team at an unfair disadvantage with no possibility of being able to re-invite the lost player or recruit another player or know that the game will compensate in difficulty based on a lost player. I had an absolute blast with one 4-player game of firefight that lasted close to an hour straight, and late in the game, I was experiencing about 2-3 frames per second in some cases. It was a lot of fun, and I wanted to play again, but it was very difficult to get people together after that because with every day after the game's release, interest in ODST dropped. Now, nobody plays it, and unless you have at least three dedicated friends who are always up for playing that particular gametype on that particular game, that wonderful Firefight experience is unobtainable. What I'm hearing you say is the game offers this challenging experience for skilled players, and Bungie shouldn't muddy it down and cater to a casual audience of less skilled players. The problem with that line of thinking is that player skill and player social life are two very different things. You're not just advocating for a gametype that caters to skilled players, but skilled players who are also deeply socially connected with other players that share an interest in the same game. All of that can lead to a fantastic, co-operative gaming experience, but also one that depends on too many external factors to be maintained, and the whole system is likely to collapse in a few months when the next Call of Duty or whatever other big game comes out and nobody wants to play Destiny as often as they used to. [b]TL;DR:[/b] Don't advocate for Destiny to be another ODST, and don't be so condescending when others disagree with you.

Scaling difficulties changes the dynamics of the challenge. Part of the challenge is getting 6 people to work together. This is more difficult than getting 2 people to work together. What happens if there are puzzle elements that require all 6 players to do something different at the same time? I'm not against being able to enter the raid solo or with less than 6 people. I am against the difficulty being scaled down to accommodate less players. If your group is skilled or geared enough to complete it with 4 players, good for you. Have fun. I just don't want the difficulty or dynamics of the raid to change because you can't get 6 people together in a social game.

[quote]Part of the challenge is getting 6 people to work together.[/quote]Now, this is the thing I have an issue with. I think that's too difficult for the vast majority of players. I'm not talking about working together during a game, I'm just talking about coordinating schedules with people and arranging for a time when 6 people who all know each other can get together and cooperate playing a game at the same time all on their own internet connections for a full hour or so. Now, I know how fun that experience can be. I said before I play PlanetSide 2, and my outfit provides the ability for that experience to be had (often with many times more people than would constitute a Strike mission in Destiny) quite frequently. It's a GREAT experience, and I LOVE how getting 12 or 48 or 100 people to work together is a part of the challenge, which is what makes the game fun. But PlanetSide 2 is a lot more open-ended than the Strike missions in Destiny. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a Strike has a very concise beginning that everyone has to start at, whereas PlanetSide 2's gameplay takes place in a perpetual world with no start or finish; the gameplay is always going on, even before you play and after you leave. In PlanetSide 2, you can also play with anybody who's on your particular faction, not just the people in your outfit, but Destiny's Strike missions seem designed around the idea that you're only allowed to play with people who are on your friends list... which to me seems like an unnecessary barrier. And my idea of a scaled system, ideally, would make it so Strikes were accessible to one player or 2 players or 6 players, and everybody could still get the maximum enjoyment out of the game, without hindering that 6-player experience you're advocating for. But you seem intent on having a system that's designed just for 6 players, and any fewer will be a lesser or unnecessarily difficult experience. I agree with your point about puzzles, but what I've seen of Destiny in videos and such suggests it's not going to be a very puzzle-heavy game. The difficulty of each encounter seems to depend purely on the amount of damage that enemies inflict, how resistant enemies are to damage, and how many enemies are present in a given encounter... very scalable system.

There's something like 20 strikes that are mm for the people that can't get enough people coordinated for the single raid. Why should every activity in the game have to cater to people who can't be bothered to find a group of 5 people in a game with millions playing with you? Are the players that do take the necessary effort to find a clan or a few online friends, and want a difficult challenge to conquer, one that requires they work together as a team. Are they less important than the ones that don't, or can't for whatever reason? It's 1 dungeon, if you don't want to take the effort required for the one raid, you still have 10 times the content that doesn't require that level of commitment.

Oh! I didn't realize that the majority of these things had matchmaking and there's only one of them that is like, "Only for you and five buddies." In that case, I have no problem with that and your position is totally agreeable! :) Thank you!

Yes, there's 1 raid as of now. The vault of glass. This is the hardest content Bungie has ever created, according to them. Strikes are the 3 person easier version of a raid. These have mm, and there are many more strikes in the game. Both as you level up, and many at level 20 and above.