So I've been trying to put my finger on exactly what is so irritating about this patch to me -- someone who played WoW for 8 years, quite actively (well over a year of /played time), someone who should have (ostensibly) been prepared for this kind of gear reset. Here's the thing: Destiny isn't WoW. As much as I might wish it were a lot more like WoW, it's being managed by a company with no experience in MMOs (or MMO-lite games, which is more accurate for Destiny) or loot-based games, and it's showing. There are a billion things that have been learned over the course of 15ish years of MMOs and 10 years of WoW that have been utterly ignored by Bungie in their development of Destiny, like RNG mitigation, social tools, and encounter design, but those really aren't the issue here. The issue is that Bungie has an absolute metric buttload to learn about communication. People keep comparing Destiny to games like WoW, saying that anyone who is surprised or shocked or frustrated with the latest news of exotic resets has clearly never played another MMO. Otherwise, obviously that person would understand the nature of the gear treadmill and that this was bound to happen. And sure, maybe it was. But the difference between WoW (or nearly any other well-managed MMO) and Destiny is quite simply that Blizzard wouldn't make a change like this without: a) forewarning the community in ample enough time to get feedback before implementation was a week away b) ensuring the community didn't throw away invested time in something that was only going to last a week, or c) releasing the information from the horse's mouth before it got out through a third-party like Game Informer. News like this is pretty massive. In a game like WoW, this type of change would be saved for a major expansion -- one that comes years after the release of the previous, not three months afterward. Beyond that, the nature of the exotic change is quite a bit different from the nature of a gear reset in a traditional MMO. A gear reset in WoW typically changes very little of the basic playstyle of your character. You might lose a set bonus that makes one of your spells work slightly differently, or you might end up short of a haste breakpoint that slightly alters your optimal spell rotation. But generally speaking, a resto druid is going to play like a resto druid, regardless of what gear you're wearing or what weapon you're wielding. But in Destiny, guns dictate your playstyle far more than your subclass, or even your main class. The way you play with Thorn, for example, is utterly different from the way you play with Invective. Exotics, in particular, typically alter your playstyle in pretty noticeable ways. So when Bungie says, "oh btdubs, if you still want to use those guns you're going to have to turn them in for New Gun+ and then level them again," you're not experiencing the same feeling as going from 85 to 90 when Mists of Pandaria comes out. Bungie has just limited the options you have for different playstyles in the future -- and that is only considering the having-to-choose-which-exotics-to-relevel bit. That's not including the swath of Vanguard and Crucible and raid legendaries that will be falling to the wayside, into obsolescence, once you're doing hard mode content or Iron Banner next time around. Will there be another gun similar to Vision of Confluence? Sure, but it won't be the same gun. Is Crota's End going to drop a legendary that feels like my 3-tube, Flared Magwell, Clown Cartridge Admonisher III? Maybe so, but I doubt I'll be lucky enough to end up with those same perks (RNGesus plz). The point is, Bungie dropped the ball, not just with this change, but with making sure the community knew what was going on ahead of time. Worse still, they released an update that would cause players to dismantle extra exotics and spend glimmer and materials and time upgrading current weapons, knowing full well that they were about to release an update that would render all of that effort null and void. Other threads have popped up offering perfectly good solutions to this feeling of being shafted - just adding more bubbles to previous exotics, or making sure that only players with fully-upgraded exotics could exchange them for the new tier version. But Bungie didn't do those things, and there's really not enough time for them to make changes like that in the week before The Dark Below releases. Will it get fixed post-release? Maybe, but the damage has already been done. People have already invested Exotic Shards into guns and will now have to invest two more Exotic Shards into the new versions, when they could have just waited a week and saved a shard, and time, and glimmer. The lesson here is that we can't trust Bungie. It hurts me to say that, but as of right now, I feel like playing this game at all is gambling that Bungie doesn't have a plan to wipe away my time investment in a week. And that's not something that's going to change after the expansion is released -- it's something that's going to last as long as we play this game. But that's just it, isn't it? As long as we play this game. I fear, for a lot of people, that time has just run out. TLW: Bungie needs to learn to communicate and stop making bass-ackward design decisions without taking care to inform the community (or worse, deliberately not inform them) first. (i read this post on reddit and give all credit to reddit user seraph 1337) EDIT 1: Im glad this post is taking off like it is on reddit, if you want to read what destiny redditors have to say about this situation here's the link to the OP's reddit post. http://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/2o8bnf/the_gear_treadmill_and_why_clearly_youve_never/