I started playing Destiny 45 days before Taken King. I worked my behind off to get Y1 Moments of Triumphs. While I didn't truly know forever 29. I was stuck at 32 for 2 weeks. I was in love with the game and the challenge it brought. I could play hours grinding raids, strikes, and the crucible. I could play strikes over and over because bosses were a challenge. Strike loot was fun to chase even if I didn't get the roll I wanted. People farmed Omnigul for hours and hours when it was the nightfall for the perfect grasp of malok. People grinded for the perfect imago loop. I believe sunsetting is a good thing. If you play mmo's most gear gets replaced with the next expansion. While its "worthless" you are proud to show you got that item that 90% off the community didn't. I think of Everquests early days. Each expansion dropped raising the max level, stats, and better gear would come out. Leveling up the gear from regular content was relevant and prepared you for the end game. A little growth here and there to give you the tiny edge and hope and pray you could beat the raid. There were many nights where we had failed raids. Hours and hours of trying to beat content that wasn't artificial hard, but extremely hard because of mechanics or the sheer amount of health the boss had or the boss hit extremely hard. You had a rotation of 10 clerics chain healing your main tank. It took skill, wits, and strategy. And people to this day play the game. Shoot there is an emulator for Everquest where people recreated the struggle of Everquest's launch P1999. (Project 1999) Back to Destiny, at the core Destiny has a lot of good and bad, but I want to believe we can eliminate the bad. I honestly think the current light level system is garbage. It eliminated all the struggles and challenge from Y1 D1. While the challenge didn't fully go away till Destiny 2. It became much easier. Today we are starting people out at 1050. Why? I don't know a single mmo that starts people at "level 60". I get you want to get them into relevant content fast, but not at the risk of making it to easy. We need the grind back. I don't want 100 legendarys every 30 minutes. I want to work hard and be deliberate in what I choose to do. Instead of let's play crucible and get to 1250 without doing anything else. I want to want to experience things I don't like(PvE bores me)but I'm losing interest and so are some of your most loyal content creators because the magic, the struggle, the challenge, the reward investment has all but gone. If you want to be an mmo then be it. But remember mmos are meant to be grindy and re-playable without feeling like a chore. They are meant to be hard. They are meant to bring communities together and still fail. We need this desperately.
Edit: Fixed some errors and added some thoughts.
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I was forever 29 for like a month then my warlock became god tier. However.....on my Titan I cheesed it and got a pair of IB legs to be lvl 30 lmao! Ahhh those sweet "fake lvl 30" slurs...lool