Polygon Article on Dark Below Changes

Read this yesterday and posted on Bungie.net to the Central guys how Bungie could completely fix Destiny. I figured I could post it here and see what else you guys thought would fix Destiny. I think Daniel is definitely on the right track, but I don't agree 100% with him on all accounts. There is a lot that needs to change, and change quickly to fix a lot of the issues that have come about with this new DLC and the Exotic changes that lead up to it.

1. The price for upgrading an exotic is honestly far too steep at this point and the whole situation could have been handled better. I think keeping the price, roughly 7,000 glimmer and an exotic shard is probably right on track as is, you want there to be a cost of doing business to upgrade your stuff. But, at the same time it shouldn't disrespect the time and energy I already put into that gear, so when you get your gun back it should have all of the upgrades you already made to it or not, basically the damage output stat should be the only thing to change. That's a fix I think everyone can get behind.

2. Add the ability for Eris to Exchange 5 Ascendant Shards for 1 Radiant Shard, and vice versa for Energies. It would be a pain, but one I'd be willing to live with. Also add one or two extra chests to Crota's End, even if they require us to beat bosses the way they want us to beat them. (They added Helmets to Normal Crota's End today if anyone notices so that's a step in the right direction)

3. Upgrade the Glimmer cap to 50,000 or even more, but at least 50k.

4. Change the cap on both Crucible and Vanguard Marks to 500, but used across all accounts, similar to glimmer. Keep the cap of 100 Marks each per week, that's fine. We lose a potential 100 Marks of each in storage but we could accrue up to 300 per week on all characters, and spend it on the guns or characters we want to.

5. Upgrade Vault Space to 40 per space. Also, wishlist, allow us to access our Vault from Orbit as well. I am so tired of running back to the Tower every time I switch characters.

6. Give us a way to upgrade our existing catalog of Legendary Weapons to 331, even if it has as steep of a cost as Exotics. Your new Legendary's are garbage Bungie. Charge us 7,000 glimmer plus 7 more Ascendant Shards, I'd pay it I promise. Plus your old Raid guns would never become obsolete so I wouldn't feel like I wasted going through 25+ VOG Raids on Normal and Hard for Fatebringer and Foil. Add this to the Gunsmith, and while your at it, allow us to reroll the other random perks on some of the Legendaries, even making it to where it re-rolls the damage type on Specials and Heavy's. Obviously exclude all Raid guns from this, it would just be the ones that can be dropped with different perks already.

7. Give us a clan page in game so we don't have to have them on our friends list and we can always see our entire clan. Why wasn't this already in the game?

8. Never add Raid matchmaking, no matter how many people ask you to, just don't do it. It won't work. Any of us that ask for that haven't raided much. Stay the course. I've helpded out in Raids with randoms I've never played several times, and it is always The Worst.

Clarification from another post on Raid Matchmaking. Obviously, I don't think no form of LFG should exist in Destiny, it absolutely should. Just not auto match making like it does already for strikes. Auto matching is what I think will not work in any way. Bungie would spend all day fielding complaints about that if they implemented it that way. I think they should put in a different type of LFG. Maybe expand the size of the tower, or at least the amount of players that can exist in each tower. There is no reason each Tower can't hold 50-100 people, instead of 16. Add in a room at the tower (how about that giant waste of a space room behind the Bounty Board you've only used three times for two vendors, just make it to where flags cannot be placed X distance from a special vendor if they are there) where people can throw down a Raid flag or something. If you click on that flag you can go into local voice chat with them and join their party to then go do strikes, Raids, or whatever. But don't auto match me with randoms. Give me some form of control over who I spend the next couple hours with.

ADD. Skippable cutscenes. Probably didn't put this on here to begin with because its something that should have already been fixed in a game like this where you constantly replay missions. It has almost become a joke with all of the awful laughable lines the characters deliver though, "I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain."

I had a few other great ideas for the game but sadly they disappeared somewhere and I have yet to find them again. But hey, even if you only fix these things, throw yourself a party Bungie, you fixed Destiny a lot for now.

Let me know what you guys think.

