Tough Love time. Take a break from the herd mentality for a few minutes and think about how much this actually affects you and your friends. Given that 99% of you have linked accounts, the answer is most likely "not very much." A few things I believe this is not: This is not an attempt to censor bad press about Destiny. As much as Bungie has the right to control what content appears on their website, they don't use it for active censorship. Some of the most damning criticism of their products is hosted on this very site, and available for the public to see. And let's be honest; the game has been out for more than a year; the only people who still care enough to complain about the game are people who are playing the game. This is not an attempt to extort money. As DeeJ said, less than 1% of us will be affected. They wouldn't take an action, let alone an action with the chance to stir up so much hate, to secure such a small number of sales. In addition, the notion is irrelevant, as a user can download the Destiny demo for [i]free[/i] with a [i]free[/i] XBL/PSN account, and create a Bungie.net account for [i]free[/i] to link it with. As long as you have an internet connection and a console that Bungie has developed for in the last 8 years, you can post here for [i]free.[/i] I believe what this really is is an honest attempt to clean up the forums. I have been here for a very long time, and I have seen many different moderation styles on this website. My first ban was for having an off-topic conversation in a thread (with the older layouts, this actually cluttered things up). There were about two dozen active forum moderators at the time. This was before we could embed pictures or videos, or even use (non-text) emoticons. As it stands, the game this website currently services is reported to have around 17,000,000 active users. If even 10% of them were active on the website at any given time, it would be way too much of a burden for 24 volunteer moderators to handle. Automated systems were put in place to handle this workload, but the general consensus is that they aren't getting the job done. It's extremely easy to create alt accounts, and moderators don't seem to have the resources to shut down prolonged attacks. Requiring linked accounts to post to the mains is a step against this. Granted, it can be maliciously bypassed quite easily, but it will discourage some, and improve the level of enforcement that can be delivered to those that do so (bans from the game itself). Most importantly, it gives the authorities more tools to track down the worst offenders. So who does this affect? A handful of aging NEETs who are drawn by nostalgia to Babby's First /b/ (#offtopic). I am sorry, but this website and this community does not owe them anything. In addition, they can retain their current level of access for free with minimal effort, it will ultimately just be slightly more tedious for them to evade bans. Such inhuman tragedy. Even if it weren't free, all it would mean is that they aren't allowed to post on the website of a company they haven't given any money to (barring store purchases) in the last 5 years. But wait, B.net actually is still catering to such people. They still have their accounts, and they can still post in private groups. You read that right; Bungie is letting people that don't even buy their games create their own private forums for free. So greedy. And even if these users are too cool to play a AAA mainstream game, they can hide their history. Could this change have been presented better? Possibly. Could it be refined into a better change? Yes. Was this decision made with ill intent? I sincerely doubt it.