Changes you'd make to fix Destiny...

I'm curious how other gamers would like to see Destiny be fixed and improved upon. By now people know the problems that a lot of us have with the game such as awful mission design, no story, no characters, not enough missions, environments, etc. If you disagree then no problem, just keep it moving. For me, these changes would make things a lot better:

1. They should now make the first DLC free. I would say the first two should be free, but that might be asking for too much. If they really want this to be a 10 year platform rather than just a game we play for a month, then it needs more content. No, replaying levels on a harder difficulty after you're 20 is NOT new content.

2. Jupiter or wherever the next area is set should actually look alien. Everywhere in the game looks like Earth besides the moon.

3. Obviously, improve mission design to more than just "deploy ghost" and defend him. I don't care if it's more sword fights, add space dogfights, or whatever. Do something!

4. Lower the cost of the vanguard and crucible gear. 120 tokens+ for gear, which will probably the average player around 2 weeks or more to gather is too high. This is not a MMO or RPG. If they wanted to make that then they should've actually made an MMO... this is just a sci-fi FPS. Most console gamers aren't used to grinding that much. Maybe if this was PC only it wouldn't be a problem, but most of my PS or Xbox only friends think that's crazy, and they're right. If just feels like a cheap way to make the game longer.

5. Having more interesting gear. Jeff touched upon it on the podcast, but all the guns are pretty normal. From what I've seen, none of the primary guns even have elemental effects, it's just the special and heavy weapons. They can learn a lot from Borderlands when it comes to loot, Rockstar when it comes to worlds being alive, and Mass Effect when it comes fiction.

Let me switch between my selection of normal/special/heavy weapons with a button, instead of devoting the whole d-pad to something as important as dancing and such.

Remove the present Grimoire card system that requires an external reference source and replace it with an in-game codex.

1. Random enemy spawns and level in public areas.
2. More variety in bounties.
3. Revamp the loot system so it works properly.
4. Add in game communication, chat, invites etc. Matchmaking.
5. Ability to trade drop gear.

Wait 2 years, release Destiny 2. Success!

Since people haven't mentioned it yet: More variety in Crucible game modes, more people in multiplayer modes in general; Open World bosses that require 25+ people to kill (and more people in each instance of multiplayer/bigger environments/faster respawns). A ranged enemy type that isn't a slow moving guy that shoots you and is extremely large/non trivial melee opponents (believe only the Kell Guards fit this description). No invisible walls, raids that take more than a day to clear (I'm fine with the present difficulty/ a lower difficulty mode but it definitely needs more bosses). There's too much to fix in this game but I'm sure the sequel will be better.

More than 4 weapons.

Man we are going to be discussing this game for 6 months.

The "loot" isn't loot. Enemies should drop weapons sometimes, and there should be different physical attributes and more variation. Take a page from Borderlands and have elemental types, bonuses, etc. I should be able to buy guns from 6-7 places that all different rotating stock. Same for armor.

And most of the solar system. This whole first game should have been exploring our solar system and had 7-9 playable environments. Not 4.

This and let me skip de cutscenes. Most suggestions here are totally right on the money, but the cutscenes and the Grimoire card system are the two most baffling design choices I saw in this game.

They ask you to replay levels, but you can't skip story content in them. They want you to learn about the backstory, but you can't do that from the game. What?

Allow matchmaking for everything - that is all.

I agree with all of these things.

I would also add that there should be one set form of currency for all items and not 3 different currencies you have to collect.

Also, fix the engram system and have them actually unlock useful gear. I got a legendary engram and all I got was a mote of light out of it.

A small change. There are way more constructive ones other people can suggest.

But.

I'd make it so named enemies and Strike bosses always drop something, scaled to the difficulty level you're playing the mission at. On a personal level, when I hit named enemies or Elite Mobs or bosses in the Diablo games--something like doing Mephisto runs in Diablo II--the excitement is two-fold.

1) A challenge to test my mettle, ability, and powers.

2) The reward. Which is and always should be drops. Loot. Stuff. Things. Gear.

Sometimes I'm not playing Strike Playlists, where rewards are "guaranteed" at match's end. Sometimes I'm just helping a low-level buddy get through some of the story missions. Hell, even the first time through I felt like I just wasn't gettingstuff.

I don't want to have to grind with that cognitive uncertainty. Ideally, I want to grind as painlessly or thoughtlessly as possible. And if my character is a little overleveled as he or she is making their journey through the story missions for the first time, why not let me reap some of the benefits along the way?

I don't know. Probably a bad idea.

But I appreciate gratification.

Ditch all the competitive stuff, spend all that time on money on enlarging the campaign area and hiring a writer.
I don't think anyone's going to like answer, but I hate PVP.

Mic chat for everything. That's the biggest issue. People complaining about loot need to accept it's RNG. There's nothing wrong with it. You're just unlucky.

Getting rid of options is never a good thing.

Also I disagree with lowering Vanguard marks. This IS an MMO. The reason so many people are complaining about loot and gearing up is because they want instant gratification. They are shooter fans. They aren't used to it. I don't want to be able to gear up in a day or two.

@mortuss_zero: PvP is much like the rest of the game, fun in a group and mostly terrible solo.

Unfortunately it's probably too late for them to do anything with the story which is my biggest gripe with the game, so with that off the table I think better mission variety has the at the top of the list. I know setpiece-driven shooters are a dime a dozen these days, but Destiny really needs a couple of those moments to break up the monotony. The Grimoire should be accessible in-game, and I have to imagine that's something they're going to address. I also think the AI needs work, but I can't really see them making major changes to that without introducing new enemy types with different behaviours.

Next planet of DLC should be free as a gesture of goodwill. IDGAF about the story, the problem is the bridge between action moments. Action movies and action games don't have good stories, but they're sufficient enough to web the action together. That's all Destiny needs to do, its a scenario problem not a lore problem. Halo had dumbass lore too but it effectively connected the different bits of the game with moments. This game needs more variety in moments, it needs more bosslike encounters and it needs better bridges into the boss encounters, they can't just be random dudes never seen before.

@deathstriker: @ #4: God no. Please no. The only reason this game has legs is because of the slowed gear progression. Shortening gear progression would turn Destiny into a weekend playthrough that you sell back to Gamestop after a couple short sessions.

My own responses:

1. Add a Codex-like UI to the game so that we can explore the Grimoire lore within the game.
2. Change the engram system so that they cannot be identified as rarities lower than the Engram itself (no more greens from legendary engrams). I don't care if they need to rebalance the droprates... it's disheartening to have a whiff of a legendary engram.
3. Daily and weekly challenges should have matchmaking. I understand why raids do not, but I'd love to actually complete those with randoms.
4. I'd prefer to have more synchronous PVE bounties. Have 5 Moon-themed bounties, then have 5 Mars-themed bounties the next day. Just make the daily bounty experience faster and more concise.
5. Global indicators for events. If I'm off in Skywatch, I'd like to know if there's an event going on in the Mothyards.
6. Flesh out existing planets with free content rather than add additional planets. I'd rather have the exciting new feeling of seeing Pluto and Saturn with Destiny 2, but there are still parts of The Tower and the Cosmodrome that feel gated off. I want a complete planet experience before we start devoting exhaustive resources toward other spaces.
7. I'd like Heroic/scaled planet spaces. It sort of sucks going to Earth and one-shotting everything at level 25; I'd like to be amongst my other 20+ Guardians, fighting actual fights. As you become more and more geared, these social bubble spaces become more and more trivialized; it's sort of the only part of the game that doesn't scale with difficulty options.
8. Quality of life stuff that the game should have launched with. Skippable cutscenes, proper audio options, more social features, actual clan support within the game, etc..

@project343 said:

People should play games because they're fun, the carrot on the stick being "I'll replay levels to get more currency and the currency so I can buy better loot to go kill things on those same levels" is silly to me. The loot isn't that creative or cool anyway. Games are about either gameplay and/or the story for me. In the case of Destiny, it's the gameplay since it has no story. Making it take over a month or possibly months to get an entire armor set and weapons that are from vanguard or crucible just seems like a really lame way to keep people around. I played Skyrin, Mass Effect, Battlefield, Borderlands, etc for months (if not over a year) for their gameplay, not unlocks.

Have an option to send engrams back to the tower. Make it a five minute turn-around if need be, but I'd love to be able to send a half dozen things back there to decrypt on a timer instead of quitting out of a match just to go back and tap the gimmie button five out six times.

As some others have said, it would be nice to have the grimoire available on the tower, instead of having to go out to the web site.

Also agree that anything with a name should drop a weapon, or armor piece, even if it's not guaranteed to be better, a bit of loot wouldn't hurt. I feel like this would probably be the easiest/most likely thing to happen, since it's likely a to be variables that they can adjust vs.writing whole new behaviors for chester interaction.

@deathstriker: On point two if they added any new location it would probably look a little more alien. The story in the start literally says that the Traveller allowed humanity to branch out into Mars and Venus to develop cities so it makes sense they would look like human civilizations. DO NOT go the route of Borderlands. Half the BL guns are useless and the ones that are good are all by the same two companies and mostly work the same except for elemental attacks maybe. I think the guns for Destiny work fine mostly. The problem with people always saying that loot should change is that the changes are generally not effective and get ignored except for people who are there to just dink around in the first place. They've included a pretty standard set of guns that every game has and they all are effective and not useless. There will still be personal preferences but there are no guns that I'm like who would ever in their right mind use this gun. EDIT: I wanted to make it clear that having elemental attacks on more weapons, like you said, would be a decent improvement. But Borderlands random gun creation is one of the worst parts of that game IMO.

@sterling: Trading gear is one thing I would definitely like to happen. I thought the game had in game communication. I always see my camera mic pop up even though its muted.

Having a better story would be kinda nice but when I think back on playing through the Halo games I thought the story was really dumb anyway. It was just as esoteric but routed a little more in understandable language. It was just an excuse to go around a shoot things. That's the part I don't get when people say they want more variety in missions is the Halo games had absolutely no variation. It was always get from point A to point B, defend point, destroy this. It was the exact same as go around and deploy Ghost.

The only two things I think would be neat if they added would be more vehicles (which sorta doesn't make sense) and more Crucible match types. I have faith they'll do the latter at some point.

A bigger variety of weapons. And by that I don't mean assault rifles with different firing rates and accuracy. Give me proper variety, like UT or even Halo.

I'd say Destiny isn't broken, but this would be a real improvement.

The problems that I do have with it can't really be fixed, I think. As much as I'm loving the game it's main "story" line missions would be infinitely improved by having a bit more structure like making actual characters...

1) Make you ghost something that appears to you, projects a hologram. Make the ghost STAY physically in the world, not blinking in & out, even if it means rendering ist and ist shadow all teh fucking time.

2) After the first mission give us a 2 minutes cut scene explaining WHO WE ARE, WHO WE CARE ABOUT, and WHAT OUR BIG CHOICE WILL BE? In other words, why do we fucking care and what journey or big choice is in front of us.

3) Less fucking loads between home and the battlefields. Going from The Tower (city) to any place on Earth should take 4 seconds not 40! All missions that move from The Tower to old Earth should be super quick loads. The first four missions should have more narrative cut scenes, explain what is going on.

4) The Tower should have 10x as many NPCs in it, all NPCs in the tower should have pull dialogue options to have discussions, and about 1/3 of them should have mission meant to introduce you to other NPCs on the Tower. This place most of all should feel alive!!!!! There should be conversations to overhear and it must go FAR-FAR-FAR beyond the "Welcome Guardian" that is the only thing people say now. Also, all shops and NPC that sell things for you to buy or fucking closed until I can!!!

How is it that I can walk up and get cold shouldered by 80% of the NPCs for the first 15 levels? Fill The Tower full of on foot missions and lots of interesting people to meet to give me a feeling of how people live, what people at the end-of-days are doing, and why the fuck me doing anything matter what fucking bit to anyone?!

