So I've been seeing a lot of "casuals are ruining (insert activity) in Destiny" takes again the last week or two and then yesterday I saw the latest Forbes article from Tassi on the subject and think it's time to point out a few things. To start, for anyone who didn't read it, I'm not linking it, look out up if you want, but the gist of it was whether or not Destiny is being catered too much towards "casuals" (and he chose to say "again"), as well as bringing up a tweet thread by Gladd complaining about the same thing and how the game needs to be more hardcore because poor Gladd isn't able to make enough content. This pile is deep. I'm going to start with wondering why a Forbes writer is posting a tale of woe about a dude who is one of the raunchiest members of the community and the streamer equivalent of a 90's shock-jock radio host, with content about violating himself with hamsters and posting from his Summit visit about swinging his junk in his hotel window. Real classy dude that totally we should feel bad the game is too easy for him. But beyond that, the whole "casual" as a slur garbage is the gaming equivalent of classism and grade school indoctrination into right wing hate culture. Playing a game for a living doesn't make anyone more "hard core" or more of a "gamer" than someone who can only play when life lets them throughout the week and this constant use of "casuals" to demean and dismiss, as well as blame all the game's "problems" is a load of crap. Then there's the fact that, I don't know about anyone else, but I know I'm tired of listening to the Gladds and Gothalions of the community always ripping "casuals", the game and Bungie the second everything isn't 100% about them when the high profile influencers have driven the lion's share of development feedback the last 4 years. The game that exists today is massively a product of their criticisms and complaints and it's garbage that they pretend that they're not culpable for where things stand. So let's backtrack -again-, because it seems like history gets rewritten a lot. Destiny 1 was a great game, but one that Bungie felt needed a fresh start and a new game for D2 and despite all the negative takes that piled on after the first month of vanilla D2, it did get a lot right, starting with investment. It was a game that allowed players to come and go and not feel left behind, and also allowed us to play multiple characters with ease and constantly change not only characters, but loadouts and play styles. It also had true endgame difficulty content that was deeply challenging with prestige difficulty raids and a sandbox that made content much more challenging overall than we have now. Certainly the game was not perfect, and both PvP and PvE needed to be better overall, but there was a really good foundation there that ultimately never got a chance to hit it's stride because a month in, all the big name content creators and high level PvP players went completely toxic on the game and started all the "dead game" crap and making anti-Destiny/Bungie content because it got easy likes and views. So let's look at where the game is today with the complaints about not enough or drip-fed content, and underwhelming exotic quests and look back at what that massive backlash led to, which was the studio basically stopping development on a lot of future content and moving essentially the entire studio to making massive changes and rebooting a game that was itself a reboot. The massive changes to the sandbox, leveling, investment, economy, etc came at a cost. Instead of building onto what existed and adding more weapons, armor, strikes, missions, etc, resources went to the reboot; and certainly there was still the content that had already been started and was in the pipeline with Gambit, Warmind and Forsaken, but there's no doubt that the deeper we got into year 2, the more we caught up to the effects of diverted resources year 1. Then we had year 2 itself which was the baby of all that hate and toxicity from the "hard core" and influencer crowd. It was ultra punishing in leveling, in investment, in grinding, in RNG and in PvP as well with the high profile PvP influencers pressuring Bungie into removing skill from matchmaking. And all the big names patted themselves on the back because they had "saved Destiny". Until around Season of the Drifter when everyone else checked out of PvE and PvP because we couldn't take it anymore and wanted a game, not another job. Oh, and another casualty of overall lack of development resources in year 2 was hard mode raids. I could be wrong, but I would be shocked if the decision to go with one difficulty wasn't affected by trying to catch up elsewhere. So then what happened? Bungie not only had to use more resources to once more make big changes to PvP, investment, economy, armor, etc, but they also split with Activision due to friction from the way year 2 devolved. So here we are in year 3 and Bungie have tried to keep the content structure that the community and the big names have said they like with seasonal content and new things every few weeks/months. We've also seen new arena after new arena instead of strikes and updates to older content like planet vendors, because this was also feedback that was given on what the "community" wanted more of. So here we are in year 3 with Bungie still playing catch-up and trying to get to the point where they can just build forward without constantly having to backtrack and reboot and it's not surprising that content is light at this point when you look at the big picture and how much development time was lost that could/should have been more new content we're getting now instead of what was spent on rebuilding then. Does anyone believe that Bungie doesn't want factions back in the game? The fact that we have nothing yet regarding them speaks volumes to how big a game of catch-up Bungie is playing, and certainly that is on the decision makers at the studio as well, and there have been calls that missed the mark, but there's also still been a lot of good and at some point the studio needs to say this is the game we believe in and stick to their vision. The game isn't too "casual". It certainly could use more legitimate endgame, but that doesn't mean the game shouldn't be accessible, and even the raids that exist are now leveling content vs true endgame because of the worlds first races. So once more content that could be more challenging that isn't has nothing to do with "casual" players and everything to do with the high profile players. The game needs a lot, but at this point what it needs is new weapons and armor, new strikes, factions, more actual story, etc, and hard modes for existing content like raids. What it doesn't need is Paul Tassi, Gladd, Gothalion or other big names pressuring Bungie into once more making infrastructure changes to make the game more "hard core". We literally went through this with vanilla D2 into Forsaken and I honestly can't believe we're seeing the same garbage now. Crapping on regular players to make the game better for content creators didn't work the first time, let's not keep making the same mistakes. The game can have content for those players without sacrificing everyone else and if players are willing to take a deep breath and give Bungie time to just build forward, I think we'll see a game that everyone can be happy with and love.