On Rewards and Player Retention There are a lot of posts on how broken the random reward system is (or isn't), but I wanted to provide feedback on a specific anecdotal case for improving the reward system. A friend of mine was playing Destiny and loving it. He's a gamer. He leveled up his first character and worked hard to get his warlock "raid ready." It was post-Dark Below, and he was level 29 or 30 with decent weapons. He tried and failed VoG with other newbs a few times and failed, but then got in with some experienced raiders and completed both normal and hard mode back to back. His reward for all this hard work? A shader, ascendent materials, and a sparrow. He hasn't played since. Some ideas on a raid reward system that might have kept him playing. 1. Provide a guaranteed reward for the first run of any raid on both levels. Like the strangers rifle at the end of the story, you should know that there is a payoff for your first successful run. 2. Make subsequent rewards dependent on how successful you are. For example, after your first run (which has guaranteed rewards), you must get to the chest with no wipes (or some reasonable number) to get a weapon or armor, otherwise you get class items or other. 3. Make the best weapon or final piece of armor something that you only get on flawless. I see multiple benefits to a system like this. First, it would provide some level of satisfaction to new raiders to keep them playing. It would incentivize people to not cheese the raids by wiping when things go off the rails. It would ensure that first-timers don't get the gun you've raided 20 times for and still haven't gotten. It would provide status and prestige to the best gear so people know if you have Necrocasm it's because you did something special, not just tagged along with a group of pro raiders and got lucky. I'm sure there are bunch more (better?) ideas than this, but I'm just giving my feedback here. Now as for the crucible rewards. I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain...