The original checkmate modifier was the best compromise. Reduced ability regen, special ammo meter progress on kills & assists. Unfortunately the casuals cried so hard we ended up with this nonsense sandbox

Just play the game bruh or better yet, try other pvp games. At this point it sounds like you just want COD. Look I’m all for balance but straight up removing the things that this game thrives on is just counterproductive. Also throw skill out of the table, this game has nothing to do with skill when we have absurd hitboxes, massive bullet magnetism, absurd aim assist and special weapons running rampant. This game is anything but skillful. Even without abilities or fragments, this game is still cheese.

Maybe but at the same time everyone has access to the same things and yet there is a massive skill gap so even if you take everything away it will still be the same

They have 1. Kinda. Hardware is exactly that. Some fragments and aspects do still work. But the complexity of the game makes it prohibitively difficult to full disable everything. When it comes around it's never that populated. Everytime bungie has tried to go too far in that direction, people stop playing. Just look at vanilla d2 launch. People come to destiny for the soace magic. But, yes, the pendulum has swimg to far towards abilities. Funny enough, pvp is the only place i actually care about my weapons. Pve is all abilities. Pvp is actually better balanced towards weapons. Still not enough and they jeed to trim back abilities some more. Especially from void warlock and hunters.

There's CoD for people that like that.

And we'd still have a problem with trash spawns and people too afraid to fight one on one without a OHK crutch or cheats via "accessibility devices". Besides, this game is basically hooked up to life support that's plugged into a faulty outlet that's powered by an outdated generator. Players may as well be just waiting for the game to flatline. At this point, I believe it would just make infinitely more sense to buff every weapons stats across the board, and I do mean ALL their stats by like 20 each on the low end (exotics by 30-40, especially ones with disproportionately low stats compared to their archetypes) because at worst all it'll accomplish is turn every weapon into a god tier weapon stat-wise. We're already able to reliably target farm several such weapons and we'll get plenty more (craftables too) with the June update like Fatebringer and Eyasluna. It's not breaking anything that isn't already being broken nor adding more shards to the pile. And at best, the stat bonuses from tiered loot become redundant, older weapons will be made relevant again, and most if not every reason to "need" those accessibility devices become null due to every weapon being a stat monster. I'm sorry, but if someone needs any devices that can enhance the stability, aim assist, or alter the recoil on a gun after that point definitely doesn't need to be playing pvp.

You can only equip Rare and Uncommon items too