Unfortunately... it doesn't really help me that much. The problem the game has is getting you from "initial player" to "veteran" like you seem to be. I played Destiny 1. I have played looters before (In fact, when done well, I really LOVE looter games. Borderlands stands out as one of my favorites in terms of looting despite the gunplay often being lackluster in it. I enjoyed Path of Exile for a while until the gameplay got fairly stale. These are examples) and they have varying degrees of enjoyment for me. Largely based on their design philosophies. I've played a lot of MMO's. The current one I'm playing is Final Fantasy XIV. I played Guild Wars 2 before that. Before that I played Runescape. I'm not counting any MMO that I didn't really "engage" in all that much, or only played haphazardly (I've probably played at least 200 MMO's, of which 3 caught my interest, so... take from that what you will). The major issue I have with Destiny 2 is the lack of a player progression structure. As an MMO player and a Looter Player... I don't really "optimize" myself. I don't typically care to. Not my style. In Runescape, I basically played a "Hybrid" character where I'd wear warrior equipment and then dump spells on players unless they were running and then I'd swap to bows and pelt you to death. Granted, I sucked in PvP in Runescape... but I enjoyed that the game let me do something like that. In Guild Wars 2, I played as a Ranger who specialized primarily in Pet and Trap Damage. I also spec'd heavily into just Critical Hit Rate. I didn't care about Crit damage or overall damage of my bows... I cared about scoring Crits as often as possible and put runes on my equipment that proc'd on Crit. This was fun for me. It was suboptimal as anything ever was, but that was my fun. In Final Fantasy XIV, I'm spec'd as a Healer who can dump tons of HP on someone and can do almost nothing with the DPS (Healers are expected to DPS some... I fall under damage quotas for almost all metrics of DPS with my White Mage... but I can cast Cure 1 with the same power most White Mages cast Cure 2 with... and my basic Regen skill is 55% of a Cure 1 every single tick... it ticks 6 times per cast). Heck, in Borderlands 3, I had my Beastmaster class use exclusively shotguns that set "mines" on people. It had a perk that was, "get ammo back in the clip for every critical hit you land at X%". I then put a ton of points into increasing these proc's so that I was killing bosses instantly. Namely, I'd fire a ton of the mines into critical hit zones on a boss, over and over and over again, never needing to reload (reloading the gun detonated the mines). Then, when I felt I had enough on the boss... I'd deliberately miss a shot... and reload to bring them from full health to zero... and skip all their boss phases. That was fun for me! I have always looked for a way to play every single game the way I want to play it. I've always looked for "the fun" in my build, no matter how suboptimal, and just ran with it. Destiny 2 has a problem where it's very difficult to find "a fun build", because there aren't enough options. Or, rather, the options don't really lend themselves to "fun builds" for me. I want to play the PvE either like Halo or like a traditional MMO. It isn't either. I want to play the PvP like a competitive experience where I can think around the enemies who act/react faster than I do (meaning I can just play smarter), but the gameplay doesn't lend itself to that at all. Likewise, the "stats" don't seem to achieve any noticeable difference to me. What's the difference between 3% and 4% recharge speed on my grenade? I don't know. Can you tell me? It's still, "really long time to recharge" in my opinion. The way I would LIKE to play is this: Scout Rifles with minimal recoil and near pinpoint accuracy (I love to headshot all day long). Fusion Rifles with a decent clip size and fast reload. Grenades that can be recharged every 10 seconds or less. The problem is that the loot doesn't tell me much of anything (if anything at all) about what I'm getting. I effectively have to just swap to every single item I get to see if it's okay... and so much of it is just such a negligible difference that I end up just equipping whatever has the biggest Power Number on it instead. I, personally, have no sense of "progression" in this game. My major issues with it stem from that. I don't feel like I'm going anywhere. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. I increased rep with someone and got a random drop. Okay, what is it? Don't know. It's 1260 and is an Auto-Rifle. Okay, dismantle, I guess. Oh, it's a piece of armor that looks exactly like this other piece I have, but is also 1260... Dismantle, I guess? I am dismantling 98% of all my loot without ever looking at it. Without checking its perks. Without checking its stats. I don't know what I'm looking for, what difference the stats make, or even if the perks are useful. I want to clear my checklists. I want to unlock content. I want to feel a sense of pride in how far I've come and what I've done. Destiny lacks that for me. It's all RNG and that's just not all that fun for me. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate random loot. I played Warframe for years, after all, and chased a TON of the random loot. The difference between chasing the Random Loot in a game like Warframe and a game like Destiny is this: I knew what I was chasing in Warframe at every single stage. I knew the drop rates and the activities that dropped what I wanted. I also knew the value of what I was chasing. If I wanted X Mod because it did Y thing and that would improve my build, I chased it. Not eternally, but at least for some time. Destiny doesn't have that. It has, "everything is random, all the time, so good luck chasing anything other than a couple specific items that you don't even know if they're valuable or not". What's valuable in Destiny 2? I don't know. Exotics, I guess. But, their perks seem to be mostly garbage from all the ones I've obtained so far (or looked at in the Vault thing), so why bother? Should I be chasing one Legendary Armor piece over another as a Warlock? I chased the glowy armor for a while because it was pretty during Solstice, but the final step involved doing things I didn't have unlocked, and no way to know how to unlock them, so I gave up. Is the Solstice Armor even good? I have no way to know. It's glowy and that's cool though. Destiny 2 is an unfocused mess. That's it's major issue in my opinion. It needs to rely less on RNG for some things and needs to allow for more "player expression". If the stats don't matter to me, why would I chase anything with them? If they game doesn't give me a significant enough boost for each stat increase, why is any increase worth chasing? I can recover 1.35 seconds faster with 100 Recovery than if I had 0? Okay... why bother? Enemies rarely push you out of cover, so I don't need the extra time... and in Crucible you die in 1 or 2 hits anyway, so Recovery is useless. This is my issue. There's nothing to chase. There's no reason to chase it. The gameplay itself is "mediocre" compared to other games I've played as well, so sticking around for the gameplay isn't a good reason to play it. I'd be sticking around for the loot, if anything... and the loot is all pretty subpar, substandard, and fairly worthless. Or rather... anything that would make loot interesting in this game... doesn't exist.

