The facts are... we don't anything about D2, beyond the information released to date. That said we know what the expectations are, and some of the negatives have been: 1) Content that is isolated, takes $$$ way from Bungie and Activision, so that had to change. Will Guided Games help this situation, maybe, if a few positive clans, support lone wolfs routinely, it will help. I hope it does actually since I am clan based but love to do the lone wolf thing once in a while. The [i]ass[/i] clans that are elite based, and hate carrying noobs can be as salty or exclusive as they want. Let them be. Bet IMHO that is not the future of anything itemized in the presentation, and I believe that the elite clans will get what they want... only the players they want, and become isolated. Whereas the clans that are open, and accepting will grow and dominate the environment in D2, and they as well as the lone wolves will benefit because of it. 2) Bungie and Activision said nothing about exclusive content, but they telegraphed in clearly, in that Sony funded the sandbox at the live event. Is this fair, no, is it reality, yes. Having played both platforms, Xbox Live beats, IMHO, PlayStation Network. So something has to give Sony a counter balance and they pay for it, to get it. 3) Bungie has said the design core of D2 supports easy and straight forward content adds to the game, better than D1 did. This is key (if true) because Blizzard told Bungie over 2 years ago (now) what they should do, need to do, to improve fan appeal, is include more content more frequently, questing, goal based scenarios, and more dynamic events,. Bungie refused to do this initially, but every suggestion Blizzard made, Bungie in some way or form, has done. Dynamic engines that create variance in content once established are dirt cheap to maintain, and drive fan appeal hands down, so many developers have learned this lesson already. 4) Balancing, this has to be the one area where Bungle was horrible., beyond reason. The idea that they can't tune a given weapon or such, separate for PvE or PvP in D1 was just, well, stupidly short sighted. I hope lesson was learned. Never mind the fact that Blizzard suggested that Bungie not get deep into nerf vs. buff struggles, and let the players find the real balance. This where IMHO Bungie needs to learn something... stop trying to force players to do anything in anyway. I would like to think Bungie made it clear that they have learned that they can't control their creation as much as they would think or like to do? Only time will tell with D2. For D2, fix real bugs, only balance when it is explicitly and extremely required, other than that... get out of the way and let us play D2. 5) Everything Bungie said, implied and even what they did not say in the recent presentation, just screamed, they realize [i]they[/i] are in trouble here. The lack of the in-house crowd cheering during the scripted pauses, was painful to watch, and not hear, of course. But unless Bungie will release data to prove otherwise, that is it, they are in trouble. They have created scenarios that damaged market share, they cater to groups that play only limited aspects of the game, such as 50% attempt at raid, but the real number that is significant is the number of players that complete a raid, I suspect that is only 5% or maybe 10% of the total population of active players, the key word active, finish a raid. I have attempt raids 100s of times, but my experience is that less than 50% of the time we finish a raid. The reasons are many, and vary, but I suspect the experience of most players is similar. And, repeat of a raid is meaningless to market share, just as repeat of content is, re-play ability is a function of community, hence why Bungie stress the community aspect. Lone wolfs rarely replay anything without a very important reward expected. I ask you, did you do the raid for the better loot, or because as a team it was fun? At first it was the loot then it was the fun as a team, right? But even then that is only 5% to 10% of total active players are rewarded fully, that is horrible, no? Don't even get me started on ToO, I am sure the numbers are even worse for ToO. Does not matter how good the loot for flawless is for ToO or ToN now in D2... if the loot is exclusive it hurts market share. 6) Activision, I could careless what $$$ goals they have, but they have all the market data, and sales data, and it has to be clear when and what drives sales and player retention... it is not going cheap, and isolating content for DLCs. DLCs numbers for the industry in total are ugly most of the time. This is why Season Passes are critical, but these appeal only to the die hard fans. When Blizzard did this, there was a major drop off in player scale/volume after the initial burst of sales as each DLC was released, and Blizzard has worked hard to improve player retention via various ways, but it is the open character and weapons markets (real world) that has really kept the player volume up for most MMOs. But it has not been a perfect scenario even for Blizzard, so Bungie can learn from the past and from Blizzard. 7) Last, did anyone else notice that not one game designer or big name significant content provider leader of D1 past, was named as part of the leadership for D2? Why is that? Did they just move on? Yes and no, because some very stupid restrictions they supported or agreed to, hurt D1 in some significant way. For example, the comment that D1 was never intended to have primaries with attributes? Absolutely nuts, that was the entire point of the first 2 raids was it not? And it returned as the end content for D1? Finally? Too little to late, to be sure. New blood is/was required, and so some (I hope) loyal Bungie resources a got a significant opportunity, and they make good on it, as D2 matures. But please, don't ever take primary weapon attributes away again, never repeat that ugly mistake. I have been in IT for over 35 years, a developer, engineer, etc. Have followed video gaming trends, patterns and such since I was a kid. My MBA thesis was on video games selection, preference and popularity as a marketing study, so I feel I know what works and does not for game developers. Hence my comments above.