The real truth of the matter is that Year 2.5 (April Update) is where Destiny finally met its...(heh) destiny. Just like Everquest, World of Warcraft, & other MMOs. Many long term Destiny players have delusions of grandure due to the sickness known as nostalgia. Nostalgia intensifies feelings into what they were not. 1. Exotics Ever since the E3 reveal Bungie said they are unique items that shake up gameplay & will force players to change their playstyles & fight in unique and/or quirky ways. Result: At Launch Exotics were extremely overpowered & broke the balance of gameplay. Bungie themselves [b][u]ADMITTED[/u][/b] this was an error and they would be retuning Exotics. Gjallarhorn & Icebreaker being the most infamous examples. The playerbase turning Exotics into requirements didn't help either. The Exotic nerfs were coming one way or another. Like it or not. We all KNEW the nerfs were coming, and we all deep down inside know they were justified. It just is a bitter pill to swallow. 2. Drop Rates Year 1 was tedious. Blue Engrams decoded into whites (betcha wonder what a white is?), and Legendary engrams turned into motes, ascended materials, & coins 90% of the time. Exotic Engrams were basically non-existent, and they often turned into blues. Nightfall & Raid rewards were mostly materials. Player progression was tied to Vendors, and due to Light being a stat & not your item level... "Become Legend." was actually... "You may randomly become legend." Players could NOT customize their stat builds, or wear gear to suit their playstyle because you wore whatever the RNG gave you that had high light. Eventually, all players looked exactly the same. As to be max lvl required the same gear. HoW changed this somewhat, but even then. Rewards were still not where they needed to be. Bungie even made fun of itself with Master Ives & his remarks on "Not disappointing you...too much." Loot was a known issue. 3. Weak Characters Despite what folks say now, we have never been more powerful than we are now. Guardians were so much weaker in Year 1. Golden Gun didn't kill yellow bars in 1 shot, it took all 3 shots. Bladedancer was used as support, not dps, & mainly to revive while invisible. Nova Bomb & Fist of Havok didn't kill yellow bars, hell sometimes regular Minotaurs & Captains survived them. Most players sat on their supers as they just were so weak you were better off relying on your gun. 4. Community Folks have these dreams of Year 1 bring this time of peace & unity. Year 1 was a cast system. Due to the extremely low drop rates & how difficult it was to progress, 1 item made or broke the game for you. Want to Raid or do PoE for Etheric Light? You better have Gjallarhorn. Want to PVP with success? Better have Thorn, Suros, Last Word, or some god roll Iron Banner weapons. Have less than 6 Real Life friends to pkay with? Well good luck doing anything beyond strikes. Want to solo? Set aside 3hrs, have a mountain of synths, and prepare to snipe. Folks excluded others for shopping at Xur. You had to sneak up to him & make purchases or risk being exiled. Folks honestly felt that RNG drops was "earning" gear. Raided for that Gjallarhorn? Yeah, Guy A earned it from that Raid boss chest. Guess what? Well Guy B got it by shooting lvl 8 Hive in a cave in Patrol. Earned it right? Nothing was earned except bought gear. Via Strange Coins or Marks. 5. Strikes Strikes were not interesting. Bosses were literally the embellishment of [b]"Bullet Sponge"[/b]. Valus Ta'arc alone (not the strike) for example took nearly 20 minutes to kill. There were no mechanics, just a boss and endless waves of adds to serve as ammo replenishment. Every boss was the same. Big badguy with gatling gun explosives with an absurd amount of HP. Now, even I nit pick some of the current strikes. But I'd rather whine over imbalanced mechanics that can be fixed easily vs complaining that it takes a full team an hour to kill 1 oversized enemy. [i]Edit: 1hr kill time is embellished. Archon Priest, Valus, Nexus Mind averaged about 13-25 minutes depending on if your teammates died often.[/i] 6. Story [i]I could tell you[/i] about the story that didn't exist... 7. PVP I won't go too indepth here. But matches were often always one-sided, there was bad lag back then just like there is now. MM times were longer too. 5 to 10 monute waits sometimes. Shotguns were even worse than they are now... Mapador? Please...if it had existed in year 1 that gun would need to be called the Planetador. Snipers had a thing called Final Round that was a 1HKO to the body (no matter your armor). Many Handcannons could shoot at Scout Rifle ranges, MIDA was inescapable, Suros killed you before you knew the trigger got pulled, Bladedancers ran the Crucible, Shoulder Charge was even worse. 8. Vendors & Marks 90% of The Tower vendors were PVP & required Crucible marks. If you didn’t PVP you had a bad time gearing up. You either PVP'd or exchanged gathering materials for PVP marks at an EXTREMELY low rate. Your marks were capped at 200 a week. Both marks added to this. So you commites to PVE marks or PVP. Many wonder why the game was strong pvp after awhile... Well Year 1 forced PVP in order to draw out content. You literally were not doing yourself any favors not pvping. The Tower itself had no kiosks, no material exchanges/swaps. 9. Faction Yeah, raising factions was a nightmare. You got 10 and 15 faction for patrol missions & crucible wins. And it only went to 1 faction. You had to pick one. And your faction packages were 95% materials. Edit: 10. Superstitions RNG was so bad, loot was so rare. Folks had rituals, urban legends, & etc for gameplay activities. We had: [u]Crouching at the Cryptarch[/u] Rumor was crouching raised the chance he'd decode the engram into an item. [u]Patrol Grimiore for bonus materials[/u] Completing _ number of patrol missions would grant a chance at a double harvest. And a debunked rumor was that if you cleared an area of all patrol missions your harvests would yield dpuble materials. [u]Mousing over an engram for 30s would increase Decryption chance[/u] Suppositly this would prompt the Cryptarch to decode engrams into the matching rarity item type. [u]Class Decryption[/u] Since engrams would decode into random class items. For a while before being proved wrong it was believed that Warlock's had a high chance at hunter gear, hunter's with titan, titan with warlock. The superstitions are all BS. But still sad that they came to be. I think the Cryptarch one still persists today though... Bottomline Year 2 was where this game met its best balance across all content, gameplay, weapons, story, rng, etc. Things felt fair. Year 3 feels lackluster because Year 2 was so good. Taken King left EXTREMELY big shoes to fill. Rise of Iron could not hope to match Taken King considering it was made with a team that was a fraction of the size of TTK's team. TTK was pretty much honestly a reboot, a desperately needed reboot. Nostalgia is cruel. Many folks like to worship, Orcarina of Time, FF7, & other old games. They tell stories that make them sound like perfection. Then you replay them & their age shows. Everquest 1 once did a temporary Vanilla server... Guess how long it lasted? Less than 1 quarter. "Veteran" players flocked to it...played for about 1 week then ran back to the modern servers and never looked back. Right now, WoW players are begging for Vanilla WoW. Yup, imagine WoW with no LFG tool, Honor points & ranks that decay, no dungeon summoning, Alterac Valley games that literally took 24+hrs to win/lose, and etc. Yeah, Nostalgia is cruel.