Again....respectfully....my argument doesn't change. You've just clarified what the point of friction is. The issue is that you're struggling with the fact that Destiny isn't a pure RPG...and it isn't a pure Action game either....but is somewhere in the middle (because its a hybrid). 1. Bungie doesn't WANT a game where players are locked into rigid roles. Like a former CM once said (DeeJ we miss you) "The role of every Guardian is to use a weapon and shoot aliens in the face". The different classes don't represent RIGID roles (ala the MMO trinity of Healer/DPS/Tank) but instead repressent different POWER-FANTASIES....and different FIGHTING styles. So while this can make it frustrating (at first) to hone in on different builds, it also allows for a LOT more creativity where it comes to finding one that is truly YOURS. 2. This game has PVP that is trying to fit into the mold of that of a conventional (balanced) FPS. Because many of the players who play this game are carry overs from Halo (AND THIS IS WHERE I AGREE WITH YOU THAT WE'VE RUN INTO A QUESTIONABLE DESIGN CHOICE.) In most MMOs, PvP isn't a "balanced" contest of skill. They are largely unbalanced contests of BUILD-STRENGTH and adaptability. Not a test of how good you are at button-mashing. So PvP doesn't have bleedover effects into PVE. Because POWER-PROGRESSION is supported....and PVP usually has its own seperate sandbox for gear. So it gets tuned seperately. The problem with Destiny is that the game has a SINGLE sandbox for both PVE and PVP....AND its PVP is based on a model that is INCOMPATIBLE with the power-progression that is part of loot gams and MMOs. Incompatible becasue the power-progression that you need for PVE, breaks the balance of PvP....and the balance you need for this kind of 'contest of skill" PVP KNEECAPS the power-progression of PVE. So (and this might be what you're trying to get at, but haven't quite zeroed in on because you're new).... [i] The game is trapped in this dysfunctional cycle around power. In part because of the single sandbox and design of PVP....BUT ALSO BECAUSE THIS GAME DOESN'T SUNSET GEAR AND EVERYTHING IS ETERNALLY VIABLE. So with every new content drop PVE gets this flush of power as the level cap is raised, and new weapons and abilities----stasis----gets added to the game. But then there is long, painful process of clawing BACK that power in (for PVE) arbitrary ways as complaints about balance pile up on the PVP side of the game, and Bungie starts churning the sandbox trying to shift the meta....because there is no systematic way of retiring power from the game like you have in Borderlands every time the level cap goes up.[/i] The problem is that Bungie refuses to acknowledge the problem, and REFUSES to play by the rules (industry standard solutions) to the design problems their facing. Not only do they refuse to admit to the problem, you have Bungie devs going on podcasts and declaring in interviews that not only are these issues not problems, they are the game's "super power"...and that they will find unique solutions (to the extent that they even acknowledge the problems) that have managed to elude the entire industry for a generation (That is, managing a loot system in a game like this without having to sunset gear.) Since you're new here, you don't know MY rep around here yet. Because of the issues I've outlined above, I am a staunch (and very unpopular around here) advocate for sunsetting.....and I' keep saying (also unpopularly) that there is a reckoning coming for this game between PVE and PVP. Becasue it is a bad marriage with irreconciable differences that Bungie seems to be in frank denial about. Though Halo Infinite's PVP carries through with the promise offered by last weeks "technical test"....that reckoning might come VERY soon.

I get that the game is a hybrid. The problem stems from the issues that presents. If you are a hybrid game you need to one of the following: 1. Be really good at one thing or another and use the secondary thing to make the really good thing even better. 2. Combine the two things in such a way as to make the overall experience very good. 3. Do both things decently well so that players can choose which thing they like to do and do that without messing with the thing they don't like. Destiny 2 (and Destiny 1) have an issue where the staff running it don't have any of these set as their goals. Best I can tell (from an amateur game dev who is unpublished and likely never will be published, point of view) is that their design goals with this game lie in these factors: 1. Monetize as much as possible. 2. Slow down player progression as much as possible to avoid having to create new content. This is part of goal 1. The less people you have to employ to make content, the more money you keep as pure profit. 3. Sometimes pleasing the remaining population of the game by making changes. Now, I have no problem with any of these goals. These goals aren't bad. But, the way in which they are executed... Not done very well. Any of the features that would make a Shooter fun to play simply don't exist, or are substandard for the industry. Any of the features that would make an MMO fun to play are afterthoughts rather than features and are even worse in terms of quality than even Runescape is (which says a lot). The hybridization of the game doesn't seem to make any of the existing features any better either... or even add new twists on those mechanics it is trying to hybridize. Likewise, there is no push from the game devs or directors to even make any single feature "adequate" to the point that players could play for just that particular thing. All of this is frustrating as a player new to Destiny 2. I really hate thinking, "I've seen this done better in X game" for everything Bungie has done in this game. I hate thinking, "this would be better if they just stole the execution of this idea from X game and put Y twist on it to fit the current game". Also, I've had this idea for a while now... Why doesn't the PvP have a separate progression system at all? Not like it would be difficult to do. Why isn't there just a set of PvP equipment that you use/upgrade as you play PvP? Why do they even allow the PvE content to be pulled into PvP? Granted, I get that having a mode where you can bring your most powerful gear into PvP will always be demanded (and they can keep doing that if they want), but why isn't there a "standardization" for a Competitive PvP environment? Why aren't each class of weapons split into "archetypes" and TTK's normalized across those archetypes for PvP? Too much work? Too complicated? I'd wager it'd be pretty easy to do. Just from a programming perspective you'd just need to do a couple things. 1. Create a separate loadout tab for PvP that can only have the PvP equipment in it (this would arguably be the easiest thing to program and probably wouldn't take any longer than 3 days at most for a team of 5). 2. Create all new PvP equipment and restrict it to PvP (some of this work was done in Destiny 1 with PvP gear that existed, it just wasn't restricted). This would probably take the longest as you'd have to normalize the stats and create "archetypes" for player styles/builds. 3. Create a Progression System for PvP. Ideally, you could use this as "light skill based matchmaking" if you restricted players to playing against only those using similar rarity equipment (this is a whole system in and of itself that I'd devised, but there's no reason to go into it). Get access to Exotics through this system, unlock perks on equipment, reroll some equipment for specific stats... whatever. It'd be easy enough to separate players out based on where they were in the progression if they wanted to. This would probably take 2 weeks of planning (if you wanted to be thorough) and about... 2 days of implementation once planned? Maybe a week if you wanted to do proper QA Testing on the new system? If Bungie believed in QA Testing anymore. If they did this, balance would be easy to achieve and even maintain in the PvP environment. Roll out 5 sets of armor (per class) in 6 configurations and 3 of each new archetype for each weapon during each "season" as well as 2 or 3 new maps... it'd be a pretty easy process. Probably not even as time intensive as I'm imagining it would be. But, none of that is either here or there. The main issue most of Destiny suffers from is just this "clear lack of progression". RNG is great, but doesn't make for compelling progression unless each thing you roll is newer/better as you move along. The gameplay suffers from a "things don't get better as you move along" issue. I'm not even looking for rolling a particular archetype of character in MMO's (I like to try to break the archetype and holy trinity where possible, to do interesting things). I'm just looking for some sense that I'm getting better. Some sense that I've accomplished something in the game. Well, I'm looking for a sense that I've done more than grinded for randomly generated loot. In Destiny 1 I had a Gallerjorn(sp?) drop for me randomly in a Nightfall Strike. It was great to finally have one... but it didn't feel great to have it. The accomplishment of it had wore off in two days. I got it from a random drop. Hooray. It was part of the Meta. You needed it for most groups to even consider taking you through Raids. There wasn't some epic quest I had to embark on to earn it. There wasn't some list of 30 things I needed to do in order to unlock it. I didn't have to run a specific strike over and over and over again because it was in the Loot List. I had to rely on luck to get it... just so I could go on Raids with decent groups. Destiny 2 suffers from this same issue. The added issue Destiny 2 has is that I have no way to know if anything is any good unless I use it. So, not only is the method to get good loot highly unreliable and prone to chance... But, I have no way to even know if what I got is even "good loot" to begin with. There's no sense of progression in this game other than "chasing Light Level" near as I can tell. They lock that off at 1260 behind "do Weekly stuff for Powerful or Pinnacle Engrams". So, they told me to play a whole bunch... and then barely play at all. Then, when I do grind out the weeklies for those Engrams... it isn't really useful enough. It isn't enough to push me over the line to the next part of my progression. Does Bungie need to Sunset items? Sure. Maybe. I don't know. What I know is that current loot has an issue with communicating to the player a sense of progression. That sense of progression is going to be vital for any player who is new to the game.