5) Sorry Earth needs six other areas and at MOST I should traverse that same are twice in this first game. My first mission should be in Area A, my next 1,000 miles away, the one after that 1,000 miles away from that, and so on! Your first ten mission should be in a different place each time, and the and only then should areas repeat where you start at the other end and travel to the start of the first mission! This 'amateur hour' recrossing the same ground over and over again ruins the game. Earth, Moon, Mars Venus is not enough, by a long shot, unless each of those places had double the content. Earth itself should have quadruple the content.

6) Helmet off!!!! All humans and alien people should have their helmet off when walking The Tower, we monkey brained people like faces Bungie, seeing masked people or robot heads for 20 hours is fucking dull. Helmets off, unless you are in battle.

7) The AI is screwed up. When you use sniper rifles all teh enemies scatter like that have a 6th sense you are around. That pretty poor AI when enemies are prescient of merely your cross-hairs at 1/4 mile away. This AI-thing was supposed to be Bungie's strength, right? They need to fix that for sure.

8) Mission variety needs to be quadrupled too. I should be going on all sort of missions, helping people, shooting things, capturing bases, defending retreats, etc. All teh while the story and characters should be spinning out to me as the world is enriched with my understanding it more. This game is dry, dull, and repetitive and that needs to change very quickly.

9) Stop leaning so hard on Strikes and Crucible for boosting content. I really think the reason there is so little content is they are expected people to give a damn about Crucible, and some people won't/can't, which means those people really are getting 1/3 of a AAA game.

This was THElesson no one has seemed to take from Torchlight. And I just can't wrap my head around it. Give me some way--a pet, or a drop pod, or a super-awesome-future email account--to attach unidentified gear on a trip back to whichever Deckard Cain stand-in the game has employed.

You could still return to the Tower for Bounties or vendors or faction quests, eventually, and if they could implement a hotly-coveted Grimoire Codex on the Tower, then players would have enough reason to return when they want.

They're kind of stuck storywise because it's a mix of single and multiplayer. I think if they differentiated the stories by class picked and added more details and set up it would go a long way to adding meaning to the world. If they don't want the main character to have a personality then they need to add characters around the player to add some life to the universe. Right now it's really stale.

The other piece is to variety to the level design. More set-pieces, different objectives, having the missions all take place in unique locations. Also make the loot and leveling feel more meaningful. Allow players more customization options when leveling to build their characters and don't just make make higher level weapons higher damage. The base gameplay is good but the reasons for engaging with the gameplay are poor.

I haven't played much of the story past the first moon mission (friend has a copy, only get a chance to play it so far when he's not working), so I don't know if the playable character talks more after getting the ship for the first time. If not, then there needs to be some sort of banter or something between the ghost of the PC. It doesn't have to be cheesy stuff like BL or the TV ad, but SOMETHING! At the moment the world needs anything to liven the place up a bit. It seems like right now it's a simulation of what a robot thinks human interaction is like. Also for a loot driven game it needs MORE AND MORE loot.

I've only glanced at some of the Raid playthroughs it already looks like content and ideas that should be in the part of the game everyone is going to play.

There are buttons to push and Vex gates to jump back and forth through to solve Tomb Raider style puzzles.

Give me a Phogoth we kill by knocking over a pillar on to him , or ripping off his arms with the chains to damage him first.

I would structurally change a lot. If FROM SOFTWARE were to make this game. In chronological order:

Story

1. The intro cutscene plays out, without voice over.
2. The Ghost arrives to find you in the car graveyard. There are no monsters nearby. The Ghost at this point doesn't speak English at all. Instead, it flies about and gestures/hovers around points of interest, all the while making beeps-boops something akin to R2D2
   
