Let me preface this by saying. If you enjoy Destiny, keep playing, there's nothing wrong with that. If you're not having fun, and this game feels like a job. That's not what the devs want. (it's what the lazy skinner box designers want). Have a read, and buy a new game to play. (I suggest Final Fantasy XIV) I had made a reply in a thread that Destiny was a skinnerbox plagued by lazy design choices that aren't nice to the players. (see Spoiler) [spoiler]I'll explain this to you. People aren't having fun, but unfortunately they won't leave. It's because Destiny is a skinner-box. The designers have been lazy, and asked the developers to make systems that are abusive and inhumane to the players. In fact their little skinner-box has made people so destiny hungry that Bungie won't be able to create content fast enough to feed the community. Infact the community realised this, and has opted to settle for old content to just be updated. Bungie, and their designers are setting a precedent. A very scary one. I've only seen mobile games be this heavy handed with their monitization scheme. Seriously, this is a dangerous precedent. TTK backhanded everyone that had purchased the base game and all DLC if they didn't buy TTK. That was way out of line, it's on my biggest douche bag moves of 2015. Never had i played a console game in my 20 years of gaming that ever took features away for not purchasing an expansion. Unless you include shitty free-to-play mobile games, that are solely designed to exploit their players. THEN... when you do finally break down and buy TTK, you would expect a more rewarding experience. On the surface, it looks like they really delivered some things we wanted. While they were praised for the few things that were fixed, they are being crucified for really giving us more of the things that we hate. Really cranked up the grind to 11 by introducing infusion and the infusion loss, varying light on the same items, stating more XP/REP from activities but nerfed the hell out of the gains from activities. Not to mention.... the players have been systematically nerfed to artificially raise the difficulty of the game, which is also the reason that elemental primaries were removed, despite what Luke Smith says. It made you feel good to chew though an enemy shield with your fate bringer during arc burn. (3x damage) Now you don't have that primary, and it's only 2x damage. Look at meta critic. Critic reviews went up with the release of TTK, and user reviews went down. Just saying.[/spoiler] Someone had decided to challenge my thoughts, which there is nothing wrong with that. He cited Bungie's psych paper. I in-turn cited a paper written by the same guy before Bungie hired him. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php There are two types of reward things discussed. Scheduled rewards, and an inconsistent reward schedule. When players approached a reward that was scheduled (i.e one they expected to show up at a certain time, which in Destiny used to be the Tuesday reset) Their frequency/length of play increased until they received that reward, and then would slowly taper off until they knew the reward was coming around again. Nerfing the nightfall was to make the reward schedule more inconsistent. This was by design, they did it on purpose (see quote) [quote]"In general, variable ratio schedules produce the highest overall rates of activity of all the schedules that I'll discuss here. This doesn't necessarily mean they're the best, but if what you're looking for is a high and constant rate of play, you want a variable ratio contingency."[/quote] By removing a predictable reliable reward, they had hoped to increase our play time and activity. After this article this guy was hired as head of Bungie user research in 2002. I think in the past this guy helped the designer avoid Skinner Box design tactics, but now I believe that Bungie uses this guys knowledge to get people to play more. Why are players mad? [quote] As a general rule, extinction {this term refers to a reward schedule ceasing} involves a lot of frustration and anger on the part of the subject. We expect the universe to make sense, to be consistent, and when the contingencies change we get testy. Interestingly, this is not unique to humans. In one experiment, two pigeons were placed in a cage. One of them was tethered to the back of the cage while the other was free to run about as it wished. Every 30 seconds, a hopper would provide a small amount of food (a fixed interval schedule, as described earlier). The free pigeon could reach the food but the tethered one could not, and the free pigeon happily ate all the food every time. After an hour or so of this, the hopper stops providing food. The free pigeon continues to check the hopper every 30 seconds for a while, but when it's clear that the food isn't coming, it will go to the back of the cage and beat up the other pigeon. Now, the interesting thing is that the tethered pigeon has never eaten the food and the free pigeon has no reason to think the other is responsible for the food stopping. The frustration is irrational, but real nonetheless.[/quote] Bungie broke the reward system. Once they removed the reliable predictable rewards, people began to be frustrated. In the example above. Deej and Cozmo are the tethered pigeons that are getting the crap beat out of them by a community that has been treated like crap by some lazy designers. Who instead of making immersive content, would rather just build a skinner box and burn the candle at both ends. (just incase you wanted to see the conversation that created this thread read here https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/195486602/0/0/1 )