Just to add another voice to the general feedback. All my subjective views and opinions, of course.
About me: I'm in my late 30s and usually play Destiny with a couple friends on Friday evenings after all of us finished work/dinner/etc. Sometimes I can squeeze in an extra session during the week.
[b]PVP:[/b] For mediocre players like me and my clan PVP is mostly fine in its current state. I'm no game dev, to me it just seems like crucible is a zero-sum-game: For someone to win, someone must lose, for someone to go 2.0, someone must go 0.5. I guess on a 1-10 scale I would rank around 4-5-6 depending on the playlist. SBMM seems reasonable to me because it's no fun playing against people who are much stronger (or weaker). Fighting against slightly stronger opponents is a fun challenge, but if I am a 5, then I am most likely having a terrible time against an 8 and the 8 is probably also not having an interesting challenge beating me.
I hear some voices trashing SBMM complaining that now every game is sweaty and they can't get easy lobbies anymore, but that seems like a very narrow view: me having an easy game always implies that my opponents get an impossibly difficult game?
To be clear: I am not asking for free wins or a forced 50/50 win rate, I just think that players who are 5s shouldn't match anyone above 7.
During IronBanner I once had a really nice gaming session, the lobby hardly changed because presumably people were having fun and we played around 10 matches or so, all great matches, people stayed in the lobby, I started recognising their names due to seeing them for 10 matches. Each fight could have gone either way, no stomping, all around a thoroughly enjoyable time, people tried different loadouts and approaches and I had some of the best times I remember having playing PVP. Then we got joined by some Unbroken Nightstalker with adept Trials weapons and he tears up the entire lobby; and we of course get disbanded after a rather lopsided and uninteresting match. That guy got a 20+ KD which I guess was cool for him but that match also ruined the lobby for 11 other people, so I think it would have been better if he was matched with players in his league.
[b]PVE: [/b] Thank you, thank you, thank you for easing up on the grind. Me and my clan love GMNFs and it's really not that interesting to spend our gaming time for weeks to play Preservation and Vox Obscura over and over in order to have the level required when it's finally time to play the really fun PVE stuff. This was probably the first season where we could play GMNF the same week it started.
The grind was basically eating all my gaming time during the first half of a season and I often didn't even play the story missions until I hit the lightlevel cap, pinnacles were more important. Now we had time to play the seasonal story and we'll finally try the new dungeon as well (going in blind, we have been saving that one).
As far as I'm concerned, you could just give me a single mission that gives me +1 total lightlevel for every week, please don't make me spend that much time on grinding anymore. If you could also arrange the dungeons so that we could play those with no or minimal grind that would also be a welcome quality-of-life upgrade.
I really enjoy the game but there is so much to do and the grind is kinda blocking me from playing the fun stuff. I'd also like to play more crucible because it can be a really fun challenge but I only have so much gaming time in total.
Thanks for reading, that turned out longer than expected.
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If you're having trouble with the excessive time for grinding light levels, honestly, try focusing on the seasonal challenges. They pay out crazy amounts of xp and are generally very easy to complete if you arrange yourself around the mentality of completing them. The XP they give will boost your light level for that season, and if your boost isn't that high, then it really stacks. Otherwise, I feel the struggle of gear leveling. Not many ways around that, unfortunately.