Greetings fellow guardians, With the release of The Taken King we’ve seen new threads about the locked content just as we have for the other DLC’s however there still seems to be some confusion on the matter. The reason some people are upset has nothing to do with the content of the DLC (which has been great so far) or playing it for free. It has to do with activities in the vanilla game being removed and held behind the paywall of the DLC. To better understand this imagine someone buying a used copy of Borderlands without any DLC. They can go home and play everything that those who bought it day one did and if they enjoyed it go buy the DLC’s to further their experience. Now instead imagine someone going and buying a used copy of Destiny. They can’t experience the weekly, the nightfall or iron banner like those that bought it a year earlier. They could potentially be less likely to buy any DLC since they’ve never experienced that content and are only able to try a small portion of what Destiny really is. In that way Destiny DLC is unconventional because it doesn’t just add to the base game like typical DLC, it adapts and changes it as well. On the one hand I think this is an innovative way to maintain an evolving franchise while on the other I’m concerned about each DLC alienating another batch of players and reducing the overall number of guardians. Kotaku had an interesting article last December [url=http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/12/why-microtransactions-arent-going-away-any-time-soon/]“Why microtransactions aren’t going away any time soon”[/url] which included a survey regarding DLC purchase. It wasn’t the largest sample size but they reported 25% of players had bought a season’s pass and 51% had purchased DLC. I imagine those conversion rates are a lot higher with destiny given how essential the DLC is. Even if the conversion rate is 80% that would still be 20% of your player base being alienated each DLC (I’d be interested in seeing the actual numbers). Now even if the new player base joining with the legendary/collector editions was that lost 20% I would be concerned about that creating a yearly revolving door of players leaving instead of retaining existing players and growing on top of that over the 10 year franchise. Alternatively if they devoted a small portion of server resources (5-15% as needed) to maintaining a year one experience existing players without the DLC wouldn’t be as alienated and could be more likely to purchase the DLC in the future. This would also allow new players picking up the base game to get the full experience and could be more sustainable and profitable for Bungie in the long run. There’s no simple answer but what do you think could be a better solution for Bungie to maintain the existing players instead of alienating them?