D2 launch was the worse the game has ever been... There was absolutely no grind for anything just rng. Forsaken seemed to be a step in the right direction but weeks later the game is dead and boring as it was in D2 year 1. For me atleast, there is no reason for me to even play D2. I will only play it when the mini dlcs release..

Pretending that the amount of RNG required to get Uriel’s gift to drop in year 1 was a difficult or overly time consuming task or otherwise arduous or excessively random is obtuse. RNG is basically rolling dice. If you ask someone to roll a 6-sided die until they roll six, that’s really not a big deal. If you ask them to roll a 6,000 sided die and get a 6, that’s a very different task that requires substantially more time or as others might put it, a lot of luck. Given that Year 1 loot other than weapon element when applicable lacked random rolls and the overall size of loot tables was relatively small, it was not overly difficult to get any or all of the items. A competitive environment is, in broad terms, the set of rules, variables, and other factors that define a competition. I’m using broad terms in the previous post because my point was a matter of broad design principle, which is true beyond just the scope of Destiny. I would think it clear enough from context what a competitive environment is on a practical level in a first person shooter; it’s our weapons, our maps, whatever abilities we might have, etc. Ideally, we don’t want RNG or locking of gear to the winners involved. The reality is that RNG does not inherently lock any players out of potential access to gear, whereas any kind of “skill based” or “performanced” based objective does. In a PvP environment there’s inherent dissonance in putting players fighting to earn loot requiring them to meet certain skill or performance thresholds against players who have already obtained that loot when said loot increases player performance. To put it simply, it’s fundamentally anti-competitive design. There’s no rhetoric about Venn Diagrams of skill and dedication which changes that fact. Bungie has some seriously messed up design going on, and they need to be taken to task for it. Year 1’s chief problem was a lack of content. Here we are Year 2 near the end of season 1, and it’s the same story. Sure they’ve added content, but nothing’s really highly replayable, and all they did was make abusive changes to add RNG and limit player resource economies to try to hide that fact and extend the grind lifetime of the game, all the while failing to put real effort into actually trying to fix or address balance or design issues even after launch. I would argue that the grind changes, while they make the game live longer for people who have time to invest, actually destroy the basic playability for a lot of more casual players who don’t have hours to farm the game or stockpiles of masterwork cores handy. I don’t think D2 was amazing at launch. I preferred it to what we have now. For overall game health, Taken King was probably the best era. For PvP specifically, I was generally happier with D2 launch than other eras.