1. Destiny does. They've just done it in a way that you either don't like or aren't used to. Which is why I'm not kidding when I say, "If you got 50 Destiny players in a room, and asked them what the game should be like, you'd get 75 different answers". Respectfully, this is a new kind of game....and NONE OF US are getting precisely the game that we want. There are no perfect games...especially a game like this where the rulebook is being written on the fly. Because no one else has done something like this before. 2. Respectfully....you have no skin in the game as a developer here (Amateur or otherwise). So you have what I refer to as "Pundit's Priviliege" when it arises in politics. By that I mean that you have the luxury of saying what others should do, but none of the responsibiliites they face. In short, you get to say what the game should be in the ABSTRACT, while not having to face any of the BUSINESS pressure to make money in a RUTHLESSLY competitive business. Game developement is a business...and it is a risky one where profit margins are slim. So---from the outside looking in----it is easy to criticize how a game goes about making its money. BUT THE FACT IS THAT PEOPLE GIVE YOU MONEY TO MAKE GAMES BECAUSE THEY EXPECT TO MAKE MONEY FROM IT. WHEN YOU STOP MAKING MONEY, THEY STOP GIVING IT TO YOU. So the money goes where it will get a better return on investment....and the games go away. A real-world fact that many gamers struggle to face...and accept. 3. You are offering your opinion as fact, and your personal tastes as if they define the industry. Again---respecfully, they do not. What you are failing to account for is player psychology. The psychology of shooter gamers, MMO gamers, and loot-based RPG gamers are VERY different....and whenever Bungie gets too far into one camp they ALIENATE the other parts of the player base. The result is the survival of the game was threatened. With vanilla D2, Bungie veered too far into the FPS camp with the design of the game....and SEVERELY angered the MMO and looter-shooter parts of the player base. Because they destroyed the part of the game that attracted these players. Last year, under the previous game director (whom I won't name because I think there is an AI alogorithm that harrasses post that name him directly becasue some people can't express themselves without resorting to abuse) one can argue that the game veered too far into the MMO camp for the shooter and looter-shooter parts of the player base....and people pushed back. Like I said in my first post, the game isn't the way it is by accident. Bungie isn't lazy, stupid or uncreative. The game has taken this form because---after 7 years of trial, error, a coherent vision, and constant player feedback----THIS is the game that the collective playerbase wants. Which means its going to be a game that certain individual players aren't going to like....or are going to have philosophical or personal preference objections to. Doesn't mean that Bungie's wrong. Just means you want something different. Which is why we have choices in the marketplace....and why Bungie's competitors are trying so desperately to get in on the action. 4. About pvp? I think it boils down to this. a. The People who were the creative spark behind this games PVP didn't want to make the kind of game that Destiny is. They basically wanted to make something similar to what Halo Infiinite is likely to be. So they did not...and would have never supported the kind of RPG elements you want. In fact they were scrambling like mad behind the scenes to BLOCK those things, becasue they wanted an e-sport...not an RPG. b. To make this game what it is---like I said earlier----they had to pressure those individuals to leave the company. So they took that creative spark with them. Those people needed to be replaced...and replaced with people who were willing to make PvP compatible with the vision of the game as an MMO...and not exclusively a FPS. c. You have a PVP fanbase that is shooter oriented, and comes to the game with a shooter mentality. So they are going to have LIMITED patience for adding lots of progression and RPG elements to the pvp side of the game. d. At the end of the day, I believe that Bungie is lost...and too caught up in past glory (cough....Halo...cough) where PVP is concerned. One of the biggest complaints I've had with this game as a Day One Destiny 1 player is that the biggest impediment to this game reaching its potential has been its inability to escape the Shadow of Halo. The PVE side of the game has to drag around this ANCHOR of a PvP game mode that is trying to be augmented mobility version of Halo (which it looks like Halo is set to do a better job of...big surprise) that is utterly incompatible with the PVE side of the game...and the core identity of the game. But instead of leaning INTO what that PvP experience does well, and letting it be its own thing, Bungie keeps trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. While continuing to hold out the hope that it will----eventually---shave off the corners and get it to fit. That they'll deliver on an experience that they've never managed to in 7 years of trying..... ....to a community that still clings Hope Eternal that they will. The irony being that Halo itself might be the final straw that forces a resolution to this untenable situation.

