Let's talk Destiny 2. You know, that game more than half of your studio seems to have completely forgotten the existence of in order to lay into Destiny 3? Yea, that one. The State of Destiny 2 is decaying. We got problems, Bungie, and too many of them are being completely ignored. Let's talk Factions first. NOBODY asked for this "renown" garbage. Absolutely no one was sitting around thinking "You know what would make Faction Rallies better? A massive debuff being applied while trying to trudge through this already tedious bitch of a grind." Can you even begin to grasp WHY the first few Rallies were marked by the community flocking to any "exploit" they could find to speed up the token-gathering process? The answer is absurdly simple: return on investment. Crap rewards offer no incentive to invest time nor effort. Making it take longer with this "Renown" garbage just to get ornaments and reskinned weapons 10+ levels BELOW what we would need just to break even is NOT an improvement. Removing the vanilla items we can get from ANY legendary item source would have been an improvement. Making Rallies a source of "Powerful" gear that moves us towards the cap would have been an improvement. This "Renown" nonsense is not an improvement. A sequel is supposed to IMPROVE the franchise by BUILDING UPON the foundation created by the first installment. Instead we launched D2 for the first time to find that everything we loved about D1 was gone,and in its place was sheer disappointment. We had to wait for you to bring things back that never should have been cut in the first place. I mean something as simple as Vault space, you should damn well know by now that unless you START with giving us enough space to store five slots of everything you're going to have to add more, and we're going to be kicking down your door demanding it for day one. But there are other, more subtle features that you removed that never should have been touched. Slot-based infusion, for example. I would really like to know who needs to be thrown under the bus for this one. D1's infusion system was a workable solution (not the best, but workable) to the problem of RNG, the stingy bastard that it is, constantly flooding our inventories with garbage drops we have no use for. I, for example, have no use whatsoever for SMGs. Scout Rifles, on the other hand, I love. With D1's infusion system I could be turning all those useless SMGs into fuel for something I'll actually use. And in D1's system I never had to worry about any of my characters falling too far behind the others, as I could take the armor "cast offs" of the frontrunner to boost the straggler. Still no answer from you as to why this decision was made but it doesn't matter. It was a bad decision. And you should be ashamed, but that doesn't mean jack, so just fix your damn mistake. Now, credit where it's due: hand-picked armor mods was a good idea, you just didn't go far enough with it. D1 armor had effectively 3 mods. Give us two more slots on D2's armor and you're heading in the right direction. Individual shader slots was another good idea but Bungie, pick one: either make them consumable or have them cost glimmer to apply. Not both. Same goes for Transmat effects. And when our weapons/armor already HAVE a Legendary mod on it it that should reduce the cost of applying another Legendary mod the same way it costs less to infuse an Exotic into a Legendary than it does to use a Rare item as the infusion fuel. Here's a crucial change that needs to be made: STOP listening to the blat-ass, cry-baby try-hards who want to be "special little snowflakes." Clan Raid and Trials engrams offering clan members a SINGLE piece of gear each week was a great idea and it should be left to the sole discretion of the CLANS to decide whether a member is taking advantage of them. Those who DO run Raids/Trials get MULTIPLE pieces of gear each week. THAT is their reward for stepping up to the plate. And that applies to the level cap whiners, too. Those who have had to rely on Clan Engrams because they simply do not have the same amount of time to throw away as other players do should NOT be shafted out of reaching the level cap. The cap is NOT about prestige. It's just a gate mechanism. They want something to brag about they've got Glory Ranks and Nightfall Top Scores. They can go be sweaty over there. You had a good thing here and you killed it because some insecure jackass who gets his self-worth from a damn video game felt threatened by a 1:5 ratio. Stop listening to these self-centered little shits. They are not good for your game. I really think you should look into the Gear Forging I have dedicated a previous thread to and others on Reddit and other venues have proposed. Could solve a lot of problems in a lot of areas. It'll give us something to grind for after milestones are done, something to work on in the downtime between content drops, it'll give BACK the feeling of a personal connection to our characters and our gear that was never fully realized in D1 and completely taken away in D2, but most importantly it will give people a reason to keep playing your game, and there's not a whole lot of that going around these days. But not every problem can be solved with some magic wand solution. Your lazy, complacent, narcissistic approach to content cannot be fixed by a simple patch. And it is this problem more than any other that has people all over the internet warning others NOT to buy Destiny if they haven't bought it and encouraging current players not to waste their money on Forsaken. And that all comes back around to what I said at the start: return on investment. The sparse amount of actual content this DLC represents is not worth the $40 price tag. It isn't worth the $20 price tag you put on the previous DLC. Taken King and Rise of Iron were barely $10 expansions yet you charged nearly a full game price for them. A piece. The total cost of playing D1 from launch was over $200 for a game that after three years of expansions STILL felt barren and incomplete, and I'm saying this even after pointing to many ways in which D1 was infinitely better than D2. That should concern you, Bungie. The fact that you all seem to think you're hitting it out of the park with every update is very concerning to us. We gave you a lot of leeway with D1 because it was your "first" game in a genre that hadn't really found its feet yet. But we're seeing the exact same pattern, the exact same RELATIVE size of content, and the exact same prices in D2; "relative" being the key word there. Compared to their respective base games the expansions have added roughly the same relative amount of content. But, if you remember that you have more than just ONE year of feedback to review here you might remember that the lack of content was the principle complaint throughout the entirety of D1's existence. D2 offers significantly LESS content than D1, while demanding we pay the same price as we did for D1's content, which was significantly less than what we felt there should be. Severe reduction of product while demanding the same premium price is not sound business strategy. And that's something we really need to talk about. Expectations. You people at Bungie LOVE to play with our expectations. You LOVE the hype game. The problem is it feels like you've forgotten you're addressing gamers, and you come off sounding like you've never played a video game in your entire lives. When you say "Epic story" we expect it to rival Final Fantasy, or at least Skyrim. You could fit the current four years of Destiny in the first disc of FF-9 and it would rattle around like a peanut in an empty oil tanker. When you say "personalize your character and your gear and make the experience truly your own" we expect a creative suite on par with the WWE "Create a wrestler" feature and immersion deeper than Fable at the very least. Reach was more personalized than this, and we never even saw Noble-6's face. When you say you want to tell a story we expect the campaign to be something we can savor and enjoy, not some half-assed, disjointed narrative we absolutely MUST steamroll through as quickly as possible (not that you made THAT all that difficult to do) in order to get to the rest of the game's content (only to find that there's damned little to be found). And when you say that you LISTEN to your community, we expect you to take feedback from someone other than -blam!-ing monetized YouTubers who get paid to shill your game whether it fails or not. We've been asking you to fix RNG for years. We've been complaining about the lack of rewards and the shitty returns on time invested for years. We've been demanding some REAL story and some REAL end-game content for years. And all you do is focus on putting out the NEXT game while the "B" Team half-asses some filler for three years. I'm going to be very blunt here with you, Bungie: you have not given your community any reason to believe your game is worth investing in anymore. The "Grand experiment" is over. We will not pardon your dust, the growth period has long passed, you are not rank amateurs and we expected better from you because of that. And you failed. You failed to heed the massive decline of your community's population as a clear indication that you were making the wrong choices, and instead you doubled-down on those poor decisions. We are far beyond the point of "gently banking to one side to get back on course." You need to hit the brakes, throw this sonuvabitch in reverse, and turn the -blam!- around because you blew it and you blew it big.