I don't have strong feelings about a lot of these but I'm very passionate about a few of them:

The slow ass Destiny 2 time to kill paired with Destiny's movement options, painfully slow cooldowns and health regen means the only reliable way to play is by team shooting from medium long range. It's stale and it's mind numbingly boring. You can learn to play a different way but you will get smashed at every turn for the smallest mistake (like throwing a bad grenade, mistiming your flank by a few seconds or looking down the wrong lane) over, and over and over again by teams playing the blob playstyle. This doesn't make me want to get better. It makes me want to never play this game again. Which I'm pretty much doing until they fix this garbage fire. But honestly, I'm not sure they want to change anything. They're fine with this dull mess that's actively crippling the PvE experience. The lead PvP designer said as much on a podcast a few weeks ago.

Hopefully Anthem or something else comes along and is good enough so I never have to think about Destiny ever again.

So I prefer the smaller teams and longer TTK etc as I come from Halo/Battlefield I would be interested to know especially if you don't like D2 PvP in its current form what MP experience others have.

I like most of the changes to D2 PvP, but not all. Not being able to choose the mode you want to play is an obvious example of something I dislike. But longer time to kill and 4v4 is great, incentivizes more tactical play as opposed to super hero chaos.

Overall most of the changes involve making the game more competitive and less unfair which I really like. I do understand why people would miss the chaotic nature of D1, but this feels a lot better to me.

Also mostly a Halo background and Gears of War, though I agree with you.

@zevvion: too bad the competitive scene is dying because this more competitive PvP is so boring to watch and play. D1 PvP wasn't "chaos". It had the perfect mix of tactical gameplay and high intensity "hero moments". PvP pretty much singlehandedly kept the game alive for almost 3 years while the content was so lacking in PvE.

Looks like D2 is heading in a very similar direction with sparse, barely replayable PvE content except this time, PvP enthusiasm is at an all time low. I can't imagin people will stick around in these conditions.

Here is my perspective on Destiny 2's PvP. I really like 4v4 for competitive modes. It works better than 3v3. Because this has a lot to do with, I also want to go into playlists, because this has a lot to do with my thoughts on 3v3, 4v4, and 6v6. I really like the idea behind a Quickplay and Competitive playlist. I just don't think Bungie has fully fleshed those idea's out enough in Destiny 2 yet. Competitive needs more modes (can we please see Elimination return), and some massive changes to Survival (rounds still take too long, I'd prefer it if each player only has 1 Res Token or extra life per round). Matchmaking Setting also need serious tuning, as connection should be the primary priority in Quickplay, not Skill Ratings. Competitive should use the current Quickplay Skill Rating settings, and more so, we need to having actual rankings in game to display how Bungie is ranking us against other players. This hidden Skill Ratings system is awful, just tell us how good you think we are. It's pretty obvious it's pretty strict just looking over stat tracking sites like Destinytracker.com. We also need to keep a Game Mode of the week up at all times. It's crazy how much fun having Mayhem back up this week has been. Even if you aren't doing well it's a good time. Have crazy weekly PvP events, with a Milestone attached to doing them for Powerful Gear. Do some crazy stuff with this, bring back some large D1 vehicle maps with the new vehicles and bring back Combined Arms in 6v6 or even 8v8, just only for this mode. Spawn Heavy Ammo frequently at 6 boxes or so at a time. Make is big, make it crazy, and let players just have a messy fun time. Rotate it to where 4v4 Iron Banner is up one week, Combined Arms is up a Week, Mayhem is out another week, then put out Rumble that is 6 players, heck you could even bring back Rift as a Weekly game. Another big thing that needs to be put in is solo player protection. I don't think a full Solo Only playlist is needed, just lower Skill Requirements, push Connection, and force Groups to play Groups. It's pretty obvious Destiny Skill Rating are being pushed above matching Groups against other Groups, which often leads to Teams rolling over solo players. All of this alone added to Custom Matches that should be coming in early 2018 would add a ton of variety and fun back in to the Crucible for Destiny 2.

