Greetings fellow Guardians,
So I know there has been A LOT of talk since this game launched about Bungie and communication and it continues to be a topic that dominates these forums to a large degree. I myself have made several posts in the past on the need for more communication between Bungie and the bnet community, but I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea that things are remotely at the level that they were in year one.
In year one there was a huge divide and not only were many people upset with the game that existed vs what people thought it would be, but there was mostly silence from Bungie coming back our way on things and DeeJ was barely (if ever) on these forums. WE demanded change and as a result of OUR posts, Bungie hired Cozmo to be a more everyday link between us and them.
My friends and I have been playing a lot of 7 Days to Die lately and that game is just bugged to hell. It's amazingly fun and the depth of what you can create is staggering, but RWG spent hours making motorcycles that would then just glitch out and disappear. Then we got 100+ days into our world and the save got corrupted and we lost everything. It turns out both these issues have been known in the game forever now from way before it even hit consoles and there is literally no response from the developer and they appear to have no plans on patching literally game-breaking bugs.
Imagine if when we played Destiny, we could play for a month and then one day our progress is just gone and we lose everything and have to start over. People would lose their -blam!-ing minds.
The fact is that Bungie not only listen to us, they are CONSTANTLY working on this game trying to improve it for us. We've driven so much change with our voices that it's pretty staggering. From getting Coz hired, to getting them to give a mea culpa on the original release and basically revamp most everything with TTK, the addition of sparrow races, increased vault space, economy changes in game, price structure changes in the game itself, and yes even adjustments to classes and abilities. The list goes on and for anyone to say that we aren't being heard, you're just not paying attention or you're blinded by what you still feel Destiny should have been at launch.
As for communication back and forth. Cozmo is all over these forums, not only constantly responding to posts (and he will actually respond to responses occasionally which never happened before), but he curates the player submitted content as well. That in and of itself is a huge step over what we had, but it doesn't stop there. He also is constantly playing this game and does so with multitudes of community members. He posts sign-ups for players to play with them and recently did the twitch stream where they went into crucible and were matched randomly with and against everyday players.
Speaking of twitch, bungie also do much more communication through that now and are still developing that avenue to get us more involved and tell us what they can. I hope and believe at some point they will use that as an avenue to do a real Q and A with the devs on specific aspects of the game.
A lot of people have a lot of negative things to say about bnet, bungie, this community and communication in general, but the fact is that we have something really unique here in that we are all entitled to our opinions and outside of the CoC, there are no real limits put on what we are allowed to propose or discuss as opposed to reddit where things are heavily censored and most hot button issues are off limits and deleted by mods if posted.
I'm not going to say everything is perfect either here on the forums where I personally believe the moderation could be a little more consistent and transparent or in the way we and Bungie always interact and share information back and forth, but it's also not what people paint it out to be and there is a hell of a lot more give and take between us and Bungie than between many other game companies and their players.
Anyway, I hope that both we as a community and Bungie as a company continue to grow and evolve and build up this relationship that exists over the love of a game and that Destiny continues to grow and evolve into the experience we all know that it can be. Thank you, see you all amongst the stars.
Edit: Here is really good post on things that have come to fruition and others that could still be improved https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/210720637?page=0&sort=0&showBanned=0&path=1
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Do you know how many changes they've made that the majority of people said they did not want/would've said no to? Does that coincide with improved listening skills? Besides buying planetary resources which I believe you're referring to with "economy changes in game" nothing can be proven. I can assert that they added in SRL only to benefit from Eververse, doesn't make it true. I can say they signed up with Twitch to enlarge their shrinking fan base, doesn't make it true. I can say weapons and abilities were data driven and not due to player feedback, doesn't make it true. The timing and subject of this feels more like propaganda to undermine the guardian council. If there weren't such a division amongst players in this community this might received as acceptable feedback but it's highly unlikely. Speaking of division its origin is a testament to their mishandling of resonating issues which in turn is a testament to their agenda running perpendicularly to the super majority's.