Also, keep in mind, the throw Destiny out the window and start over isn't quite what I was looking for. We all know the story of Destiny is non-existent, the enemy encounters repetitive, bad level design in most instances, and poor boss designs a lot of the time. But those things cannot be fixed in Destiny. They would take significantly more resources than Activision will allow Bungie to give to this game to implement those changes. Hopefully those will be fixed in Destiny 2.

I think these suggestions are good, but the main issue with destiny is that there simply isn't enough variety to the core design. There's maybe 12 different types of enemies, half of which are reskinned interchangeables, and all of them are essentially bullet sponges. The raid demonstrates that they have the capacity to design interesting and strategic gameplay, which only serves to make all the other (7? 8?) strikes more frustrating as they are the same mindless hallways you've already ventured down dozens, if not hundreds of times.

Making the game more difficult should be more subtle than "This one has a bigger health bar" and asking you to grind 10 levels worth of gear by repeatedly completing the same mission and riding a hover bike round in circles on Venus for weeks (literally, weeks) looking for random drops, is completely unreasonable.

A lot of it could be super simple as well. How fucking hard would it be to add some new bounties? You could patch that in overnight.

I got to level 28. Fuck Destiny.

Hey, I 100% echo that sentiment. There is no doubt they shipped a half baked batch of dough and called it a baker's dozen of delicious cookies. I don't even think any fans of Destiny like myself would argue against that. One of the guys in Central jumped in our Playstation voice chat the other day and echoed an all too familiar sentiment about this game, "Man I hate this game, I only even play it now to hang out with my new Destiny buddies." It does so much so well, and so much sooo abhorrently wrong. It makes no sense, I hate this game, it's terrible, but that doesn't change the fact that 3 months later I log almost everyday.

So since we have this addiction, lets just not let it land us the hospital every week if we can help it at all.

1. Agreed, except remove exotic shards. Glimmer only, and keep our upgrades. Move the process from Xur to the Gunsmith and have all exotics available for upgrade all the time.
2. Remove radiant materials entirely. There are too many currencies in this game as it is. Ascendant materials are fine, as is a way to exchange one for another (shards > energies, energies > shards).
3. Remove the glimmer cap.
4. Remove the marks cap, including the weekly limit.
5. Agreed, especially with vault access from orbit.
6. Make the process to upgrade legendaries the same as exotics: glimmer only, we keep our upgrades, and the Gunsmith does it.
7. Agreed.
8. Disagree. If randoms want to try to do the raids, fine. They may fail, they may succeed, but either way they may make some friends and will eventually be able to fill out a proper fireteam.
9. Add (optional) matchmaking to all events. People are using third party methods to get around this anyway, just add it to the game proper already.
10. Remove commendations. As if this game needed another currency and another time-gated mechanic.
11. Patch vendor armor to 30 light, Vault of Glass armor to 33 light, and Crota's End armor stays the same at 36 light.
12. Add an armor upgrade process similar to weapons: glimmer only, we keep our upgrades, the guardian outfitter does it. The more light you upgrade to, the more it costs. The added benefit is people won't be funneled into wearing the raid armor and looking the same as everyone else. If you want to look different, pay for it.
13. Patch the cryptarch to previous upgrade speeds.
14. Allow inventory items, particularly destination materials and ammo synths, to stack indefinitely.
15. Add earning vanguard marks to patrol missions and bounties.
16. Add player trading.
17. Having a blank reward screen should never happen. At the very least reward destination materials.

Pretend the first game never happened, make a better second game.

The problem with Destiny isn't how many damn shards and energies you have, it is a 6 hour singleplayer corridor shooter with No Story, No characters, no big events or exciting set pieces. It looks nice has amazing art and cool enemy design and then asks you to grind the same levels and bullshit you've already done to get to the raid.

They made World of Warcraft+Halo and only put in the first 4 zones and one endgame raid. They said they were making an MMO that is what people were expecting and the MMOs live and die by the size of their content, it honestly wouldn't have taken to much more and they could have worked within what they made but they didn't. No quest NPC's out in the world no meaningful interaction with other players, the open areas of the Moon-Venus-Mars-Earth should have been much much larger and even if they weren't bigger they could have used the space better and made actual quests more "dungeons" to explore. Its a shallow and sad little MMO with ambitions for something it is certainly not.