1. I would argue they don't. They're behind the market in nearly every feature they've implemented that relates to either genre, which is unfortunate. They likely can't be "cutting edge", but it would help if they could be "current". Respectfully, I understand that it's a new type of game. But, as you've been using "respectfully" to me quite a lot, I would like to do the same to you here. Respectfully, I wish you would quit hiding behind the argument of "it's a new game". Yeah, it's a new game. So what? "It's a new type of game nobody has seen before!" Yeah, it is. So what? Do we really need to go through the entire history of the gaming industry and how every genre and hybrid of every single genre came to be? There's a "new game" at some point when a hybrid is made. It's just that most people who decide to make a "hybrid" game have uh... considered things a lot more carefully. Including who their "Installed Playerbase" are likely to be as a result. This is why they had to remove/extend the timers in X-Com 2. The devs didn't understand who their Installed Playerbase were and what they would be expecting from the genre they had slapped their game into. Any dev worth their salt realizes the challenges and issues before laying a single line of code. Bungie here decided "trial and error" was the best policy. A policy you seem willing to excuse because, "oh, it's a new game". Tell me, if a New Employee were still having issues delivering a product after 7 years and working for you, would you still be saying, "Oh, it's a new product and they're a new employee, we just need to understand that's the best they can do and we should let them keep working for me"? I'd wager "no". 2. Respectfully... neither do you. I'm just a person who likes feeling useful and helpful. My "skin in the game" is just in trying to get something that is obviously broken... to be fixed. Whether Bungie will listen to me or not... probably not. But, the problem arises when an amateur game dev with no skin in the game and nothing published (or likely every will be published) can point out the basic stuff you learn on Day 1 of Game Dev schooling isn't being done in a game... Well, it's scary. To that end... profit in the game industry is actually pretty hefty. Well, unless you're an indie dev. But, Bungie isn't an Indie Dev and hasn't been for quite some time. We're not even going to get into how many silly business decisions they've made since creating Destiny 1 either (stuff not even related to the game development, no less!). The largest spending point for any game company, currently, is in advertising. Namely, it tends to account for nearly 52% of any AAA game price tag. Which means, if the people running the industry spent less money on marketing (which typically produces negligible results to begin with... so net loss) and more money creating, refining, and testing their games... you'd have overall more profitable games. I've often wondered, off-hand, how much money it would take me to develop a game like Destiny. I mean, not counting paying for the art assets. How much would the programming of the game itself cost in terms of time and employees? Probably not that much. A "reputation meter" can be programmed in less than an hour by one person. A quest system in less then 3. It is very likely that most of the budget for Destiny has simply gone to the executives and higher ups... as well as anyone producing art assets. The rest likely spent on marketing, if they've done any (or goody bags for press, as the industry is want to do). Game development is a business. A business that Bungie doesn't seem to know the first thing about or they could still be selling Destiny 2 and their playerbase wouldn't have dwindled... and they wouldn't have had backlash at Eververse. Business isn't hard except for people who don't understand how you make profit. Or rather, people who don't care to CONTINUE to make profit. Then it's hard. 3. This isn't opinion. It is fact. How many video games have you played? Mine is probably in the range of 200,000 or more. It isn't difficult to spot trends, read bad reviews to notice frequent issues, or even why specific things work according to the playerbase. Part of game design is to do these things. Analyze these things. Typically from a Player Psychology point of view. Granted, this doesn't make me special. Anyone can do it if they care enough. The only advantage I might have over other people in the games industry is that I currently do what Bungie used to. That is... examine why or why not something is fun. Play, replay, constantly analyze to figure out which parts are fun, which are not, and excise the parts that aren't fun. I miss Bungie doing this. Bungie doing this is exactly why I started doing it. That being said, it doesn't really matter if what players are expecting out of an experience is different. Players in a shooter expect different things than players in an RPG. Yes, sure. But, you avoid that by not trying to market the game as a Hybrid and instead trying to make it it's own thing with it's own spin. Or, rather, you combine the commonality between the expectations to create something new. A player going in with the expectation of shooters is looking to have fun gunplay. They're looking for interesting gunfights, interesting enemies to fight, fun weapons to use, and skilled play. A player going in with the expectation of RPG's is looking to have a progression system of some kind (not all RPG's use stats and levels). A tangible gain in power. They're also looking to meet interesting characters, have an interesting story to follow, maybe a few choices to make, and feel powerful by the end. A player going in with the expectation of MMO's is looking for social systems. Activities to do with other players, communication features to constantly chat with people, easy ability to form teams, friendships, and even memories. These players are also looking to overcome challenges with other players. There is lots of overlap in these three genres for what players are typically looking for. None of that has been taken into account in Destiny 1 or Destiny 2. The problem Destiny has is that it's trying too hard to be too many things and doing none of those things well. Is it an RPG? Well, no. There's no level up system, the progression is locked behind loot, the stats are near meaningless other than Power Level. Is it a Shooter? Well, no. The enemies are boring to fight with stupid mechanics, very little reaction to being shot, and don't create interesting encounters. Is it an MMO? Well, no. It lacks a lot of basic functionality to link up with other players, communicate frequently with other players, and form bonds or at least alliances. Is it a looter? Well, no. It lacks a lot of the basic functionality of most looters where prefixes/suffixes are a thing, loot scales up as you progress in the game, and you can easily settle on a specific type of build within 50 minutes of gameplay. What Desitny mostly is... is a Mobile Game. That is... buy cash shop items, do daily stuff to give you addiction, and turn it off once you've done that stuff. For me, that's a problem. I'm not looking for a Mobile Game. Especially when Bungie doesn't even do Mobile Gaming very well here in Destiny. The problem you are currently having here is your inability to accept that parts of the game you love or have accepted... might actually be problems. I get it. You love Destiny 2. You love it to the point that you're defending the game rather than trying to figure out ways it can be changed to cater to a wider audience. You're interested in defending it "as is" rather than "how can it be improved to solve these issues?". That's the problem. The only issues you care about are ones that affect you directly. PvP is what you care about. You don't care about issues that affect other players. You don't care to understand any opinion other than your own. To you, my opinions are "my problem" rather than "a Destiny problem". That's how you get bad game design. To you, it can't be that my opinions have merit or are valid. To you, it can only be that, "This just isn't the game for you" or even "you came into this game expecting something you didn't get, and that's not how it works". These aren't valid arguments. These are excuses. You bought an Apple and expected it to be tasty and juicy? Well, it's your fault it isn't tasty and juicy and somehow has the flavor of carrots! It's a silly argument on a dozen levels. I would love to have an actual proper discussion with you about Destiny, but you don't seem interested. Your interest seems to only be in offering excuses for Destiny and dismissing me out of hand because I don't agree. You haven't even really addressed any of my individual complaints. The best you had was "Yeah, PvP is broken and won't be fixed because of X. Here's Excuses Y and Z for why they won't be". Instead of hearing the excuses you offer up for the way Destiny is... I would've rather you tried to argue the merits of my complaint or figure out ways those complaints could be mitigated. And trust me, no sane business goes, "It's the customer who is the problem, not our product". Likewise, no sensible person in a debate tries to argue any form of that.