As far as the Sandbox goes, I'm personally not a big fan of either the Static Rolls or the new Energy Weapon Systems. But we are where we are and there really isn't any changing that, at least not until a full sequel of Destiny 3, and that's likely 3 years away. So for now I'd like a couple things to change. Kinetic/Energy Weapon Damage needs to go up, as in almost 25% across the board in both PvE and PvP (with the exception of a few outliers like Sidearms and SMG's, which would receive smaller buffs). In my opinion, for PvE, these Weapons just take too long to kill Ads, especially in the harder difficulty modes like Prestige. It feels more like you are playing The Division than Destiny, and normal enemies just feel like bullet sponges. This is primarily due to the decrease in PvP damage to bring TTK to around 1.2-1.3s across the board. This has also led to several problem's in PvP I really hate, like players feeling forced to run in Groups since 1 player can easily take a bad angle, get shot from a single player, and easily dip to cover and still have 1/3 or more of their health before dying. This is the number 1 reason Assist numbers have more than doubled for Destiny 2 PvP over Destiny 1. IMO, this isn't a positive change. If someone makes a bad decision, they should be punished for it, not just say oh crap, I guess I shouldn't push that angle and walk away. TTK should be moved back down to around where it was in Destiny 1, at around 0.9s. And before anyone says "Go to COD if you want low TTK", that's an absurd statement since COD TTK's are between 0.15-0.25s. I want to play Destiny, not COD or Halo, both of those games have their own problems, and Destiny 1 had it's own identity being neither and being right in between both, giving players both the ability to have reaction time, but not enough to literally do a 180 in the middle of a field and kill an opponent because they missed 1 of 5 shots like it is now and is for Halo. For Destiny 2 players, SMG TTK is basically perfect, and all guns should have that TTK except SMG's and Sidearms (I would nudge Sidearms to around 0.7s and SMG's to 0.8s, as they are at 0.75s and 0.9s now respectively). I'd also bring the range up on Pulse Rifles, down a bit on Autos, drastically reduce in air accuracy penalties across the board, reduce accuracy penalties like Bloom and Initial Shot for Precision based Weapons (Scouts, Hand Cannons, Pulses, Snipers), and base AA up around 20 on Snipers and Hand Cannons. Bullets should always feel like they go where aimed, and at least with a Gamepad on PC and Consoles, they don't. Another thing I would really like is if we had less Rocket Ammo per Power in PvP (1 per grab no matter the Rocket), and more Spawns of Power (3-4 at a time). Make players push for the Power instead of each team having 1 player grab Power. It isn't fun to kill non-Power Ammo players, there is no challenge in that. Force players into battleground positions for Power Ammo to fight for it more. While in this ballpark I'd also like to hit on Static Rolls. I don't necessarily think Static Rolls are the biggest problem. Masterwork Weapons kind of fill that void that has been missing in the finding cool things department, especially their ability to allow more PvE Supers without really effecting PvP much at all. Those are really growing on me, and from what Christopher Barrett has mentioned on Twitter about Masterwork Armor, I think I will love those as well, especially if they come with a complete overhaul of the current Mod System like many of us are hoping. The biggest problem though is that the Weapons we have are extremely boring. With Random Rolls, there were these special God Tier level of Weapons/Armor you could find. The thing that is really missing, is Bungie isn't combining perks in a cohesive way, the way in which players of Destiny 1 would combine perks to create those God Tier Weapons. If Bungie started doing a better job of making Legendary guns, ones that truly felt powerful in given situations, it would make a lot of us feel much better about what we have with Static Rolls. Think about this, for PvE, our top tier Weapons are Scouts like Purpose, Nameless Midnight, and Mannannan. It's it's almost exclusively because each of these guns have Explosive Rounds (which in D2 is a solid perk, let me say that again "a solid perk"). If we compare that to one of the most famous PvE Scouts of Destiny 2, The Hung Jury, it's easy to see the Power discrepancy. Hung Jury had Triple Tap, Firefly (which did 50% damage to normal Ads nearby per kill), and Extended Mag (giving it 21 Rounds compared to D2 Scouts 15, and 29 for HJ if you hit all Crits due to TT). Primary Weapons in D1 just had a potential for a staggering amount of more power than any of the Weapons we have in D2. And the same thing can be said about Subclasses. Bungie has combines many of the D2 Subclasses in nonsensical ways, for seemingly no other reason but to suck Power out of the game from Players. Make us feel Powerful again.

Which brings me to the next thing I want to talk about. There is no doubt Ability Cooldowns had gotten quite a bit out of Control on Tier 12 builds at the end of Destiny 1. Grenades were on Sub 25s cooldowns depending on the Class. And when they had the sheer power they did, there was no getting around the fact that this was a problem. Though Bungie did what they always do, and way over-corrected by hitting this problem with a Hammer from two angles. For the most part they cut damage of Grenades in half, and optimal cooldowns with 2 Mods went up to 75s. This is not only not fun in PvE, it isn't fun for PvP either, and creates massive imbalance problems, and contributes drastically to the massive issue of roaming packs of Guardian blobs in the Crucible for D2. Players rarely have AoE Grenades to challenge groups, and even when they do, they barely do more than tickle the enemies. This needs to change. Many Grenades received a tiny buff in the latest Sandbox pass, but this wasn't nearly enough. With the exception of Pulse, Tripmine, Voidwall, Vortex, and Solar Grenades, all of the Grenades need another pass and about another 20% increase in damage, and on AoE grenades that needs to be applied to their AoE, as well as an increased splash radius by about 2.5m. This would do a better job of discouraging players from running around attached at the hip like they are now. Now, nobody wants to see Grenades go back to 25s, but un-Modded at 93s and 75s with 2 Mods is silly. Those should be brought down by 35% to 60s un-Modded and -7s per Mod (46s for 2 Mods), and cap the effectiveness at 2 Mods. This would both increase the fun of PvE and PvP, because lets face it, abilities are fun, and they are what makes Destiny... Destiny. In this same vein, I'd like to see base Recovery boosted by 1s more, and Mobility to increase the both Ground and Aerial Speed to a much greater degree. Quick Movement Speed was a defining characteristic of Destiny 1, and it's removal is nothing less than sad. I totally understand removing the ability to gain momentum, and that's fine, but allow us to gain D1 Ground and Aerial Speed after a certain distance based on their Mobility Stat and Lightweight Modifiers active. As Ricky Bobby once said "I want to go fast".