3. The ghost leads you along a path that includes finding your first gun, and fighting your way past a few simple bad guys.
4. You encounter another, fully voiced and cutscene'd Guardian. He makes some sort of comment to himself like, "A new one..." and then asks what do you want.
   1. You explain you don't know who you are or what you're doing here, and there are monsters after you.
   2. He introduces himself and suggests you follow him to his camp, and that he's with The Dead Orbit. We'll call him Mort.
5. You then keep travelling---BY FOOT---towards a small trading post or something. You encounter a big baddie on the way, and the big baddie traps the Dead Orbit guy under a steel i-beam or something so you have to face off the big baddie by yourself.
6. You get the big baddie down to half health, and then another Guardian, we'll call him King, discovers you. He helps you kill the big bad, but you can hear monsters coming in the near distance.
   1. King says we gotta leave. Mort is like, "Hey, help me out, I'm trapped."
   2. King says "You can't trust him, he's with Dead Orbit." and then leaves you with the ultimatum; follow King, who says he's with the New Monarch, or risk saving Mort (whereupon King will leave)

...All the while nobody explains what the Traveller is because, to them, IT DOESN'T MATTER. The Traveller hasn't moved or done anything in centuries. It's just there. It just exists. We don't talk about the Pyramids in everyday conversation. They just are. They have "more important" things, like following the party line of their faction agenda or their own personal gain. In other words, DRAMA HAPPENS with ACTUAL CHARACTERS.

...Eventually, these choices will determine what kind of person you are organically, and thus sort you into a faction that way. The faction will give you a Sparrow, which you will then use to travel--again, by foot/Sparrow/on the ground--to a physical location on Earth called THE TOWER.

At the Tower, THAT'S where you go to buy a spaceship, which you can use to fast travel to various points already traveled to on Earth. If you beat a certain mission on Earth for the Speaker, he will then grant you access to the Moon. All of this would be conveyed in a cutscene or series of cutscenes.

When you're on Patrol, people in your faction that just show up are Friendly. People that aren't in your faction that show up are marked as hostile. It's entirely random whether they are in your faction or not, but they should be +/- 1 level of your level.

Doing things this way I think would naturally lead the player in such a way that they wouldn't feel too info-dumped, and have investment in the story. And investment in their faction!

• Don't instance off single player missions. People should be able to be in the missions areas doing stuff while you're doing stuff. It'd be great to be able to run into some extra, strange help during some tougher missions. This would also let them make the missions more challenging and interesting. The game's narrative isn't intricate or involving enough for it to be ruined by having other players around while you're doing single player stuff.
• Matchmaking for Fire Teams. If you want to form a group of dudes to just do whatever, why not? Stop "protecting" the sanctity of your game by restricting people from playing together. It's not that fucking precious.
• Matchmaking before story missions and raids. For the reasons stated above.
• Lower level raids. The raid sounds like it has interesting content. It's horseshit that it's hidden behind such a steep fucking wall.

@stete: The game has practically every type of weapon that is in Halo minus the needler and the SMG.

@hatking: those are the only reasonable changes I've seen anyone mention. Half the stuff in this thread is just insane or doesn't make sense. It's pretty clear people have RADICALLY different ideas about what they think or thought Destiny was going to be. It's not an MMO, its not a single player game, its a multiplayer shooter with a story and RPG elements that has some ideas taken from people who have probably played an MMO or two.

As someone who hasn't played it yet, the only thing I would add is 12 months.

My current plan is to wait 12 months, play this game, and then come back here to see how many of this thread's ideas have been implemented. I'm as cynical as the next guy but even my cynicism leads me to believe that massive ongoing support and updates are all part of Acti/Bungie's "Operation: Git Dat Money".

Despite the moaning, I'm still getting the impression that this thing is going to be a huge success.

@hatking: These would actually all be great changes.

@matatat: I'm only level 14 so far but so far Ive only seen the 3-4 types of assault rifles and the usual fare of heavy machine guns, shotguns and sniper rifles, so nothing which comes near to the exotic variety of the Covenant weapons. The only ones that sort of that stand out is the hand cannon and the fusion rifle, but that's just an overpowered handgun and a rifle with such a low rate of fire that makes it inferior to any other type of special weapon.

