The break between Bungie and Activision mostly resulted in positive changes to the game, but certainly a few features and changes concerning in-game purchases and bright dust in particular are bothering me. Since many praise Bungie for not being as greedy and consumer-unfriendly as Activision but these changes I’ll refer to in a moment certainly beg to differ. Certainly it’s great that items once acquired in your collection don’t require bright dust again to pull that specific item from your collection. But things start to get murky with small things like always showing your silver balance in the top right corner next to glimmer, before if you didn’t have any silver, it wouldn’t show in your menu, and thus not asking for your attention. Or the fact that skins and most silver purchases are not only fairly expensive but usually require an inconvenient amount of silver which always leaves you left with a certain amount of silver that can’t be spend since nothing is cheap enough to be bought with that amount of silver, prompting you to purchase more silver to spend it once more. True, the amount was around the same before Activision was involved, and frankly we see this practice happening more often in the gaming industry. It feels predatory, unwarranted and plain greedy. Bright dust is obtainable in-game through bounties but doesn’t really add up all that much, which helps intensifies in-game purchases of silver for skins and what not. Further compounded by the fact that such items are not available as rare exotics drops. Sure those bounties of Everis before didn’t give you much bright dust as well. But these changes certainly feel even more pushed towards spending real world money. And so far my biggest complained; this whole XP leveling system seems fine and all, but I certainly expected to earn bright engrams every level after level 100 like we used to. But now it’s every 5 levels. Making bright engrams even rarer than ever before, making changes to obtain rare skins and what not even more less likely. And that’s my complained not that vanity items, etc are getting more and more rare in-game, I don’t ‘’have to have’’ every item in-game. Nor do I think that every player is entitled to all the content in the game just because you bought the game. But I can’t help feeling that all these subtle changes push towards more in-game spending. I’m not here to grieve on Bungie, but it’s a trend in gaming I feel like more gamers are getting more aware on. But we have to keep pointing this stuff out to everybody since such greedy practices are bad for gaming in general. Hopefully I’m not the only one but microtransactions have to be restricted, even though industry and political oversight is taking it’s time to eventually not take action. Sure you could point out that it’s up to the player to determine whether he or she wants to spend that money. But when practices such as these become more and more predatory it not only provides danger to a vulnerable demographic, ruins the game as well. The mere fact that we need to worry about this stuff in gaming and our pastime is worrying enough to be honest…