I fundamentally disagree with the stance that raid matchmaking would never work. I mean, let's be real here, Bungie created an MMO, complete with ridiculous rep grind to get gear for raids (and now actual attunement for dungeons). World of Warcraft has tried and discarded mechanics (like attunement for dungeons) and added in stuff that people desperately wanted (like a raid LFG mechanic). Numbers may be down, but WoW is still one of the most successful games to ever grace the world.

You literally are owned by the same company that owns Blizzard. Take a page out of their fucking book and add raid matchmaking. I promise, people will do fine, because running around with a couple random players to fill out my group is better than not being able to run around at all.

How to fix Destiny:

Free shit and stop treating their playerbase like junkies. Add in as much content as they possibly can without charging a cent.

I was worried this'd be a "remove all the grinding" thing because I've seen quite a few of those - but I agree with pretty much all of these. Maybe (maybe) not upgrading the legendaries - I'll be sad to see them go, but they'll still be good enough for at least this DLC (that last damage bump isn't a big deal) and they work just fine in the Crucible. I already have too many guns to choose from and while that is kinda neat I'm fine with letting the old ones fall by the wayside.

Also, my other request to Bungie: y'know the really cool multi-part bounties? Such as the exotic ones, or even the long one in the Dark Below which is one of the most fun "missions" in the game? Make more of those, please. Some of the DLC bounties have been much more interesting too - but I feel like I've seen them all already. I feel like new bounties could be one of the simplest things to add but it'd increase the variety in some really fun ways, and offering a "legendary bounty chain" once a week for a piece of gear or strange coins or whatever would be fantastic.

A story that's even remotely interesting (same for the characters involved) could also do. I know it's fun to just shoot stuff, especially so with friends, but holy shit if the story didn't become tedious as hell. Probably would've also helped to have more than 1-2 type of missions once in a while...

Those fixes will lower the active numbers they show investors because people will grinding less, reach the end of the content, and move on. Let those idiots grind, the game is what it is.

However, I like that this list is acknowledging what the game actually is and building on that. Unlike people who think Destiny should patch in some kind of bounty hunter cantina vibe and a dramatic character driven story. Like you're playing the wrong game, guys.

You want to know how to fix it? Well pull up a chair, it's gonna be quite a tale!

@ford_dent: See 8 & 9, I probably should have explained my position on that better. Hopefully this does the trick.

@bane: Bungie has proven then cannot make an update without being at least a little bit of a bastard, so I tried to keep it in the realm of what they might actually do.

1. Exotic shards are fine in game as is, as long as from now on each upgraded weapon only requires 1 instead of the 3 we now have to put into them to go from 300 to 331 (1 to 300, 1 to change, 1 after leveling to 331). Xur having the upgrades is fine, gives you something to look forward to every week. Although him having 9-12 of each per week instead of 6 would be great. He also better not continue to sell and upgrade the same freakin armor and weapons like he did before where the same armors and gun were up every week. That garbage has got to go.

2. Don't disagree, but I doubt they will already abandon a monetary system they just implemented.

3. That's fine with me but then they might not actually be able to do that. We know they can at least upgrade it to 99,999, which would be great.

4. Caps are fine on Marks, they just encourage players to spend their marks when you are about to hit the cap. Also it encourages players that play enough for that to matter to try out other characters. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most of us that play that much have multiple characters at this point in Destiny.

8 & 9. Here is the big one, I don't think no form of LFG should exist in Destiny, it absolutely should. Just not auto match making like it does already for strikes. Auto matching is what I think will not work in any way. Bungie would spend all day fielding complaints about that if they implemented it that way. I think they should put in a different type of LFG. Maybe expand the size of the tower, or at least the amount of players that can exist in each tower. There is no reason each Tower can't hold 50-100 people, instead of 16. Add in a room at the tower (how about that giant waste of a space room behind the Bounty Board you've only used three times for two vendors, just make it to where flags cannot be placed X distance from a special vendor if they are there) where people can throw down a Raid flag or something. If you click on that flag you can go into local voice chat with them and join their party to then go do strikes, Raids, or whatever. But don't auto match me with randoms. Give me some form of control over who I spend the next couple hours with.