@stete: The Covenant weapons were all variations on things that existed for the humans though. Their pistol had a charge, their rifles didn't have clips, the needler was pretty much an SMG with slightly homing ammo. They don't necessarily look exotic but they function similarly. They had the sword and the hammer but I'm not sure how well they would fit into the game. The Hunter's subclass special is a powerful knife which is a little similar to the sword in a way.

Melee weapons?

More characters, or more accurately some actual characters.

Vehicles beyond the Sparrow.

Weapons on the Sparrow.

Increased single player content.

Choice of voice/sounds of your ghost.

Decreased faction equipment costs.

Better variation in weapons, with increased loot drop rate.

Double or triple the level cap. 20 just seems so low for how quickly you can get to the level cap.

Quadruple the number of areas on each planet, with random enemy types and dispersal.

Make use of the spider tank, how about a constant battle area with multiple tanks and fallen attacking an outpost type area filled with Guardians. Something similar to Horde mode.

Story/strike mission markers in the open world.
Drop-in/out matchmaking for all PvE missions.
Shotgun and Machinegun are primary weapons.
Rifles variants merged into single rifle category.
More primary and secondary weapon categories. (SMG, rail gun, laser?)
Wide variety within each weapon category.
Rocket Launcher is a secondary.
Remove Heavy weapons.
Armor adds to the stats instead of the cooldowns.
Stats give more noticable bonuses.
Remove the damage scaling and make it pure dps.
Loot level scale based on enemy not player.
Engrams give loot according to rarity and category.
Level 21+ weapons.
Remove Launch screen and make the Tower the default area, with "exits" to each planet.

There's a bunch of other minor things that needs changing too (and a bunch of major things that should be changed/removed), but those are the things I can think of that would make the game feel more like an immersive world and make the loot game more attractive, which is what the game is trying to be.

Clan rosters. Good god do we need clan rosters in the game instead of people in the zone with you who are probably not in your friends list.

Dunno, more mission variety is always the thing right? Just like AC to AC2. I'm sure they'll get there. Otherwise I think it's great. Oh, maybe some sort of indication when the patrol quest you're picking up is sending you to fight some fucking level 25 monstrosities when you're only level 14 on a planet that is indicated as level 12.

The fusion rifle is amazing for taking out shields anywhere from mid-to-close-range, especially if you have the right element on it. Sniper rifles are really powerful but if you're far enough away to take advantage of their strengths, you're really not in any danger anyways so it becomes largely irrelevant. And if you're close enough to actually use a shotgun you might as well melee instead. It's just as fast and you don't have to reload.

I'm a Warlock using scout rifles primarily so maybe it's just my particular loadout that makes it this way, but the fusion rifle is the only secondary weapon that provides me with any situational advantages over my other weapons and abilities.

1. PC release similar to common sense.

2. Free 2 Play similar to Warframe. At least I think Digital Extremes have a nice F2P model that shows F2P doesn't have to be garbage.

3. All additional content/DLC/expansions free similar to Guild Wars 2. I don't see why Destiny has to charge extra ontop of the entry fee.

..at least have a demo or free trial available?

Of course not having played the game I can't say anything about what tweaks or additions it needs, and the F2P suggestion is only half-serious. Most of all there just needs to be a PC release!

@professoress: I'm really curious to see what Destiny's player base even looks like in 12 months because it seems like a lot of people have already had their fill. It's almost guaranteed to have a fairly robust community for the foreseeable future, but if everyone still playing is level 20+, how shitty is that going to be for new players?

Add some kind of easy "join forces" button, so I can team up with people I meet in the world. It's stupid and worthless to point or way at some one, take on of those away and replace it with "join fireteam." Destiny is much better when played with other people yet they make it so hard to team up.

So you just don't want to pay for anything?

@deathstriker: If carrots on sticks don't matter to you, you shouldn't be bothered by the length of the stick. Gear only gates you from the raiding scene and higher difficulty levels for content that you already have access to; I guess I just don't see why you're complaining unless you happen to really want to do raiding.