1. They aren't behind the market. [b]THEY ARE THE MARKET.[/b] Every other game that has tried to enter into this market with Destiny has been a SPECTACULAR failure. Anthem? Dead Game Walking. The Division? A success...but one whose future is still in Limbo. Borderlands 3? Limping along. The Avengers? Dying a slow, painful death. Unlikely to survive beyond the end of the year given how poor its player engagement is right now. Outriders? All sorts of launch problems and unwilling to committ to the genre. Trying to stand at the edge of the pool and just dip their toe in. Which is a testament to how DIFFICULT....expensive...and RESOURCE INTENSIVE what Bungie is trying to do really is. So the issue isn't Destiny. The issue is---as I keep trying to get you to understand---is you keep trying to make apples-to-lawn furniture comparisons that refuse to accept that this game is a HYBRID game. So that the parts you don't like aren't "bad design"...but are nods to the REALITY of the other kinds of games this game borrows from, and the legitimate expectations of those players. 2. You're right I don't. Which is why I'm cutting Bungie some slack on matters of monetization and profit margins. Its very easy to say what someone else should be doing when you are under no obligation to produce results, or having to live with the consequences of doing what you are suggesting. They do. Neither one of us do. 3. No it isn't a fact. Its an opinion and a personal prefrence....and don't get up on your hinds legs and play "smartest guy in the room" with me. I've been gaming for 40 years. Which means I played the FIRST video games. Both in paid arcades...and on consoles and PCs. I was around for the beginning of all the gaming genres that Destiny borrows from....and have an INTIMATE knowledge of both the psychology that drives play, and what player expectations are. Which is why I'm confronting you. You are agitating for a course that is a personal gaming preference...and one will sit POORLY with the game's looter-shooter and FPS player bases. Who have little patience and tolerance for the layers of RPG complexity you want built into this game. You may enjoy it. They wont. You're new. I've been playing this game for 7 years, and have sunk proabaly about 7000 hours of my life into playing it. I've been here to see how this player base has responded to changes to the game....and I've gotten VERY good at predicting how it will respond...and what the outcome will be of changes that Bungie makes. ...and you are PUSHING for a character change to this game that will not be recieved well by the majority of the player base....and one that will end badly for the franchise. That game director that I mentioned earlier was a former hardcore MMO player, yet he understood that this game was not World of Warcraft....and that this player base would not tolerate it being turned into Wow-with-guns. That this is a game that has to walk a fine line between RPG and action-game....and the more layers of RPG you ladle onto...the more you smother the crispness and immediacy of the action game. (Issues that nip at the heels of games like The Division and Outriders...and is suffocating The Avengers). But you have to have enough layers of RPG in the game, so that the shooting game doesn't grow stale and repetitive over time. You're new....and like so many critics of this game....you are assuming that Bungie doesn't know what they're doing....and that they stumbled into this by accident. They didn't. There are things that they could do BETTER, for sure. But at this point in the franchise they know what they're doing with the PVE side of the game....and no one in the industry right now can TOUCH them in this "MMO-lite/Action-MMO" genre.

They are the market? I mean... going Free To Play Mobile is the market? Now I'm confused about what you're even arguing. If you're a hybrid of many different types of games, you are competing WITH ALL OF THOSE GAMES. That's how the market works. That's how business works. You don't slice out a piece of the market and pretend you aren't competing with other parts of the market just because you want to brand yourself as "hybrid". That isn't how reality works. If you are marketing yourself as an RPG, you are competing with every other RPG on the Market. If you are marketing yourself as an MMO, you are competing with every other MMO on the market. If you are marketing yourself as a Shooter, you are competing with every other shooter on the market. To that extent, it is "behind the times" in every single market it is trying to seize a part of. The glamour system isn't even on par with Runescape... a game that probably still runs in freakin' Java. The RPG elements aren't even as good as Final Fantasy 1 on the NES. The MMO elements aren't even as good as the best Korean MMOs on the market (though the grind is fairly on point to those :D ). The shooter elements aren't even better than Goldeneye from the N64. You don't get just to say, "They are the market!" because others haven't tried it yet. I also hesitate to even lump those other games in with what Destiny is, because they don't really fit. Sort of like comparing Apples to Oranges. Especially when most of those games advertised themselves as RPGMMO's and were pretty lite on both aspects while being pretty heavy on the action elements... and not doing action elements very well at all. You could probably argue, "they're looters!", but they weren't really marketed that way and it was never the selling point of any of those games. IT certainly doesn't help that most of the games you've listed here primarily died due to being bug-riddled messes with excessive grind. Probably also doesn't help that most of those games were basically designed to get you into the cash shop and buying Loot Boxes... so gameplay was a secondary concern. Lots of those games tend to die pretty slow and painful deaths. And yes, I get that it's a Hybrid game. What you keep failing to understand is: IT. DOES. NOT. NEED. TO. BE. A. HYBRID. GAME. AT. ALL. There is literally no good reason it has to be a Hybrid game at all. None. All the Lore and story and gameplay elements would've worked fine if they'd committed to just making it a shooter. The PvP and Leveling aspects would've worked fine if they'd committed to just making it a RPG. Bungie DECIDED to make it a Hybrid. For no reason. None at all. They did it without understanding the playerbase behind anything they were hybridizing or even having the basic game dev knowledge to understand how and why the systems employed in these genres EVEN WORK TO START WITH. Here's where our opinions differ: If Bungie is going to continue to insist that this game BE a Hybrid... Then it needs to fix all the issues plaguing it in order to make it into a proper hybrid. That is... the RPG aspects need to be fleshed out properly. The MMO aspects need to bolstered. The Loot Drops need to be fixed and less random to make it a proper Looter (or at the very least, the random loot needs to be more interesting AND WORTH INSPECTING). The shooter aspects need to be fun with Enemies serving specific goals and challenges and AI and Terrain playing a key factor in every engagement. The issue isn't that -I- refuse to accept it's a Hybrid game. The issue is that -you- and -Bungie- refuse to accept it's a hybrid game... There is an expectation for hybrid games. One you or Bungie don't seem to share or even realize should exist. I understand it's a hybrid game better than you do at this point. Which is why I have expectations for what it is and why it's not doing those things very well. The only takeaway you have from it being "a hybrid game" is that you get to use that as an excuse for failure. If Destiny weren't competing with everything else on the Market and only had to compete with "RPG Looter Shooters", then it would still be losing. Warframe blows it out of the water and has for a long time... and it's always been free. It's also never had to resort to predatory gambling addictions to make money (hey kiddos, not legal to gamble? THAT'S OKAY! Buy Eververse Lootboxes today! It's like gambling, except legal because there's no law against it yet!). Back to my original point now: Destiny is unfocused. That is it's biggest problem. It has no idea what is. It has no idea what it wants to be. It has no idea what direction it should take and when it settles on one, it has no idea how to get there. 2. I'm not beholden to a "Board of Directors", sure. But... most of my expertise in the workforce is in Management. Some of that is also in Cost Cutting (well, not officially, there's not really a term for what I do in terms of minimizing expenses and streamlining workflow). Put simply... most of my life is about "producing results" and I'm not worth much if I don't. My talent is about spotting waste and reducing it. Spotting good employees and incentivizing them to work well... educating them how to do their job better, and making them strive to be the best they can be. That's effectively what my job is. I wear a lot of hats, take on a lot of responsibilities, and learn the jobs of anyone I need to in order to "produce the desired results" of whatever boss I'm working for. I'm a problem solver. I've heard every excuse under the sun from all types of people for why "the status quo should remain". That's not how I operate. If we can do better than status quo, then we should. 3. So... you've been gaming... 4 years more than me? Or is it 3 and some change? I've been gaming since I was 5 and been creating my own games since 6. What does that mean? It means I've been analyzing every single game I've ever played. It means, I've had to figure out how to get people to have fun with the games I created and how to keep them having fun. To that end... What you're advocating for is stagnation of Destiny. You don't want new players in the game. You want to keep the players the game has. You're so preoccupied with keeping the current (very small) playerbase happy that you don't even want to consider installing a new one. Sure, we can make all the old players happy. They've never played better games than Destiny, so they have nothing to compare their current experiences to. If they ever did play better games, they won't come back. Or, if Destiny did something they didn't like, they'd never come back. They have "sunk cost Fallacy" issues. Just as you do. You've got too much skin in the game. You've invested too many hours. If the game changes and people don't like it, you've wasted all those hours playing a game that you now have to give up. A game that dies and you can't ever play again. Sunk Cost. Wasted time. Unfortunately, that's why Destiny is dying slowly. Too many people like you in it. Change nothing! It alienates existing playerbase! Don't fix anything to attract new players! Don't focus on new player retention! Please only the very small minority of players who are still playing! Just make sure you don't do anything to make that very small amount of people angry so that they leave! Yeah, that's how a lot of businesses fail. Want to know what's amusing? You've never even once talked about the changes I wanted to make. Want to know why? I didn't suggest any changes. I advocated for no course of action. I made a couple suggestions that would likely improve new player engagement and nothing else. They don't even really change the game all that much. In fact, most of them are simply minor adjustments. Make loot more useful. Make the progression system more focused. Reduce RNG in some of these places. Emphasize player accomplishment and individuality. These things are advocating to destroy Destiny? REALLY? Now you're just being ridiculous. How toxic is the community that minor changes that wouldn't even affect gameplay would destroy the game and cause it to fail and cause people to leave?