10. Commendations are fine, especially since only Guns, Helms, and Chest's require them. You can still buy Arms and Boots without a Commendation. Plus *SPOILER ALERT* they gave you free gloves if you finish the Urn quest for free, sorry not sure if you saw me say free, but they are free!

11. Eh, that would be fine, but it's also fine now.

12. Not really needed, although I would be completely fine with giving the Outfitter my armor to reroll its special stats for Glimmer and a few Shards. Also, get some new emblems and shaders Outfitter, your a waste of space right now.

13, 14, & 15. Agreed 100%.

16. That would break the current loot system entirely and cause all the same problems as Diablo III had. It's a great concept but it's entirely broken in practice.

17. Yes, do that, do that now Bungie. At least when I help out a friend on a mission I already did I will get something out of it, even if it's 10 Spirit Bloom.

@y2ken: Yeah, I 100% agree. That Urn quest was the best. I hope they do something like that every week, like a scavenger hunt in Destiny with a cool reward and unique mission to close it out. That would be amazing. We paid you $20 or $35 for the pack, you owe us some cool stuff like this Bungie, cause you and I both know I overpaid you for this DLC.

@glottery: Bungie actually forgot how to design levels and tell stories. They don't do that anymore... it got lost somewhere in the void of the Grimoire. It's all about those guns, all about those guns... wait they only made 20 Exotic guns for this game, and a couple more special Legendaries for the Raids... Sorry having a hard time coming up for a defense in their honor. I quit.

@bargainben: I hope not. A lot of the guys I play with quit because of these things, this would get them to jump back in, at least I hope. My goal for the changes would be to keep people from leaving Destiny. Also, I agree with you completely, too many people have unrealistic expectations for ways Bungie could fix Destiny. And hey, hopefully they do some of that in the next game, but most of that would take too many designers too long and Activision isn't going to allow Destiny to have those kind of resources now that it's shipped.

@humanity: I would pull up a chair if I wasn't at work... already in a chair. No seriously though, I wish I had time at work to respond to some of your posts, I always enjoy reading your perspective on things, even if I don't agree on the specifics.

There is no way to fix Destiny. No matter what they do to it people will always bitch.

@hestilllives19: Hey thanks that for kind of you to say. As much fun as I had playing Destiny with friends I think the best decision I made was not purchasing the DLC and moving on. I'm now playing Dragon Age Inquisition, exploring new lands, engaging in story heavy missions and having a lot of fun experiencing something new. Even though I know I'd continue to enjoy Destiny as long as I would keep playing with my group of excellent individuals I met on Giant Bomb, it would still be me, right now, running between the half dozen relic iron spawn points on Mars for hours on end.

@humanity: They cut that down some with the last update but I know what you mean. I was trying to get through Inquisition when we weren't busy trying to Raid or whatnot in Destiny. I got just past class specialization as an Assassin before The Dark Below came out. Also got GTA V to finish again on PS4 (couple heists in on the story), but that can wait until before Online Heists launch next year. The real tragedy Destiny created for me is not finishing Shadow of Mordor and buying Far Cry 4. I loved FC3 and want to play that terribly bad but at this point I'll wait for a Steam sale. Hopefully things slow down and I can knock some stuff out over the winter before Dying Light comes out. Gaming addiction is the worst.

@hestilllives19: Yeah I hear ya. Destiny basically took over all of my free time for a while. Each day there was so much to do, dailies for shards, bounties for vanguard and crucible, nightfalls on tuesday and raids on wednesdays-friday. That game is a huge time sink which is amazing when you have nothing else to play but it's devastating when you're trying to keep up with the group and still play something else on the side - impossible really.

@humanity: Yeah I think the Central Clan just had to relegate itself to everyone is on Tuesdays to do everything, Nightfall, then Weekly, then a Raid. I would be on other games and would do other Raids if asked the rest of the week or do my own thing to upgrade stuff in Destiny the rest of the week. Then a Xur visit on Fridays.

@hestilllives19: I could definitely get behind a system like the one you describe for raids--I mean, people can already randomly join your fireteam chat if you have space open (which I keep muted because who knows what the fuck they want from me and I DON'T WANT TO KNOW, MAN), but being able to plant your flag and say "HEY GUYS I WANT TO RUN A RAID NOW PLEASE" means that people know you're looking to do some dirt and therefore can actually expect a response when you join the chat. You'd need a way to set a level range on who could join up--but that shouldn't be hard to implement, should it?

