[u][b]Welcome to My TED Talk:[/b][/u] First I want to start this off by saying this is going to be long and broken into a couple of phases about my experience with Destiny and the sad reality that is the game has lost its identity. I write this in the hope that community manager, executive, or just someone from bungie who cares will read it. If not at least this will be memorialized eventually in the lost logs of Bungie. [u][b]WARNING:[/u]THIS IS MY OPINION![/b] I am not stating that everything I speak on is feasible or to be viewed as gospel. This is strictly a written out version of my thoughts on destiny after almost 10 years of playing. I respect the developers for their efforts, and by no means am I really targeting them with this post. This is mainly against those steering the ship. [u][b]Destiny:[/b][/u] Like most of you, I have been playing Destiny now since the beta and initial release back in Sep, 2014. I remember waiting at the midnight release with my best friend excited to spend hours of my Junior year in high school, grinding on what seemed to be the next best MMO/FPS. I was en"thrall"ed with the game and loved all aspects and the honeymoon phase was in full swing. As the years went on I spent a countless amount of time grinding for the best gear, playing PvP, playing trials, and always attempting the new raids with LFG teams. We all fell in love with the gameplay of Destiny, the story was: lets be honest Mid at best, but interesting enough to keep us engaged and always looking for the next tidbit of information that could alter the Destiny universe. We played the game because Bungie was able to make one of the BEST feeling FPS games and some of the most fun ability gameplay we had experienced up to that point. I believe this all started to go downward after the announcement of Destiny 2. [b][u]Destiny 2 Failure:[/u][/b] Upon initial launch, this is where destiny should have died. At this point destiny had been existing for years and was in a subjectively very good spot after Rise of Iron expansion. The Red war arc was terrible, felt shallow and instead of building on the foundation that they had created within Destiny, Destiny 2 wiped the slate clean and introduced a terrible primary weapon system with almost no loot and stat rolled weapons. PvP was in a -blam!- state, PvE lacked replay ability, and there was only 1 raid available that was, I’m my opinion, really not worth the hassle to attempt to LFG a team to even go into the raid. From there the community outrage has been up and down in waves as Bungie has been trying to establish a storyline, while trying to push destiny in the right direction. Rightfully so, the community has felt betrayed by the inconsistency that is Destiny 2 expansions, and the seasonal model that has trickle fed content for so long now that playing Destiny for the story can be done in its entirety on the last week of any season. Following this rant I'm going to go into the specifics of the current state of D2. [u][b]Leveling:[/b][/u] I do not even know where to start on this, but as this is my opinion here's what I believe has gone wrong. Bungie should have never gotten into the light level system, I miss when my account had an actually associated number to it. I couldn't care less if they just kept adding levels for me to grind my levels up, but I swear we'd all be at level 300 by now. For some reason I feel more pride in the thought of that than saying "Oh I'm at light level 1810 or 1815". They should have spent more time on how can I make the player feel more prideful/connected to their character, while still providing purpose to these levels. Whether that's locking new content behind a level wall or not, the game should always have some content that you need to grind for to be able to play. Doesn't mean it takes 100 hrs to get to the level but this should always be the case otherwise you'll run into what they are currently experiencing which is the inability to keep player retention long term. [u][b]Gear:[/b][/u] I will try to keep this one short but this one I don't see many people talking about anymore because I believe we've all given up. Why the heck do we have gear rarities when 99% of our gear is legendaries and the other 1% are the exotics we use. I feel there's no value in the gear and it's just taking on the "appearance" of a MMO by assigning it a rarity. Having a fully kitted out character should mean something more than just a power level, it should feel like you earned it and grinded for it and the excitement for leveling up and getting full rare armor should be just a stage underneath getting fully kitted out in legendary. There's no connection between the players and their gear. Therefore there's no value in a looter shooter when the loot has no purpose and is limited by only really being legendary weapons. I mean why could we not have a rare spare rations? And as we leveled we finally get one at a legendary level and we'd be ecstatic to get our favorite gun in its ultimate form. Plus, if they had a model like that in place it would feel much more like a looter, there'd be tons of loot all the time of all types of weapons and all types of gear. Besides a few really top tier items staying at legendary only, there's so many weapons that could be of value if you had implemented a proper loot system and not just a few additional legendaries each expansion/season. Loot loses it's purpose, and in turn players feel no need to play. [u][b]Mods:[/b][/u] I am, and always have been against the modding system. Don't get me wrong, I love that I can customize my gear to fit the activity I am playing, BUT again it ruins any sort of attachment to a specific piece of armor. Instead of mods, why couldn't we of had gear that inherently had these mods and could be crafted, or rerolled or anything but the current unlock the mod system we have in place now. Which is basically useless cause everything is available for those who have been playing and contributes to the consistent lack of emotions towards gear. [u][b]PvE:[/b][/u] Even as a PvP advocate, I cannot deny the fact that D2 is primarily a PvE game. The core of this game is suppose to be PvE, and can be seen by how many PvE activities there are. However, Bungie has really toed the line of replay ability. In an expansive universe such as Destiny, I would expect there to be MUCH MUCH more to the PvE content. Marketed as an "open world" game, we would expect there to be many more locations for us to explore, and find new places, lore, side quests (not just bounties), and loot. All of which fall short for a game that's suppose to be PvE first. They marketed the idea of this being an Open-world MMORPG but fail to really deliver the RPG element, or really a purpose to the open world. Let me ask you this question, when was the last time you purposely loaded into a patrol zone just to look around, explore, do public events, or to find loot, or even see how the world changed with the story? Because to be totally honest, for me it's not been since the initial release of D2. Even with the most recent failure in Lightfall, I couldn't really care about what Neomuna looked like and just grinded out the story (which was another "experimental" failure), just to unlock strand and play with the new subclass. I didn't feel a connection to the space, and I think this is where Destiny is hurting. We don't have any connections to these spaces to make them feel worth while. Besides the lack of purpose for these "open-world" spaces, everyone is tied into the dumb seasonal activity that's general copy-paste-slightly alter to fit the theme of the season. If Bungie was to have done this all right, we would see a purpose to these Open-world spaces, so if Bungie wants to sunset something, maybe sunset all the wasted data on open-world spaces and public events that nearly no one plays. (Not a wise choice for a game marketed as open world) [u][b]LFG:[/b][/u] Speaking on PvE, why can't we LFG for more things in game? For a game that's all about creating new friends and experiences, this is a terrible way of executing it. I am so tired of looking at a piece of content and seeing that I have to go to another website or location just to find a group to play with. (Yes I have no friends) If Bungie had properly established an LFG capability I believe that this would actually improve the replay ability of PvE content, and reduce the player drought in those areas.