So I've been doing a lot of thinking. Like many people I was not pleased by this week's announcement regarding changes to exotics, and like many others, I was not mollified by the notion that the weapons we'd be trading in for would have 302 attack. Some people pointed out that in MMOs, when an expansion is released with a new level cap, or even when new gear is introduced, it makes old gear obsolete. Now, I'm also an avid swtor player, and they just released a new expansion this past week with a new level cap, and sure enough, my old top tier gear can now be crafted, and is only really good for leveling to the new cap and maybe the story/normal version of the new raids. Yet I wasn't particularly bothered by this. So what was the difference? Part of it was PR. Bioware has had 3 years of mistakes to learn from when it comes to dealing with a community. They spent the past months getting everyone excited and doing weekly 90 minute streams to explain changes which might concern players. Another part was simply time. The old level cap in star wars has been in place for 18 months. We were ready for new stuff. But neither of those really rang true. Then I realized the difference. It was in how the two games approach gear. In swtor, all your gear is much like legendary gear now. It's all stats, and the new expansion will simply have gear with higher stats. That's why new tower gear that puts you as high level as raid gear doesn't bug me. But weapons are a whole other ball game. In swtor all your damage comes from class specific abilities, and it's those classes that really differentiate your playstyle and capabilities. Each are different and gear just makes those abilities more powerful. The classes in Destiny are very similar in comparison. But what separates people are the weapons. You don't notice this much with green and blue weapons, but with legendary and ESPECIALLY exotics this becomes easy to see. The elemental damage on raid primary weapons, fatebringer's firefly perk, VoC's full auto, Gjallarhorn's wolf pack rounds, Ice Breaker's infinite ammo. These are game changers. That's why putting down my VoC is going to hurt more than my raid helmet, and that's why having to regrind gjallarhorn just strikes a nerve. Because it's not like I'm just trading in gear for more powerful gear. It's like my characters worked hard for certain capabilities and now I have to do it all again, assuming I can get the trade in. In swtor, while they use these chances for major balancing changes, and might reshuffle certain things, for the most part I'm as powerful on day one of the expansion as I am on the day before. If I have to go re-earn a key ability, well that's annoying, but I'm going to be playing all the new content and will naturally get those things back, plus the new stuff, without focusing exclusively on that. More importantly, every activity with the exception of ranked PvP which I could do the day before I can still do the day after, but all my time is gonna be spent doing the new stuff. Destiny isn't like that. In order to bring my weapons to the new cap, I'll have to wait for xur, invest heavily, then focus on releveling that exotic, most likely through the same old bounties. When I do this, attack level aside I'm starting from the beginning. It's not like my gear just became inferior to newer better gear. It's as if, if I wanted to reach the new level cap I'd have to completely reset my class to the beginning and level again, go back and do the same old before finally getting to move forward with the new stuff. And that's what feels like such disrespect. I've said before it would be one thing if we were simply earning more exp on already leveled weapons, but we're completely resetting everything about these weapons that makes them special, with the most likely avenue for making them good again the old bounties, and we can't even do the old stuff we used to till we hit the cap again. Now let me be clear. That's all my feelings on the matter. I can't speak to others, and I'm sure someone will tell me why my perceptions are wrong. But they are still the perceptions I have, so deeply engrained I had to really think about it to even really nail down what they were. But as best I can figure that's why this change, taken with everything else, bothers me so much while the swtor level cap raise doesn't make me bat an eye.