@ford_dent: That's dumb, I posted a reply to this like 5 hours ago, just never checked to make sure it went through. Yeah, one would think it would be pretty simple to implement. Just give the person who planted the flag control of the party to set a level range, or auto the level range to up to 2 levels above and 2 below the leader, and give that leader the ability to kick people out of the local party. Give it a cap of 8 in a voice chat, like PSN so you can decide on your party members and then just the ability to add them to your actual party manually. And Bobs your uncle.

There need to be better hooks to keep people playing. After the Moon, I quit playing. I just didn't care. It wasn't so much the "go here, shoot this" repetition, but they made a critical sci-fi mistake: they didn't get me to care about the world. Here's this crazy future with crazy stuff, but why should I care enough to keep grinding through levels?

I'm going to use a Halo comparison here, which for the record I think is strange because they are fairly different games. In Halo, they gave you a fast-ish paced first mission, and then you went hurdling to this weird ring planet. Then, you started to discover that the thing was a weapon. Then, more groups were introduced to the story. It was INTERESTING. I wanted to keep playing to find out more. In Destiny, it's "evil stuff is being evil and you have to stop the evil stuff!! Look at this evil stuff that only lives in darkness! Look at this other evil stuff! Protect this old Russian AI from the evil stuff! OK now don't worry about the Russian AI because we have to go to the Moon and kill more evil stuff!"

So after a few hours, I didn't care. It wasn't interesting. So, TL:DR, I think the writing is bad.

EDIT: Also, screw Grimoire cards. Give me a Codex OR a voice actor who can deliver the backstory better than the phoned-in Dinklage.

I think the base experience is beyond saving. The story presentation and repetitiveness in what you do felt really bad to me even the first time I was going through the game.

And for end game progression, last I played at least, it is much too steep if you are unwilling to spend about 50 hours per month playing Destiny. I think they alienated a lot of people through that.

1. Port this game to PC.

2. More mission variety.

3. Better story.

4. But mostly port this game to PC. That will solve pretty much everyone's problems about poor matchmaking and communication.

That list is way too nitpicky. Destiny only needs 2 things:

1. A lot more varied content
2. A better story

The amount of content in the dark below is piss poor. I thought the raid would be enough but it's a lot thinner than the VoG in terms of new mechanics and amount of space to get through. Still a lot of fun but even with low expectations Destiny disappoints again.

8. Never add Raid matchmaking, no matter how many people ask you to, just don't do it. It won't work. Any of us that ask for that haven't raided much. Stay the course. I've helpded out in Raids with randoms I've never played several times, and it is always The Worst.

This.

I've played with some random people and it is the absolute worst. Vault of Glass on Hard can be done in an hour. 1,5 hours is acceptable. It has taken me 3 on some occasions because some people refuse to work together or refuse to follow a plan that they didn't think up. It is the shittiest time. I use DestinyLFG and specifically call out which strategy I want to use before hand and what I expect. It makes sure I get grouped with people who are looking to get it done. I honestly don't see how you could add functionality like DestinyLFG in the game itself.

4. But mostly port this game to PC. That will solve pretty much everyone's problems about poor matchmaking and communication.

That's hilarious. It sure won't. Most people on PC refuse to use a mic. Raiding when people keep typing messages and you have to read all of it? That sounds awful. There are literally zero problems with matchmaking in Destiny that cannot be solved on the console, or would be solved by porting it to PC.

Destiny is so weird because it's so busted, but I still love it.

You fix Destiny, by not playing it.

Step 1: Make Destiny 2 better

Step 2: Release Destiny 2.

Random raids seem to have like an 80-90% success rate in my experience, pretty simple stuff. A 5 man in WoW is more difficult.

That's because the people who are still raiding are the ones who've done it a gazzillion times before.

