I am writing this cause I want Destiny 2 (D2) to be better because I love Destiny (D1). Destiny is my favorite game, and I play it more than the rest of the games I buy, combined. I keep coming back after D1 blew me away. I am writing this cause I want Destiny 2 (D2) to be better because I WANT love D2. Destiny 1 was an awesome game. Yes toward the end I had done everything there was to do it was boring. The Age of Triumph, for me, was spent playing other games. I knew I would come back and play D2. I pre-ordered the day it was available. Destiny 1 lasted three years and I expect a similar life for D2, and we are only a few months in and things just seem broken. I initially intended in writing a list of what I feel needs to be changed specifically. Then as I started making my list and adding some really thoughtful observations and suggestions from the community forum it got overwhelming. There were so many good suggestions. There were too many. But I realized it really comes down to this: I want Bungie to change its' focus. Fix bugs and issues 1st, add meaningful content 2nd, and add cosmetics and live events a distant 3rd or in adjacent to the last point. So first make the game you released in September the best it can be. Fix the issues, improve performance, and introduce quality of life changes that make the game easier to or at least less frustrating to use. That needs to be the #1 priority. After that your focus needs to be on adding meaningful content that has a long term goal so you can add depth to the game. More DLC’s, new mechanics, new exotics, and new guns that are not just a re-skin and a tweak away from being the like 30% of the weapons of that type. Masterworks are great thank you! They introduced something to the game that is different and I realize that takes a lot more effort than you putting a new set of armor behind a real murky pay-wall. Finally once you have gotten those two done, start worrying about what you are going to sell in Eververse. (I swear the Eververse stuff is coming.) Don’t waste your resources on the valentines live event if you were planning to. Save it for when you got your foundations fixed. Please plug into user feedback. Listening to the right 20% of the suggestions and like 0.01% of the complaints you can reduce the noise by 80%. Get the Pareto charts out, look at your KPI’s, but do not try to craft the game going forward by looking at the numbers. It’s like trying to drive while looking through the rearview mirror. If you don’t fix the game and start worrying about retaining customers you will have no one left to buy silver from you. Finally if anyone from the #OCCUPYEVERVERSE movement has stuck around this long. Here it is… In all the noise surrounding the Eververse right now I initially set off to defend Bungie. Not because I like the Eververse, but because I want Destiny to follow my advice from above. I do want them to fix the Eververse, but not right now, that is not D2’s biggest problem. My feeling on the Eververse is this, as long as Bungie is only selling cosmetic, I have no problem with that. In D2 all armor is one of three archetypes: Survivalist (recovery), Heavy (resilience), and Mobility (agility). So Eververse armor is just a re-skinned version of about 1/3 of the rest of the armor sets. So that qualifies. Shaders, ghosts, armor, sparrows, ships, and emotes. All that stuff is cosmetic. Now if they want to start hiding a G-Horn behind a pay wall that is a problem but they haven’t done that so to me it seemed harmless. On top of that it is a really murky pay-wall. All that gear is bought through bright dust and you get that all the time. And if you’re like me are sitting on a huge stock pile of it that you can cash in by dismantling those shaders that you will never use, those ghosts that are duplicates beside looking different and having a different name (cosmetics again), and ships/sparrows that you can barely tell the different between. So it’s all technically free if you are patient enough and grind it out. The exception is the Dawning gear since you couldn’t really earn it all in 3-week “limited time only” event. And Exotic ghosts need to drop from more places than just Eververse, I am not sure they are right now and if they are not, that is a problem. Again I didn’t really care so much, as soon as I saw I wasn’t going to get the whole set I just dismantled that stuff the moment it dropped. No big deal. I think Bungie has the right to sell cosmetic gear for the people that like dropping coin to look cool. So I felt micro-transactions (MTX) don’t bother me. But it got me thinking and I found out something about me. I have a HUGE problem with the MTX + loot box business model. It’s shady business and when you reduce the rate at which the Eververse engrams drop, it seems down-right greedy. I came to this conclusion after a conversation on the community forums and it made me recall an article I had read about Paula Poundstone. Poundstone was a really funny stand-up comic I remember liking a long time ago and when there was an article in my news feed about her and gaming addiction I read it out of curiosity. And then I recalled that just a few days ago I read that the World Health Organization had just stated that Gaming Addiction is now recognized as a mental health condition. That combined with the discussion on the forums about “targeting reward centers” similar to the reward centers found in people with a gambling addiction, the proposed legislature to deem this business model as a kin to gambling and require, at the least, that games that use this model be limited to an “Adults Only” rating. Bungie, and possibly even more importantly, Activision would stand to lose and enormous user base and that equals them losing an enormous amount of money. I would recommend that you search the web for “Paula Poundstone and gaming addiction” and “World Health Organization and gaming addiction”. Read it, you’ll be smarter for it. You don’t need to agree with them. Poundstone, at times, comes off as bitter but justifiably so considering what her son went through with his gaming addiction. And the W.H.O coming out and making the statement that they made is just nothing really, not yet… But I think that step is going to be followed by others and we all as gamers are going to see some changes because of it. It might take a while, even years, but I think it’s a sign that some change is coming. I would love for Bungie to get out in front of it and stop. Will Activison let them? My guess is the industry, and Activison is simply one of the bigger players in it, will continue this model until they are forced to stop by lawsuits and legislation which they will fight with lawyers and lobbyists, or until we as gamers demand they stop with our voices and with our wallets. Part of my rush to defend Eververse, even going as far to down vote a bunch of #removeeververse posts was the attitude of gamers and people in general about the whole thing. People want Eververse removed, kill D2, and kill Bungie. I am not on board, I love Destiny! So I posted with the intention of clearing the air and telling Bungie keep going and tune out the noise. Ironically and hypocritically I was really just blasting back at them. Cause people on forums suck right? I am writing this because I want (us all) to be better. So Tuesday night, after missing the almost the entire first week of the Dawning I wrote my post. [url]https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/241065422[/url] Then a wonderful thing happened. I engaged with you all on this forum and I learned from you. When I set out I guess I thought I could change all your minds but I didn’t, you changed mine. Some people wrote back and agreed and I engaged with them. I learned from the people that agreed with me. Some people wrote back and disagreed and I engaged with them. I learned from the people that disagreed with me too. But the best part is some people just wrote back and insulted me and told me I was stupid and I engaged with them too. Most had spewed their venom and moved on. Like I said, people on forums suck right? But some of those people I tried to engage wrote back and told me why I was stupid, and I was able to learn from them too. And then at end of the sub-thread we might not have really changed each other’s minds but we saw where they were coming from and respected the fact that we are both entitled to our own opinions and that I don’t have to agree with you to like you. The fact is we all need to read/watch/listen to people we don’t agree with and not to change your mind or theirs but to inform our own opinions. Changing your opinions in light of new information is not weakness, it is enlightenment. Engage with respect and everyone wins. Try to understand them first before you call them stupid. Engage your community with the understanding that you don’t come to this forum if you don’t love Destiny. Start at the common ground and work from there. And engage Bungie with respect and they might listen. I doubt they sit and read a bunch of posts about them being @$$hats without a single reason as to why you feel that way. Maybe at the Christmas party for fun…. Thanks for reading especially if you made it this far. I didn’t set out to write this much but I feel I learned a lot from all of you and wanted to share my thoughts on the matter. So thank you and thank you to all who responded to my original post. We covered a lot of stuff there that I didn’t put in this post but enjoyed that too. Especially they conversation about the cost of games, is $60 a value or a rip off. Good stuff even if it based on A LOT of assumptions. You guys made it fun, well most of you… Cheers guardians and Happy New Year!