Battle pass levels locked behind time gating. Conqueror gilding locked behind time gating. Mediocre story locked behind time gating. This is ridiculous. I’ve paid good money for almost every season pass before this and it was NEVER this egregious. Back then, you can finish up the season pass at ANYTIME without it feeling like you’re just wasting your time. Back then, you can gild your titles at a quicker pace and have enough time to show off your golden title to everyone. Story was locked behind time gating too, but at least it was over by the 8th-10th week and even THEN we could -blam!- off to other games until the final mission on the last week. Now? Not anymore. Battle pass is now on an Act Structure, meaning that you won’t get the new rewards until after the next Act starts. Originally, I thought this was fine. Until I realized in the next act that NONE of my XP from the previous Act will carry over, rendering ALL of my playtime then [i]worthless[/i]. By the way, the levels that you see under the Bright Engram Bonus in the Season Pass are ALSO worthless as they only give out Bright Engrams (which have NO dupe protection 🙄) and are not retroactive to the pass by any means. The only way you can use your earned XP to your advantage is by hoarding your Seasonal Challenges/Bounties until the next Act starts. Knowing Bungie however, they’ll just either nerf the XP from them or remove the ability to hoard them outright to keep us in their game longer. 🤷🏿‍♂️ Conqueror gliding is ALSO under Act Structure, meaning that there are only 3 Nightfalls you can do per act. Once you’ve done all three, you have to wait ANOTHER three weeks until you can attempt the next set of Nightfalls. But that’s not all, folks. In their infinite wisdom of knowing what their players [i]truely[/i] want, Bungie decided to also FOMO the Nightfalls as well. This means that if you’ve missed out of doing the Glassway GM on the fourth week of the season (since GMs start around this time), you’re just -blam!-. You have no node to catch up on and even if they do, you’ll (hopefully) have to wait until either the third Act starts or until the third Act Nightfalls finish a rotation. That’s 8-11 WEEKS of waiting if you missed out on my example. Even if you did ALL of this perfectly and gotten your gilded title with no FOMO tactics, you’ll only get to enjoy it for around 3-4 weeks until you’ll have to play Bungie’s FOMO game again in the next episode. And now the story. The story sucks. I don’t need to explain what’s already been said, but I’ll do it anyways. No decent person cares about Saint and Osiris being a couple or not. What we really care about is if it’s written WELL. This story isn’t written with tactfulness and introspection. This looks like a third grader’s fanfic about Justin Bieber and Joe Biden shooting off in Elon Musk’s rocket to Mars all while kissing and smooching over Earth’s orbit. It’s awful. It’s -blam!- awful. And the best part is that [i]you know it is[/i]. You didn’t lead us into it well like you did with Devrim Kay and Marc or Mara Sov and Sjur Eido in the lore. Instead, you try to double down by trying to hand wave their explicit brother-in-arms relationship in the lore as a romantic one. It’s sick and it’s clear that you only did this to get brownie points from LGBTQ+ people or people sympathetic to them. That has to stop. In all, I play this game to get away from my responsibilities for a few hours, not to clock in for a second job. If you can’t provide the entertainment I’ve paid you for without FOMO/timegating tactics, then I’ll just take my money elsewhere. The only reason why I’m not quitting right now is because: 1. I’ve paid $100 dollars to see what will happen with the rest of the enemy factions (Cabal, Fallen, Scorn, Hive, etc.) after the death of the Witness. 2. I want to get to at least Conqueror x10 (I’m x8 now). Once the third Episode’s story is over, I’m leaving. Screw the Frontiers -blam!- you’re trying to pull. Your tactics won’t work on me anymore. 🖕🏿