Dear Bungie Balance Team, Ever since I started to really pay attention to your patch notes around weapons and classes and perks, etc, I've really become intrigued at how your design philosophies change the way I play and make me become a better player. On the other side of the spectrum, I've also learned how much of a complete chore it is to read your patch notes and find that the next cool and unique thing has been guttered and neutered to the point of no recovery. Your history has been a rather interesting one. I can think way back to the first couple of patches. The first one was about the Vex Mythoclast. It was a gun of immense power and precision, able to annihilate people in 3-4 shots in very quick amounts of time. It was a very powerful gun, and did it deserve to be fixed up to be more fair? Absolutely it did. Then there was the Suros Regime, a gun that Xur sold in the first couple weeks of Destiny's life span and it was a very popular weapon. I think it was popular for a multitude of reasons; one of them being that it was one of the first exotic weapons readily available to the masses who had amassed enough Strange Coins to purchase it, but also because it was just such a generously powerful auto rifle. As if it wasn't already powerful just because the auto rifle class was powerful, it had the best-in-class magazine, best-in-class impact rate to rate of fire, and it had a signature exotic perk that made the last few bullets of the magazine do an upward of 2-300 damage per head shot in the Crucible. Did it deserve a re-balancing? I'd say so, yeah. Did auto rifles need some fine tuning? Perhaps they did. Another example I can think of isn't even a bad one. Pulse rifles were the laughing stock of the game; completely incapable of dishing out any signs of worthy damage both in PvP and PvE, completely not worth the time you invested in using them. This gun type was the gun definition of putting yourself and your team at a disadvantage using it. You buffed them. You buffed them pretty good too, giving them a massive 9.7% increase in damage and skyrocketing them into mass popularity. Although they weren't quite able to stand up to the hand cannon's massive power levels, they were still quite good, all around weapons. Hell, you even nerfed hand cannons with varied degrees of success here and there. Eventually you had to re-nerf pulse rifles down a bit after the hand cannon nerf so they were more in-line with other guns; that update also included a generous auto rifle buff that launched them into a spot where they've been in for about a year now, somewhat usable and fun. What I'm getting at here Bungie, is that there's a weird trend with your balance updates that worry me. You see, it appeared at first, especially with the Vex Mythoclast hot fix early in 2014, that almost all of these balance changes have been thanks to a distinct cry for them in just one single game type. At least half of your game is PvE and the other half is PvP. The funny part of it is that you only seem to balance the guns and classes and damage and perks based on the PvP side of the game. This is not surprising to me but it worries me a lot because the game is more than just a multiplayer PvP shooter. There's things I like to do by myself against the minions of the darkness that your patches affect. To continue using the Vex example, it seemed like you were very content with letting the Vex Mythoclast be that strong and powerful in PvE, yet the small community of people that complained and cried for nerfs over it in PvP, you balanced the whole game around those cries. Now before you get up and write me off: I absolutely do believe that some of those nerfs (Vex Mythoclast, Suros Regime, auto rifles, Gjallarhorn, etc) did deserve to be nerfed both in PvP and PvE. I'm able to look at those guns objectively and determine that they were game breaking on both sides of the spectrum. However, what I don't understand is the other things. The other things like the shotgun nerfs and the sniper rifle nerfs. WARNINGS, MAY TRIGGER YOU: In my opinion nerfing shotguns and snipers was not needed IN PvE. You buffed shotgun damage in PvE before, and not PvP, which was nice, then you nerfed it again, and now it's just there. You just recently nerfed sniper damage in PvP which in turn resulted in a PvE damage change as well and that's what I don't understand. You've clearly shown in the past that you are capable of buffing and nerfing weapons, classes, and perks for just one or the other side of the game. You were very easily able to buff shotguns by 100% in House of Wolves for just PvE enemies (aka minions of the darkness) while leaving PvP completely untouched. So why aren't you doing that now? Why aren't you doing that for your current updates? Why didn't you sit down and look at how it might affect stuff in PvE and nerf them accordingly for PvP only? Maybe you have, and I'm just talking out of my ass, but it feels like, seems like, and looks like you actually don't care about your PvE balance and decided to balance your game around one aspect rather than both. You have 2 sides of a coin and you decided that Heads is the most important side and then erased Tails from the equation (Heads being PvP and Tails being PvE). This behavior has shown for the past year that it doesn't matter how things react in PvE, if they're ridiculous in PvP, they're going to be nerfed everywhere. It feels like you don't care anymore... and that makes me sad. I know balancing a game is incredibly difficult, far more difficult than I could ever imagine and I don't know the first thing about balance. I do just want to say I believe personally that abandoning Tails makes the coin into a product that nobody wants. If Heads is too important to the point where Tails doesn't even show up anymore, why bother even making Tails, why not just make Heads and make it a one-sided coin? It might as well just be PvP, not PvE. I just wanted to vent to you. I respect you guys and your work, and I will always look at your game balances objectively. I just hope you do too for both sides of the coin. Tails is just as important as Heads on a penny, Bungie.