So a very long while ago.. it seems since some real bullshit has happened in the meantime that made the effort invalid, I started, finally, to put thoughts down about Destiny.
So that's after two years of playing the game on Xbox and PS4.. and somewhat looking forward to more grinding for crap loot.
For me, Destiny has been an evolving pastime. As the game's community spokesperson was recently quoted as saying, they want players to treat the game like a hobby.
For me that means most people will put down and pick back up the game. Which means Bungie needs to keep bringing them back because they know people will want to leave the game and probably won't want to come back on their own.
http://www.polygon.com/features/2016/7/5/12079326/destiny-rise-of-iron-preview-interview
Edit: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2016/07/05/has-the-division-proved-me-wrong-about-destinys-endgame-matchmaking/#61f1d0fcafa0
Forbes' Paul Tassi weighs in on the topic of matchmaking.
This was easy to consider since they started the game's public marketing push by stating that they have a 10 year plan and they want your character(s) to travel with you through that time. At first I wasn't sold, on Xbox One, or on Destiny.. but was coerced into it. But then my co-workers quit playing.. which ended up being the start of a consistent trend.
People keep dropping Destiny. Whatever their reasons, even Bungie at one point sent out a questionnaire to figure out why people didn't want to play anymore.
The loot system. There's only so much reward for the insane amount of grinding required by this game. Grinding which is only at its most effective when you're in a fireteam. A fireteam that hopefully is populated by your friends.
Once that team disintegrates, in you're lucky enough to actually have 6 or more people who play the game often enough.. you're stuck. If you never even get to that point. You're stuck.
You're stuck looking for people to play with. People who are almost guaranteed to know BFA about the games core systems. What do I need vanguard marks for? how did you get n item I've never seen that before! why is this raid so hard!?! but I know what to do! uh huh.
I'd like to scream at them.. delete every blue thing. Don't even look at it. There should be no blue things because they have NO USE but to fill up your inventory.. pick them up of course, because you can use them for money, STOP DELETING shit. NEVER use ammo synth. EVER.. unless you are making a clutch play to save your fireteam from a wipe. START buying heavy synth and materials and use them for faction rep. Use motes of light and weapon telemetries to upgrade you legendaries instead of just deleting them.
Only if you understand the above can I respect if you say.. fuck that noise I don't have time for that. Inventory management takes a significant amount of time BECAUSE the loot system is such garbage. It is complicated.. but that doesn't excuse garbage items, drop rates.. horrendous UI presentation and latency.. etc.
Nearing on what should be the game's 3rd year, which Bungie... as fucking idiotically as ever, refuses to call it year three.. and the games next but not biggest DLC update.. I really wonder if people will come back. To this shit? where's so little has seen improvement? Where you're stuck with 1 exotic at a time for no damn good reason but because Bungie says so? I'd sooner sell both these consoles and be done with Destiny that have to deal with another wave of players that don't understand what they are getting into. I knew perfectly well what I was getting into when I bought my PS4 and it has still taken up to now to get to this point where I can't see the point anymore again. There's no gain happening. As much as I've tried to have no one on my friends list.. I've seen people come and go when what should be happening is people should be returning to the game to prep for the next update.
Two of my good friends that I met online through the game agreed, one by making a point to tell me I'm only still on his friends list after successive purges because he wanted to play Destiny, but never returned, and another who's just too busy.. just don't want to waste the time on this game.
I get it. You play the scant content a couple of times, get the gist of it, then put it away. That's a hobby.
For someone that spends thousands of hours on the game though.. scrubbing every last corner of it.. losing years to it.. and STILL not getting all the loot.. I mean fuck.. what the hell is the point?
They intentionally play keep away and IF you managed to get a good item to drop.. the stats are almost guaranteed to be shit and the perks are probably going to be garbage.
At least you've unlocked that item. It might have taken several weeks or months.. but that item is yours. It will start dropping duplicates.. with probably garbage stats and perks.. but eventually you'll catch a good one.
This isn't even something that normal players care about. They only care about the game's Light Level cap. Why? again because the loot system is so fucking garbage that you simply can't expect anything good to drop. EVER. And IF something drops the only thing that matters is that it is above your light level so that you can get to the light level cap and so be accepted into more activities.
I find this specifically heinous because that makes people sweat about getting higher light gear and not BETTER gear which I was guilty of for the longest time... because it is actually hard for the uninitiated.. meaning those oblivious to Reddit to even recognize they are dismantling potentially good gear.
Bungie has set their gear system up to be like a series of baseball bats to the face. You might understand after being bludgeoned a few times that you are making mistakes with the gear you're getting and try to correct.. but then you realize.. I'm not even getting good gear. None of it matches anything else in a particular set (rarity and shit never dropping in the first place). None of the perks give me adequate cool downs (functionally useful items are very hard to come by).. and over all the perks and stat points don't work together.
Which ignores that many exotics since year one are garbage and they get nerfed to the point that they aren't useful. Nearly the entire Year 1 catalogue of gear is obsolete. Year 2's catalogue is mostly garbage.. and the new exclusive gear for Year 2 on playstation is either extremely hard to obtain.. or falls under the category of obsolescence. Every blue thing is garbage. Most legendary items are garbage. Most armor is garbage.
For the uninitiated though.. this doesn't matter. You can get by. Maybe not easily.. but eventually after you've completed everything the grind takes hold and you accept it.. because you know there's more to reach for.. but you realize you're just reaching into a toilet which has never been flushed and is just full of every piece of gear you don't need.
There's only so many actually useful guns and pieces of armor. Eventually you figure out which guns actually are worth a damn and only when you see them do the eyes widen and ears perk up.
Do I give a fuck that there's a new DLC?
To put it into perspective for myself I stopped caring that I'd put 4000+ hours into the Xbox version of the game, that I could have earned 70 thousand dollars instead. Which at my old job's pay rate (was fired a couple of weeks ago for being late too often).. is two years worth of gross pay committed to grinding for shit gear. Because I have almost no friends left playing the game. There's no reason for me to play.
I think the voice at the tower just said something about recreational tower jumping and ITS THAT BAD. ?! yeah I suppose.. I should just find something high to jump off of after adding the hundreds of hours on PS4 to get the exclusives, only just got a Jade Rabbit, and to prep these characters for Rise of Iron.
At this point the answer is still I don't know. I don't know why I should give a fuck. I've only kept up with my Xbox characters because because. And there's really nothing left to grind for except perfect gear which is apparently impossible to obtain.
It got apparent after starting to use Destiny Item Manager, an extension for Chrome, that not only are people probably having a hard time for nothing.. but that it really is impossible (given some people's available time to play) to actually get a full, perfect gear set.
Since I looked out and got PS4 for the game's update this past april and have filled my inventory many times over.. I have a handful of perfect items and can get a reasonably close to perfect set going.
It's all moot because no one actually does this. Most players are either not capable of setting their gear up right.. or they just don't care because they can get by.
Then why play at all? if the goal is unattainable for most people. If they aren't getting the achievements and trophies.. that's obvious.. but if fundamentally they can't even get and manage their gear.. like why build a game like this and why do people beat their heads over how hard it is? Manage your fucking gear better! (that's to players and Bungie)