Yeah I think EVERYONE is collectively wondering this. It’s painfully obvious at this point.

Which is why I believe its a cultural problem at Bungie. Team leaders become identified and invested in certain ideas or approaches, and I'm betting it affects their career prospects. So people cling to their own bad ideas with a desperate intensity....yet are reluctant to give oxygen to other people's good ideas. (I think the reverse of this is part of BioWare's problems,and why so few of their team leaders seem to be capable of making ANY decisions. They're paralyzed by teh fear of failure....and the costs of it) This reared its head during the marketing and early release of Vanilla Destiny 2. Luke Smith was clearly trying to distance himself from many of the changes that were being made to the game from D1...despite being (nominally) the team leader (Later found out because he was vehmently opposed to them) OTOH, Weapons Design Lead (at the time) Jon Weisnewski was seemingly doing everything he could to makes sure everyone knew that these changes were his idea, and that he should get the credit for them. I didnt' have a context for why this was happening at the time, but both struck me as really odd...and kind of troubling. (Well run organizations dont' air their dirty laundry in public like that. Support in public. Fight/Disagree in private). In the case of Gambit and many of the game's dysfunctional reward structures, Bungie's unwillingness to abandon things that are clearly not working has the feel of someone stubbornly holding on to a design approach that doesn't work...beacuse its their idea, and they dont' want to admit failure. OTOH, the speed at which Bungie got rid of sunsetting has the all-too-familiar (to me) feel of new leadership (in terms of the day-to-day running of the game) throwing out the ideas of hte old leadership (who either left Bungie, or were promoted). So the deck is clear for THEIR ideas to "shine". Which is great when they do work and actually shine. When they don't, however....... (see point about Gambit). The issue is that what skilled leaders in an organization get paid to manage. Allow enough freedom and credit-taking to motivate your people....but squelch it when it starts to create fiefdoms or make the organization less effective. Never mind when it grows to such an size that breaks the walls of the building and spills out into public and into the view of your customers.

Reading your conversation, I had the same initial thought at a high-level. I think it is a Bungie culture thing. Certain leaders have tendencies that are hard to let up. I think Bungie wants the PvP element to be significant enough to draw the PvP crowd on one hand, but also they want the game to feel intense enough to feel like a battle on the other hand. Both of those elements can be achieved by dialing back a bit. However, it's just far easier to stick to your guns vs solution new ways of doing it. Ultimately, I liked the solutions you both proposed: 1) reduce the number of invasions and 2) reduce the significant of the loss of motes on an invasion kill. I recommend maybe half of your motes vs just up to 5. People carrying 15 motes should get hit a bit harder. Not to mention, as an invader, the dialog from the drifter when you kill enemy guardians with lots of motes is quite entertaining. It would be a shame to lose that thrill.

I hope the new guy brings in new ideas that work. This company has a recent track record of trying to appeal to the customer but all they’re really doing is satiating their own desire to have D2 Their Way.

There has to be an element of that so that you can clearly brand your product. Part of the reason why Call of Duty is so successful, is because you KNOW what you're going to get when you spend your money. Much of this game's early problems was that Bungie couldn't decide among themselves or with their publisher on exactly what kind of game Destiny was going to be. So you never really knew what to expect from one content release to the next (cough.....vanilla D2....cough). Bungie is mainly just clearly branding this game for the first time....and that is inevitably going to anger people who want the game to be something else. The issue here is that its crazy-making how Bungie will stubbornly dig their heels in about stuff that doesn't matter. While they bail on sunsetting...which is the only known solution to big issues like power creep. So you get this situation where Bungie appears to just spin their wheels...and keeps doing the same things (that dont' work) over and over again.....but expects a different outcome each time.

Which really sucks because the players have to just roll with it. We move [i]some[/i]things along ourselves by making big waves in the forums but they have to be tsunamis to get Bungie’s attention. I get that they can’t listen to most of us and I’m not expecting them to. But they just stopped chasing chickens for one minute and played their own game for hours on end they’d probably develop some kind of future direction based on what the game needs.