[url]https://imgur.com/a/Sc2pa[/url]

I think that "ten year plan" got wrecked the first week of vanilla Destiny 1. When they realized that there was so much about that game that people didn't like. And its like there has been this internal fight within Bungie as to what direction the franchise would go in ever since. Those in favor of the game as an RPG seemed to have (eventually) won out among the Live Team, and in how D1 ultimately involved. Those in favor of the game being a shooter with just a candy-coating of MMO and RPG elements seem to have won out among the Sandbox team, the Weapon's Design team and among the Dev team for Destiny 2. I think Bungie took the whole Loot Cave fiasco and the ridicule that took for it to heart. So I think there has been this drive to micro-manage every aspect of the game, to prevent that sort of "humiliation" from ever happening again. But there is a difference between enforcing reasonable limits....and trying to eliminate all other ways of playing the game other than what you've "pre-approved". Where you can really see this is in PVP. The Sandbox and the Maps are so ass-tight and constrained that there is literally only two ways to play the game in The Crucible. Which has lead to this really stale, really frustrating game play experience.

I'm in full agreement here. Not so much with the why's, ask ten ppl you'll get ten different answers. But it absolutely does seem chaotic with little direction. Maybe it's our unique, different, many personalities wrt comms. Only person I understand at Bungie is CGB. And that train will only roll so far.

I agree, mostly. But I’d also add that d2’s problems are also a compilation of bad decisions. (i.e. seasons: where IB and factions appear once every couple of months). Is that a result of lack of leadership? Idk. Maybe. Perhaps a lack of good leadership. Certainly someone would’ve piped up and said, “hey. Making IB, (where player population spiked), an even more rare event is a bad idea!” I can’t help but think that SOMEONE would’ve said this AND pointed out other terrible ideas and they were shot down by BAD leadership. Just my opinion though.

[b][u]Whoops, I thought I was replying to someone else, I'll take care of this real quick...[/u][/b] [quote]Sorry to argue, I really am, but on the point of Bungie’s current audience not being halo folks... You’re taking a big liberty there. I played Halo and Destiny. A shit ton of us Destiny players played Halo and were eager to follow Bungie to whatever depths they were wading into.[/quote] I was comparing was Destiny to a standard of excellence. D1 doesn't have a great story (counting DLC here), but it more than makes up for that with gameplay and content. D2 regresses on both of these fronts, so that's what I was comparing it to. I know that a lot of these players that bothered to stick around were old Halo players (being one myself), but I haven't seen a lot of posts any time recently comparing Titans to Master Chief, the Fallen to Elites, the Flo- Hive to Flood, Pulse Rifles to Battle Rifles, etc. I feel like the timespan of people widely comparing Destiny to Halo is gone, at least for the most part. [quote]On your other point, i have to disagree as well. The RNG loot was not a problem for me in pvp. It was always thorn, the last word and Mida.[/quote] I don't think RNG loot or custom loadouts are a problem. There will always be a meta in any game with PvP, just look at Ash in Rainbow Six, or Mercy in Overwatch. The thing about the meta is that it's always subject to change. On Mercy, they've changed her resurrect several time now, and on Ash, they activated her hitbox. With Destiny though, it takes months before a weapon patch is put out, so you end up with stuff like the House of Wolves meta lasting 9 months. Bungie could easily mitigate that by actually engaging with the community, rather than surfing the forums, seeing people complain about The Last Word, then nerfing it. The main reason these weapons were too powerful was because The Last Word was broken for almoat the entirety of it's existence, and Thorn had DoT. Mida was actually (fairly) balanced, but by the point people started using it, everything else was a pea shooter due to unnecessary nerfs. In order to properly balance weapons, you have to establish a control, then base changes off of that. What Bungie has done is used the control, adjusted something, then applied it to everything, including the control. This shifts what the intended control is, and after several generations of adjustments, you end up with Destiny 2, where the time to kill is about as long as a game of Smite. [quote]I can’t tell you how pissed I was that they brought Mida back [u]Untouched[/u] in vanilla D2. Like, there goes my aspirations of a flawless trial run as I refuse to use that op crutch piece of shit in PVP.[/quote] Jokes on you, they didn't bring it back untouched, the buffed it by putting High Caliber Rounds back on it. Remember when I said Mida was balanced? That was in the context of Destiny 1, not Destiny 2. I have no idea why Bungie thought it was a good idea to bring that instead of a underperforming exotic. That was probably not a good idea on their part. [b][u]I think I fixed it, but if anything sounds weird, it's because of editing[/u][/b]

Agreed. Standards aren't a problem. And most of the time, expectations aren't either. The problem is that Bungie had a fanbase that were expecting---and grew to love----a game that was a fun-to-play, rough and tumble loot-based RPG. But without considering the game's identity, and the fanbase expectations....Bungie went and rebranded the franchise as a competitive shooter. 1. Of course---since you've given the fanbase a game that is fundamentally different from what they were expecting----they are going to think its a bad game. 2. Bungie kind of half-assed the rebranding. Go far enough to BREAK the RPG aspects of the game, and far enough to BREAK the rough and tumble feel of the first game (power fantasy). But not far enough to create an enjoyable play experience in PVP, or to be taken serious in their efforts at rebranding. 3. It wound up half-assed, not because Bungie was lazy. But because Bungie was stubbornly trying to force ONE game to satisfy gamers with expectations and needs from the game that were diametrically opposed to one another.