The thing I can't emphasize enough is the need for in-game clan stuff. I joined the Lincoln Force North America Central clan before the game even released and haven't interacted with another member of that clan even ONCE. I have a couple friends on my friends list that play every day for several hours but they are just internet people and have always already completed the hardest challenges of the week by the time I even login for the first time. I often only have the time for the Daily and a couple bounties with one character during the week and I haven't completed a Nightfall since the second week they were available. As a result, my Titan has been level 29 for over a month and my only experience with the raid was one random invite from those two guys to try and help beat Atheon, but we were just five guys and three of us were level 28 so after an hour of repeatedly just barely not crushing him we called it quits.

As a result, the problem I have with Destiny is that they've created a game that doesn't have any built in way to reward players like me who really, truly enjoy grinding the same content over and over again but have run out of ways to get the most out of the game. Xur is mostly useless to me because I don't earn Strange Coins quickly enough, my 26 Hunter and 25 Warlock are basically stuck in that position because my 'friends' don't have characters weak enough to run with them and have a challenging time, and there is content like the Nightfalls and Raids that I simply can't experience because my real life friends left the game behind and my online friends play way, way more frequently than I do across all three of their characters.

Destiny needs to figure out how to accommodate players like me, people who desperately want to see what little content there is in the game that they haven't seen but can't figure out a way to experience it. That's what bugs me about people who say matchmaking in the Nightfall or the Raid wouldn't work. If it wouldn't work, fine, but at least let me find that out for myself, because as it stands I know what the beginning of the Vault of Glass looks like and I know what the end looks like. But I've never opened the Vault and I've never defeated Atheon. My experience with Nightfalls now consists of loading into a game, stumbling into the first combat arena and getting killed over and over as I fruitlessly attempt to invite strangers to my Fireteam. So I just do bounties, upgrade the weapons I still have to upgrade, and pretend I'm making actual progress, when really I'm stuck in this rut for a while to come since I earn about 30 vanguard marks a week and buying armor from the store seems the only way I'll even think about playing the new story content on hard.

First off, add me to your friends list. I have 3 characters and pretty much exclusively play Destiny as far as games go now. As we speak I still need to finish the Nightfall and Heroic with one of my characters. There is a good chance that if you are looking to get stuff done I still need to do that with at least one of my characters anyway. I usually do the Nightfall for all characters before Xur shows up though, as should anyone, as Exotics are not uncommon rewards for completing it.

Also, you can totally use your 29 Titan in the Nightfall and then just switch to your low level guys at the last moment to claim the reward. That's what I'm doing.

But yes, you are completely right. It's funny because they said Destiny is an online game so critics shouldn't review it until everyone had access to the game, even though the game doesn't do anything to promote online play whatsoever. If you don't have any friends playing or they already completed those activities, then screw you. Destiny doesn't accommodate to you. You need external sources to get matchmaking done. It is actually pretty hilarious how they sell it off as a huge online game and then don't even include a bare minimum of matchmaking or friending options. Even a section in the Tower where people could hang out with the specific goal of finding people to Raid or Nightfall with would have been better than nothing. I really do get why there is no matchmaking in the game for the Raid, and there shouldn't be, but they could have figured out something clever to enable you to still find a group.

I'm not opposed to using DestinyLFG; it works great. But it's an external source. Bungie should've implemented something like it themselves.

I'm glad you find it funny! But seriously, going to external websites to find games for people who don't have a 6 man squad isn't very fun and is more disorganized than going to the tower to find people and having a chat dedicated to find groups (which would be optimal). The game overall to me just screams PC with its interface and overall instanced design. I'm thinking in terms of an MMO like WoW that has done such a thing successfully. So yes, I think it will help matchmaking problems and communication problems. As for having text chat, it's better than nothing. One could type out their plans for the raid and give everyone a role. It doesn't have to be while everyone is in combat.

Because chat on console is impossible? Nope. And voice chat is so much more effective and efficient than the hordes of PC gamers who refuse to use it and want to text chat only. I'm not saying going to an external site is great, but an ingame option to handle that stuff that would be possible on PC, is also possible on console. The mere fact of it coming to PC would thus not alleviate any matchmaking issues. Those issues are there by design choice, not a platform limitation. They would persist on PC as well.

