Nothing worth doing is ever easy. Sure, we could have kept the same old style flat forums. But we've been doing this for a long time. We saw how it failed once lots of people came. Conversations were impossible to follow, you relied on a crew of about 15 moderators to deal with hundreds of thousands of posts. Worse, our internal systems weren't flexible - it required great efforts to change even small things. There were three seperate code paths to show Halo stats, one for each client (web, mobile, and public api). That's insane. Worse, our aspirations for Destiny called for an even greater web/mobile footprint than in Halo. We'd be crushed. Time for a new approach. But what? Fortunately, we have faced this problem before. In 2003, Halo 2 was approaching. Our perl-based bungie.net had maybe 50,000 total users on it. It would have been crushed by Halo 2. So we threw it all away, and created the basic tech that ran the site from Halo 2 through Reach. Here, we faced a similar problem, and reached the same solution: start from the ground up. This web site is designed for a game you know little about. It is designed for both familiar and unfamiliar social interactions. It our platform for the future - not a marketing site, but a place to grow the community of our new universe from. It has some holes, some rough edges, sure. Your irrational fear of the words "social media" is just that: irrational. You've been part of a social media site for a while - bungie.net has always been one. We're committed to growing this site with you - both the fans who have been with us forever, and those jumping on board for the first time. It should be fun - just don't expect us to follow the status quo of your idea of what bungie.net should be all the time.