I'm sorry, explain to me why you're seemingly opposed to my argument, because the time I spent away from the game holds little relevancy to the statement i'm making regarding the lootboxes in general, as I only stated that time period to set the context of me returning to the game. Unless of course, you're telling me that if I stayed on the game for the months that I was away from it, Bungie would've somehow seen fit to remove the lootboxes from the game.

Because a lot happened in that five months.

They made the Go faster update along with some hotfixes and bugfixes, They didn't actually address player concerns, like making the time-to-kill in crucible shorter or removing the damn lootboxes. In some cases they're mitigating issues instead of actually fixing them and in the case of lootboxes, they're not so much mitigating it as they are digging their heels in. I can acknowledge that Bungie may be trying to make things better, but their approach is the equivalent of putting a bandage on cancer, when what you really need to do is to cut the damn tumor out. In short, they may be trying, but "doing" is better than "trying".

Tomorrow’s patch will address TTK by making the game’s exotics more powerful. And the vast majority of the player base doesn’t give a shit about lootboxes or MTXs. Which is good because they aren’t going anywhere. What they care about is the broken weapon slot system. The broken skill tree. And the broken loot system. None of which will get fixed by getting rid of COSMETIC LOOTBOXES.

that might address TTK but if it does, it will do so in a way that makes the weapon balance tilted towards exotics. We could have a situation like when the Thorn exotic handcannon was OP in D1 Crucible.A more balanced approach would be to just flat out increase general weapon damage in crucible. Secondly those lootboxes, bright engrams in particular are NOT just cosmetic, They drop Mods and Ghost shells which both impact gameplay. The impact may be small but its still there.

Bungie tried the flat-and-balanced Sandbox approach for D2. It [i]broke the game.[/i] It created a sandbox of weapons that had no appeal to pve players as loot. ...and sucked all the fun out of pvp as well. They are making a strong move back towards what the game was in vanilla D1, and I applaud it.