Matchmaking is probably on of the top three problems this game has. If you take aside complaints about the amount of content present, then not having any real social features, like an MMO would, is terrible. I mean you have have to jump though some weird hoops to even get your clan tag to show up in the game - and this is all done through the Bungie website instead of the game. It is, one of the many half-baked and completely bewildering design decisions that look like they either ran out of time or there were several teams working on different parts of the game and they came together at the last moment which would explain a lot of the jarring transitions. It's also possible that they are just incredibly incompetent at making anything other than great feeling shooting mechanics.

@zevvion: Text chat on consoles is quite a bit more difficult than on PC. Not impossible, but given that on PC the keyboard is right there, people don't really want to decipher people talking with poor quality microphones on top of game sounds.

Voice chat is fine with friends, but with strangers it can be better to use text. Note that not that all PC players hate voice chat, plenty of people use it for things like DayZ (to mixed effect).

fixing destiny involves scrapping everything thats there structure wise and starting over. new missions new progression all that.

They won't fix Destiny. Destiny 2 is probably the only thing that could potentially 'fix' Destiny, and that itself is a huge sham and disappointment even more. "Hey! pay another 60$ and destiny can finally be closer to what it should of been the first time around, you know you want to!"

I think most of the threads like this are usually pretty good for a laugh, because most of the 'fix' suggestions are really just 'make the game something that it isn't trying to be because that's what I personally want it to be." You can easily separate the people who actually still play/enjoy the game and made progress at the endgame versus people who didn't like the game's fundamental design mechanics and think everything should change to suit them instead of just playing a different game.

As for OP's list:

1) You're probably right, and I like your suggestion that XP stays as-is (if none, none; if maxed, maxed). Most suggestions from people were that weapons should have to be maxed before they're upgraded, but that unnecessarily punishes newer players. I think they've gotten enough feedback that they'll probably do that the next time they raise the level cap. Either way, having to relevel exotics never bothered me; I've played enough MMOs that I understand that gear will be replaced upon release of a new tier of content. Frankly, I was surprised (and pretty happy) that they managed to find a way to keep old exotics relevant.

2) Again, something that doesn't really bother me one way or the other. I like what they've got going on right now, with the idea that you can only upgrade your raid gear by doing the raid, but it would be nice to have something to do with all these extra shards I have.

3) With the new glimmer sinks they've added, I'm pretty sure they know this, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen sooner than later.

4) I don't really like this one, and it probably stems from the fact that it was a bad decision for them to not make armor Bind on Equip. It's dumb that players who want to have one of each class are penalized for doing so when compared to people who make three of one class and only have to level one set of gear that they toss between their characters. I'm a fan of the 'if you want to earn gear for Class A, do content on Class A' philosophy, and that's kinda been thrown by the wayside with the way they chose to handle gear binding (i.e. none at all).

5) Why stop at 40? Also, vault from orbit is definitely one of the most requested features; I'm pretty sure Deej has even said they're aware of it. That being said, it wouldn't be as big of a deal if a) gear (or just armor) was character-bound, and b) things like planetary resources were just in an account-wide wallet instead of in each individual character's inventory (which is another change I think they should make).

6) Totally agree. Even though I'm 31, I didn't even bother with Iron Banner this week because I haven't bothered to buy a new legendary primary. My PVP primary is still a pre-TDB 267 Vanquisher because, aside from 2-3 exceptions, all the new vendor legendaries are worse and/or have worse perks than the pre-TDB ones.

7) Again, agree, though it's obviously nothing game-breaking, just a nuisance (like most of these things, honestly).

8) 100% disagree. People seem to get all up in arms about talking Bungie into never adding raid matchmaking, but it would obviously be optional, just like strike matchmaking is already. If you've got 6, great, you don't have to matchmake. It simply allows people who don't want to bother with destinylfg or r/fireteams (two out-of-game resources that most of the community doesn't know about) to learn and attempt the raid. I think the Nightfall, Weekly Heroic, and Daily Heroic should have MM as well.

9/ADD) Yeah, it's a joke that cutscenes weren't skippable after the first viewing, and it's even more of a joke that they still aren't.