You don’t understand because you keep making the mistake so many people make when dealing with any hybrid art form. You start comparing it with the pure forms of whatever the hybrid is borrowing from, instead of seeing it as something NEW. Until you can get past that bias, you will continue to make unfair and unreasonable demands….. …and we’re talking past each other from different reality-systems. Iow, jazz-rock isnt watered-down jazz or lame rock. It is its own form of music that needs to be judged by what it is trying to accomplish. Same with what Destiny is doing.

Please reread my latest post. You don't get to decide a hybrid of two things can't be compared to the pure forms. That's not how reality works. That's not how ANY reality works. After all, it still has to compete with those pure forms. It literally does not matter if it's trying to be something new. It literally does not matter if it's TRYING to be something new. It is still competing with the pure forms of what it is on the market. There is zero way around that. Much as you would love for there to be. It's an immutable truth. If your game is part RPG, it will be compared against other RPG's. Especially if it doesn't do the RPG portion very well. If your game is part Shooter, it will be compared against other shooters, especially if it doesn't do the shooter very well. After all, who would buy a Hybrid that does 6 things really badly when they can buy the pure form of the thing they want out of the hybrid from a company that does it really well? Especially when the community here doesn't even want the Shooter and RPG aspects to be combined to begin with? Your words, by the by. Bungie goes too far in on the RPG side and the Shooter players get upset. Right now, Destiny is competing with other games that share it's hybrid traits. If they go too far in with RPG elements and the shooter fans get upset... aren't they just going to go play other shooters instead? Also... games aren't art. Much as a lot of navel gazers love to say games are art... they aren't (I think they do this largely to try to elevate their past time beyond what it is... they're usually ego-trippers justifying their time wasted on something). They can have art in them... But, they aren't art. Art is open to interpretation and each individual would get something different out of it depending on their personal experiences in life. Video games craft specific experiences and don't offer up the ability to have "different interpretations". The writing in a game can be art. The actual graphics can be art. But, the game itself cannot be art. Video games are no more art than Poker. Dominoes. Football. Also, what is Destiny trying to accomplish? Doesn't seem to be trying to accomplish anything near as I can tell. Well, except monetizing gambling. The devs don't even seem to know the direction Destiny should go in and what they should be doing with it. The rate at which they destroy their own Lore from Destiny 1 is a good indicator of that issue. The "new directions" they keep talking about their game taking are another indication of that. I don't think anyone in charge of Destiny 2 even knows what Destiny is supposed to be. Heck, it's especially telling that the original vision for Destiny was never even realized. I mean Joseph envisioned a 10-12 hour linear game, with a linear story, that had a loot system in place and static rewards (you can tell most of this from the videos we got before Destiny 1 launched and was being talked about... the stuff with Joseph is behind the scenes drama and largely why he quit... when corporate decided the game should be open world and then stripped the story out of it). Nobody other than the original staff who left the game ever knew what Destiny was meant to be... they're still scrambling to figure out what it should be. Best I can tell... Destiny essentially exists as a game to try to get people into Eververse because the business model isn't working at generating them money in any other way.

Actually I do get to decide. Because if you wish to be fair, you understand that what you are doing is an unfair and unreasonable comparison. Because the moment you combine different genres of [i]anything[/i] you have to [i]edit[/i] the creation. Which means you have to leave out some aspects of mmo design, to make room for the aspects of looter shooter design you wish to add. If you just try to add every aspect of MMOs to every aspect of looter shooter to a single game? You get an unworkable mess. IOW, know what you get when you combine every color together? An ugly, muddy shade of [i]brown.[/i] More isn’t always better. Sometimes it’s just more…and at times it actually makes things worse. Because you just wind up with chaos.