If you don't want to play Destiny like an MMO, I'd say that Destiny isn't for you. There's plenty in this game that straddles the line between traditional console shooter and traditional MMO. I mean, the game has reputation grinding, raid lockouts, and very arbitrary gold sinks for the economy.

@glottery: I find the current system pretty intuitive. Tip: Double-tap Triangle / Y when using a heavy weapon to go straight to your secondary weapon. There's a ton of little control shortcuts like that in there.

I'm not sure what's hard to understand. Also, criticizing doesn't automatically mean complaining. I think giving people nothing but plain, green, or sometimes blue weapons and hiding the pink and exotic ones behind hours & hours of repetition is lame and a bad way to try to keep people around. I didn't say I didn't want the cool weapons, it's just that grinding isn't close to being the main focus to me. For me, it's much like GTA online, it's flawed but very fun to play with friends. If GTA kept the cool stuff behind weeks or months of playing then I'd think that was a huge mistake too. However, you're able to get enough money to buy a crib, customize cars, weapons, etc a few days into the multiplayer... not over a month.

Warframe has an AWFUL business model. That's the only reason I don't play the game often. It's silly in a Facebook or mobile sort of way. Buying the currency has a ridiculous price and it taking days (in real life) to build a suit or weapons is downright offensive. Loadout, Smite, and Path of Exlie are examples of F2P done correctly. Warframe does it in one of the worst ways.

I can't see how they shipped this game without a button to allow matchmaking for all normal missions, not just Strikes. I don't have any friends online in my level range, and no one in-game ever wants to join a fire team. I get not wanting to have an LFR for raids, but the process of joining up with other players for normal missions is so obtuse that I just went ahead and soloed from 1 to 12. I'd love to have some low-key co-op, and that seems to be the way the game was designed, which is why it's so weird that they make it difficult to actually have that experience in the shorter content.

simple, better mission variety.

A MAP!!!!!!

If armor set is going to be such a big deal light levels and curcible armor why not a vault or a locker to change up your fashion sets?

The loot progression in this game is white to green to blue to purple. I will not count Exotic's since you can only equip one piece at a time.

White and green are your leveling tiers. A player might get lucky to have a blue drop, but that should be a welcome surprise when it happens. Once the player hits 20, it is about getting the blue drops with the Light stat to prepare for harder tiers of Strikes. At level 22/23, the player is moving on to getting ready for the endgame and is starting the grind to get purples. At level 26, the player has access to the Raid, and at 28 the Nightfall Strike. This is the time that the best gear available needs to start appearing more frequently.

The problem with Destiny right now is that greens are still very much common in level 22/24 Strikes, and that the precious Legendary Engrams are not producing Legendary gear. This is either because Bungie is artificially lengthening the Light leveling experience by making good gear drops a low RNG percentage, or they screwed up the algorithms in the RNG.

The fix is simple. Nothing of green quality should be dropping in the Level 22/24 Heroics, nor should green gear be an option for a blue or Legendary Engrams. Blue Engrams should be 75% blue gear, and 25% high level mats. Legendary Engrams should be 50% purple gear, 40% high level mats, and 10% Exotic.

Raid and Nightfall Strike final bosses should drop an Engram that guarantees a piece of Class Set gear. Shaders should not be a reward for what will be a three hour raid.

The grind for Vanguard/Crucible marks and rep is perfectly fine the way they are.

I think the systems are pretty well balanced and some people do seem to just want awesome stuff immediately. I would add matchmaking to everything to at least give people the option. I understand it might not go well but not giving us the choice is pretty dumb.

1. Text chat. Give me keyboard support.
2. Level appropriate matchmaking for things other than strikes.
3. Change the RNG on engrams. I have decoded a Legendary engram twice and gotten a level 16 blue item. That simply should not happen.
4. The one hit kills in PvP. There are far too many situations of turning a corner and instantly being killed (this was discussed on the latest bombcast).
5. For the love of god, add clan support. I should be able to message someone from my clan (see point 1) and ask him if he wants to do a strike with me. This is basic shit, Bungie.