Honestly, what bothers me the most about Destiny isn't any of the stuff that people think is 'wrong' with the game; I like and/or respect about 95% of their design decisions. What bothers me the most is that simply QoL changes and bug fixes seem to be completely ignored by Bungie, and with every week that goes by, the loyal community grows more and more tired of the communication blackout. There's simply no excuse for things like the Heavy Ammo Bug and Unskippable Cutscenes, which have been heavily documented problems since launch, to still be issues. Hell, it took them like three weeks to reverse the hotfix that broke the Pocket Infinity, even though the community was informing them that it was broken the next day. That is what keeps Destiny from being a truly great game; there are so many little unaddressed things that nag at the loyal playerbase and build up into frustration. The people who want to change entire gameplay systems and mechanics whole-hog just need to realize that the game simply isn't for them and move on.

At this point I don't believe they can "fix" the game; it is what it is. They can slightly refine some of the systems, but they will never fully correct all the stuff that bugs me. Destiny 2 is all they can do now and Destiny will never be more than 2014's biggest gaming disappointment of the year for me. That's never going to change. Even the multiplayer is a massive disappointment, and seeing video of Halo 5 makes that even more glaring for me. I just don't believe Bungie has the talent, or at least the experience, to handle balancing for so many weapons (which is quite low for this type of game), maps, powers, and gear so the whole "pvp" suffers because of it.

No? Voice chat is so much better than text chat in a Raid. Or even just a Nightfall. With strangers it's the same thing. I use DestinyLFG to do the Raid sometimes and more often than not, I end up with 4-5 more people on my friends list afterwards. Voice is the way to go.

@sweep: The enemy variety is the biggest problem for me. Most of them feel like re skinned Halo enemies. So when it's a game that you have to grind it ends up being a grind of the same combat you've already played in 6 other games.

I completely agree about the clan stuff, I've wanted that stuff in from day 1. As far as not finding people to play with, add me, PSN is hestilllives19, same as on here. I actually started NA Central. We usually play every Tuesday guaranteed for Nightfalls, Weekly, and Raids, but most days of the week others of us are doing random bounties or Strike playlists so we will probably be on. Here are some of the guys you can add. There are many others, these are just the ones that I usually do Raids and stuff with and I know aren't in other Raid groups already like Quaglar and Coleopterous. Just put Giantbomb or Lincoln Force in the message and they will probably add you.

KingDead, Tienamen-Ra, Convoy_84, Johnpro4, Jimsaurus, Mech4399, FreelancerX8, lil-juggr, ImpendingFoil, and theimmortalbum.

Also, if you watch the feed on Bungie.net on our page it should keep you up to date with what is going on, we post there pretty frequently. I actually just made a post about creating a second Raid group with Central because our main group is getting too full after the DLC launched. As a side note, we also play pretty frequently with another mock Linconln Force group not created by Fattony, the Lincoln Force dot RU guys like Pyro in this thread. I actually killed Crota with them twice last night legit without any cheeses. But those guys usually have their set 6 for Raids. But go ahead and check out their clan page and follow them as well.

Also, I edited the Raid matchmaking philosophy to more clearly present where I was coming from on that.

@ajamafalous: I wholeheartedly hope I am the former. I think we are pretty much on the same page for the most part, except the Raid matchmaking, and even that I don't think we are that far apart. I updated the top of the page to reflect a comment I made earlier about matchmaking that better reflects my position on it, because that first post was pretty vague. A form of LFG in game would be fantastic, but auto match making, eh no thanks. What if I don't want to be matched with randoms on Nightfall? What if I want to solo the Nightfall? Which, by the way, is super fun and a cool accomplishment some weeks, and impossible others.

I couldn't agree more about the updates, bug fixes, etc. It seems most of the time they take one step forward and two steps back on every update usually. It seems they finally fixed the loss of ammo after death, which was pretty much the worst in Raids with Heavy ammo. But specifically with the VOG, they constantly patched ways to cheese bosses, yet refuse to fix game breaking glitches that prevent VOG from being possible to beat. Enemies still regularly regain their entire health bars after death, which is especially grueling with Minotaur's. Sometimes Atheon still sends an incorrect amount of people back in time and puts the bubble on those sent back in time. The relic still sometimes allows splash damage inside it, even though it is suppose to be a safe zone. Then add in all of the random Templar shenanigans. By this time, the VOG should be a completely streamlined Raid with all of the bugs worked out. They will probably fix the suicide by foot in water glitch next, which is the best glitch ever.