No, you don't get to decide. Why don't you? Because you are shoving your fingers in your ears and yelling, "I reject reality and substitute it with my own!". It's the highest form of delusion. It isn't an unfair and unreasonable comparison. It's quite simple to prove this point, actually. I do it all the time with my lazier employees. Ones that use this same excuse. "Why did you take on the work if you were just going to do it only halfway?" Namely, if you weren't going to put forth your best work, or create the best it could by, why did you even bother? If you were just going to show up to work and put forth half the effort that was expected of you... why are you here? Find a different job where you can do less work. There is no sense in creating an MMO/RPG/Shooter Hybrid if you are not going to take the best parts of these things and combine them in a sensible way to create a good product. If you are unwilling to put forth the work that such a feat requires, then there is zero need to create the hybrid. Why is it MMO when all the MMO Features that would be necessary to please the MMO crowd are missing? Why wasn't the MMO aspect simply stripped out instead? Why is it an RPG when the stats of equipment and level up system serve no purpose and don't affect gameplay all that much? If there was no intent to please the RPG crowd, why were RPG elements ever implemented? The list goes on and on. Your only argument thus far for not doing these things well (that it SHOULD be doing well) is that "it will be crap if they did those things well". But... that's not a very good argument, is it? Oh, if you have features that work as intended, with systems in place that nearly guarantee player enjoyment and interact in a synergistic way with the rest of the game... it means the game is bad? It turns "an ugly, muddy shade of brown"? At this point you are literally arguing that Destiny should never be improved and it's systems that are only half implemented with no understanding of why they even exist in their pure forms should be left in their broken state because "it's fine this way". Hey, the house is burning down around your ears. How long are you going to keep saying, "It's fine. This is fine."? I'm not even talking about "add more". I'm talking about, "Let's fix things that are broken and make them synergize better, because it simply doesn't at the moment". The New Player experience is atrocious. It turns players off from joining and staying in Destiny. The Veteran Player experience is atrocious. It's causing a slow bleed of existing players who get one thing that happens to the game and they never come back as a result of the change. Destiny is in Free Fall whether you like to admit it or not. It went Free To Play which is the death knell for pretty much every single game. Well, short of mobile Gacha games. I don't even care if new content is added. I care that current systems be fixed. Namely, fixed in the name of appealing to a wider audience and then making that new audience stick around because they're having fun. Not sticking around because they're freakin' addicts. Bungie didn't need addicts to buy and play Halo 2 until servers shut down (and even keeping the servers from shutting down by continuing to play long after they were scheduled to go down). Bungie didn't need addicts to buy and play Halo 3 for 5+ years and then go on to buy The Master Chief Collection. Bungie is capable of creating amazing games that people come back and play BECAUSE THEY'RE AMAZING. Bungie is capable of creating such amazing stories that people go out and buy the merch and the books and the spin off comics in massive droves because they want to learn more about the universe. Or, at least... they were. Now, here we sit. Destiny 2 enduring a slow burn of almost no content... trying to get everyone into the cash shop... knowing that nobody is going to ever buy Destiny 2, so making it free to play to get people in... A small minority of video game players defending it vehemently in order to justify the thousands of hours spent with it, even if most of those hours were likely "not having fun" and were probably just from addiction. I am telling you that I want Destiny 2 to live. I want it to grow. I want it to be fun and amazing. You are telling me that it shouldn't grow. It should be let to be slowly bled dry. It should stay as it is, because change is scary. You are sort of starting to remind me of all the elderly people I've worked with at my jobs who do nothing except fear change because it means they would have to learn something new. Every single time I have to ease them into it and slowly trot out the reasons why it would be better than the current broken way they're doing things. It's annoying.

Yes I do. Though you are welcome to keep making unfair comparisons that refuse to acknowledge the reality of the situation. They will just be ignored by Bungie. And I’ve been talking about your proposed changes the entire time. You just don’t want to hear that they aren’t wrong for this game and it’s player base. And vehemently want to argue with someone who has been here from the beginning and has seen how this community has responded to every change in the game’s history.

Thank you for trying to prove that other guy wrong even if he won’t accept it

He’s not wrong, per se. They are good ideas for [b]a game.[/b]. Probably for a new, pure MMO. But he stubbornly refuses to hear that these ideas will not work for THIS game. I can explain, but I can’t make him listen. 🤷🏾‍♂️

Even the most vehemently die-hard players are ignored by Bungie. Doesn't make me any different to be ignored by them. And no, you don't. You've yet to put forth a single argument for why you get to ignore reality other than you don't want to face it and you believe change is bad and should never be implemented. But, I mean, I guess you are 40 or whatever. Change is hard for you old people. Especially when you'd have to relearn everything. Especially when you might have to do some work again. Maybe pick up some new skills. Maybe even be held to some standards again. Sorry, but I believe in progress. I believe in fixing the broken things. I believe in making things better than I found them. I don't believe in getting lazy just because it conveniences me the most. I don't believe in doing a job halfway. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. There is no greater pursuit than seeking to achieve perfection even if you never will. There is no sense doing a job if you aren't willing to put forth 100% of your time and effort in order to make it the absolute best it can be. There are no unfair comparisons here. Only a person who deals in reality and wishes to make a game they've barely even touched into something amazing... and a person who wants to deny reality and wishes to let the game die on the vine out of selfishness.

I’ve addressed your changes. You just don’t want to hear what I have to say. Because you want to be right rather than understand how this game works and why it is the way that is. As you propose changes that in many ways have already been tried and rejected by the community. I keep trying to—politely—tell you this fact, but you refuse to hear this.

No, you didn't address any of them. Here's what you did do though: You told me that I shouldn't hold the game to the same standard as I would other games. You told me that game is meant to be played a certain way and I should engage with it in that way. You latched on to a minor point I made about multiplayer and talked about that for a couple posts until you gave up trying to argue that and went back to "you aren't playing Destiny right". Now, here we are... You've still addressed none of the points and are continuing to insist, "You're holding the game to too high of a standard" and "you're not playing Destiny right". I'll wait until you can copy and paste your addresses to my changes back in here. Pro tip: I didn't actually suggest any specific change. I only outlined existing problems and made a single suggestion for monetizing shaders. I mean, I know you've never really read any of my posts and have been replying based on what you think I might've said... But... could you make it LESS OBVIOUS that you aren't courteous enough to listen to others?

Like I said. I’ve been addressing them this whole time. That this is simply not a game where you can just start dumping all your favorite RPG elements from MMOs into and expect it to work. I’ve even explained why some of the most ardent MMO fans who work at Bungie understand and accept this. I’ve explained why you can’t do that: this game has to appeal to looter-shooter and shooter gamers that are part of it core playerbase, and doing that will alienate them. I’ve explained that this game is the way it is, because in pve it is just about the right balance between action game and RPG for what the vast majority of the player base. I can say this as someone who has seven years of experience in this game and has lived through every change this game has had and seen how the player base responds. As a [i]new[/i] player, your ideas may be good for a new MMO, they are ideas that will not be accepted by large portions of the players of [i]this[/i] game. I’ve explained in detail why. But you simply don’t want to hear or accept why. Which is why I’m about to walk away and declare this a waste of my time because the answers aren’t going to change simply because you don’t like them.

