I'm a long time fan of Bungie and I came into my own with your games. I love your business model and I love Destiny 2. Today I'm questioning all that I thought I knew and believed in just because of the awful experience I had this Trials weekend. Having a game with diverse classes and abilities will easily cause divisions amongst players competing and I know it's a constant juggle trying to keep things balanced and fair but this weekend was callous and painfully unfair to the players that just wanted to play Trials. I feel that this was all because of Bungie's failure to act appropriately and in a timely manner. I'm a Trials rat and I love to compete. I enjoy it even when it's frustrating, even when the meta is annoying. I enjoy it even when people are obviously using aim bots. I seldom complain because I play for the love of the game and for the love of competition. I was excited for Trials to drop and within minutes of launch this passed Friday I only had time for 2 matches; my goal was to farm up my k/d since recent physical issues have had me steadily dropping over the last few weeks. I started my weekend with 2 wins and a 3.25 weekly k/d and went about the rest of my day blissfully unaware of the chaos that would soon ensue. I later rendezvoused with my best friend who I play everything with since the day the met, and we started playing Control to warm-up. That is when we got our first taste of the weapon exploits. The Crucible quickly became saturated with one-shot weapons and was unplayable. I assumed that a fix was on the way so we withdrew and participated in other activities. Social Media and news was blowing up with information about the exploit and I continued to assume that there was no way this would go on for too long but turns out that fixing it wouldn't be easy; this is understandable. I'm not a developer or designer but I can compare this to an error in a vital protein in the human body-- to just extract the defect could be detrimental to the entire system and I know Bungie issued a statement that expressed it wouldn't be easy to fix. I'll admit that my friend and I were able to craft the weapons but we had little interest in playing with or against them. We decided to bide our time in other activities and were shocked to find that Bungie's message to players regarding the exploit stated that they wouldn't disable Trials and encouraged us to "have fun". We waited for the patch and when the patch came out the servers were understandably unstable but we were happy to have a legitimate chance at playing the Trials of Osiris we know and love. The patch came out late in the evening so we decided we'd give it our all on Monday to make up for the lost time. When we started playing on Monday, we were shocked and surprised people were still using exploited crafted weapon. We encountered things like a Recluse that was one-shotting from a considerable distance and reservoir burst on automatic weapons which is particularly devastating on an SMG and a Raconteur bow that one-shots no matter what. Unfortunately, we didn't just have to compete with the exploited weapons but we also had to compete against the servers error coding. My friend had a 90 week streak of flawlesses and I had 57 weeks, we waited for the patch and the patch enabled us to play but it didn't stop the exploiting. We had two cards of 5 wins with 2 mercy's that we lost because we got booted out of our matches and when we knuckled up to play the last two games we matched teams with exploited weapons we couldn't compete against. On top of all of that we lost time because of the coconut, baboon and bee error codes we would keep getting 30 minute bans as well. I'm disheartened, hurt and just disappointed. I know it's a video game and we'll move on from this as we cycle through the subsequent weeks of content but i feel cheated and exploited. Why couldn't Bungie just take the servers down and do emergency maintenance at the time things went wrong? As a dedicated player i'm feeling especially betrayed as we tried to make a last ditch effort and servers go down super early thus ending or final attempts at a flawless to protect the stats we've worked so hard to accumulate. Imagine going flawless every week it's available for over a year and having that taken away from you because the developers let an exploit go. I know some people enjoyed the exploit but it took time and dedication to attain the streak we had and to end Trials weekend without a flawless and having Bungie respond to the viral exploit by telling us to "have fun" just feels like a slap in the face. I'm hurt by the way this was handled... some of us just wanted to play the game and others wanted to exploit the game. We chose not to participate until the patch launched and we ended up getting the short end of the stick and we have nothing to show for it. I know this post is long and I hope Bungie takes the time to read it. My life will go on and i'll live to play another day but i'm just hurt by the way things were handled and how they went. I don't want to cheat or exploit the game's design; i want to compete in the impressive and expansive world that Bungie gave me.