Favorite RPG Elements? I don't believe I ever listed those anywhere. I've listed my favorite iterations of currently existing systems in Bungie and how I'd like to see them improved... But nothing else. I don't even believe I've mentioned all that much about MMO's other than, "hey, can we get some ways for players to show off their individuality and accomplishments to other players?" I understood all of your posts. The problem is that you haven't read any of mine. In fact, most of your replies are "off topic" considering what I've posted. You've come into this discussion with the silly mindset of "This person should just not play this game, because this game isn't what they expected". News Flash. I went into Destiny 2 not expecting anything. I expected it to be grindy. That's it. That's what Destiny 1 was. Oh, I expected to play the Campaign the game shipped with too... but that's stripped out. I didn't even complain about that. Not that I think I should complain about that. Those were my two expectations going into the game. I addressed the game based on what it was doing and my time with it. I didn't go into Destiny 2 expecting an MMO. I didn't go into Destiny 2 expecting a Looter. I didn't go into Destiny 2 expecting an RPG. I went into Destiny 2 expecting to just mindlessly grind objectives. For hours on end. That's it. I explained my experience with Destiny 2 as a new player with zero expectations. Including all the points where I went, "there are other games that do this better... why doesn't this game do them?". You have still not provided me any answer as to why it doesn't do the things it does... better than it does them. The game needs to appeal to looter shooters? Okay, so why isn't it doing that? Why isn't it doing what Warframe does in appealing to Looter Shooters? Or even Borderlands 2? Why isn't it doing that? It needs to appeal to players who are shooters? Okay, so why isn't it doing that? Why isn't it borrowing from more successful shooter games like Halo... Call of Duty... Battlefield? All you have really told me is this: "I don't like change, so let's not change anything. I fear we would lose old players so much that I don't even want to attempt to get new players." You've not even addressed any of the things I mentioned. "I want the game to have it clearly outlined what the progression path is. I also don't want that progression path time gated. I would also like to be able to get most of the great loot through static drops of some kind so that I know how to get it, other players know how I got it, and I can show off my accomplishments. I would like to be able to tell if my loot is worth equipping as well. Oh, and you could probably make some money if you sold some sort of item that let players create custom shaders for their armor and put it in the cash shop". That is the list of my issues with the game. Your response to that was, "You aren't playing Destiny right" and "You are holding the game to too high of expectations because it's really a very crappy hybrid game and it should be held to crappy hybrid game standards instead". I mean... what a vote of confidence. Tell a player who wants to see refinement of existing systems to pound sand, he isn't playing the game right (nevermind that the game doesn't even tell you how it SHOULD be played... you need to go to YouTube for that! FANTASTIC DESIGN! Even then, all the existing systems tell you that you shouldn't be playing it that way!), and that he should lower his expectations of the game so that maybe he enjoys it. What kind of endorsement of Destiny is that? "Lower your expectations for what you think it should be, and it's fun". Are you for real?

Yes. I’m for real. And I’m really tired of trying to get a [i]new player[/i] to understand how this game and community works, and why he can’t come in and change the game as he sees fit and expect the rest of us to accept it. Or Bungie to ignore the hard lessons of past experience, and go along with. That he can’t change the game with no regard for the player base as a whole and their needs and legitimate expectations. It’s been done before…and it’s always failed spectacularly. Believe what you want. Walls of text ranting about why things should be different won’t make them different. Things are as they are… and they are the way they are for a good reason. I’m out.

I understand how the game works. I understand how the community works. Your problem is that you don't understand that I'm telling you, "It's dysfunctional that these things work this way". I mean, would the "Working As Intended" Meme for this game even exist if the game and community weren't so dysfunctional most of the time? The community acknowledges the problems with Destiny. Complains about them frequently... then continues to play the game into the ground. What sort of sense does that make? The game doesn't have to be that way! The game doesn't have to be a bunch of people who refused to go play better games continuing to play a game they aren't having fun with. It can have a new playerbase. It can legitimately fix its issues. And the things I'm suggesting exist have never been in Destiny, so I don't even know why you have the complaints you do. Never been tried. Not once. Clear progression path? Doesn't seem to have ever existed. At least, not beyond, "hope you get good loot from the random rolls" and "best loot is in the Raids". There's never been a clear progression path in the game. Especially not for most of the best equipment. MOst of the Exotics aren't even dished out through quests or Raids or difficult content... Most are dished out through Xur and Random Drops. It was like that in Destiny 1, too. Clear Progression Path has never been tried. They've always had a system for for Time Gating content as well. They've never once done away with it. Been the restrictions on a lot of this stuff since Destiny 1. Never been tried. They've never had a system for showing off your accomplishments to other players. Through loot or otherwise. The best they've got currently is your Playercard which displays a point value and maybe how many kills you've got... and some titles you get that reset every Season. I mean, I guess that's "trying", but it's really not trying very hard. It's very, "I threw this together in about an hour" effort. Don't think I've ever even seen backlash against these things either... so no clue what you're on about. There was backlash against selling shaders in the Cash Shop... sure... but they've never sold Customizable shaders as far as I can tell. That is... the ability to design your own shader for your equipment. Never once been tried. It's really not all that implemented for "grind with purpose" either unless we're talking just the Raids. You know, the content that everyone seems to love running and chasing the loot for? What if... I mean... just spitballing here... What if every single Strike had a table of loot it could roll and maybe an exotic behind each.... and you could chase that? What if that loot was themed for the Strike too?! What if... What if there were loot tables for everything? What if every chest in a zone had a loot table that made players want to chase that loot? What if the Lost Sectors had their own loot pools to make you chase that loot? What if each Nightfall had their own individualized loot? Or, each difficulty of every activity had their own individualized loot tables to roll off of? What if the only "random drops" in the game were from killing enemies? Would that be fun? Amazing? Would it give players a goal? Something to chase? Certainly hasn't been tried yet. "There was backlash against your proposals". Against proposals that have never been tried? Systems that were never implemented? Backlash against things that never existed? Really? I mean, I doubt that. Also... your problem with talking to me this: I came in and said, "It would be nice if my juicy apple didn't taste like pesticides and wasn't bruised before I ate it" and your reply to me was, "Here's the history of Apple Farming across the world and why I think you aren't eating apples right." It's such a weird disconnect. I'm not sure where it's coming.