Another big thing mentioned her in a way is the Bounty System. I don't know if I want a Bounty Board back, as I don't mind the Milestones. What I do desperately want back though is a Quest Tab. Why do I have to keep so many of these Quests in my Weapons, Ghost, and Inventory Slots. This is absurd that we went backwards so badly with these changes. You fixes this stuff literally 2 years ago, why have we backtracked. I don't understand. Along these lines, please, for the love of all that is holy, increase of inventories. Increase Shader Slots or at least give us dedicated Vault Space for them (and allow us to delete stacks of unwanted Shaders, as I'm not going to sit there and delete 213 Blue Geometry's), increase Mod Slots or reconfigure them to where only having 50 slots makes a lot more sense (seeing as how we have the potential for 90+ Mods now), and increase Vault Space to a lot more than 200. Along the lines of other stuff mentioned here, I like the return of D1 Exotics personally, as long as that doesn't effect their creation of new Exotics. I'd rather a DLC contain 15 Exotic Armor, 11 of which is from D1, and 9 Weapons, 5 of which of from D1, as opposed to only getting 4 Armors and 4 Weapons. Especially when many of those D1 Exotics have been re-imagined to work in Destiny 2 in great ways. I don't know how anyone could see this as a bad thing. Personally I kind of hate that they felt they had to leave so much of Destiny behind for D2 to begin with. It made Destiny 2 feel a bit hallow honestly.

All in all, I think Bungie has a long way to go with Destiny 2 still, I just hope they get there before next Fall, because as sad as it is, I never thought we would be in this situation. But here we are.

Note: This is silly but if you want to know my experience I've been playing FPS games for a long time. Didn't start getting into Multiplayer until Socom Fireteam Bravo games on PSP and the occasional Halo LAN party in HS. Played a lot of COD 4, WAW, BO, MW II, BO II, MW III, Ghosts, Battlefield BC, BC 2, Battlefield 3 & 4, Battlefield 1, Titanfall, hated COD WWII this year. I think Reach was the only Halo I played a lot of Multiplayer of, outside of just playing at friends houses. But Destiny is far and wide the most time I've ever put into any multiplayer game. In Destiny 1 I put 1036 hours into the Crucible, most of which was playing Trials of Osiris. I played 4,481 games of Trials, winning over 71% of matches at a 1.4 K/D, and going Flawless 147 times (if I remember correctly, none of the sites track that anymore, but I remember only being a week short of 150 Flawless). In Destiny 2 I've played 214 Trials of the Nine matches, winning 77%, a 2.12 KA/D (actual K/D matters less in D2), and 11 Flawless. I'm far from the best player around but I like to think when it comes to Destiny I know what I'm talking about in regards to PvP, as I've played a lot more of it than most. I'm also getting older and my FPS skills are slowing down as youngen's reaction times have already surpasses mine, so I very much don't want to play a twitch shooter, but Destiny 2 in it's current state is very boring.

@pyrodactyl: The only noticable drop in competitive PvP was right after The Dawning launched and that had likely more to do with the kick in the balls the event represented.

Otherwise, I have never seen 5 full pages of 'less than a minute ago' posts for Trials on LFG websites other than in D2. Dead is not a term appropriate for a game that had more people grouping up for its competitive multiplayer. Even now when numbers are lowest I've ever seen, it's still a lot more present than Year 3 of D1. That mythical time you speak of where everyone kept playing D1 for 3 years straight truly doesn't exist. That game was in deeper depths repeatedly than D2 has reached thus far.

@zevvion: You're comparing a 3 year old game to a 4 month old game. A 3 year old game they completely mangled by implementing what I've heard was the worst meta at the end. D1 vs D2 in any other point in its lifespan? D1 wins by a landslide. Twitch viewership was through the roof. People complained about PvP a lot because they cared. Now they're just over it. They've abandoned the idea of PvP turning into something good in the future. Also the Christmas event is terrible? I haven't looked into it but how could that be? I am *shocked*, *SHOCKED* I tell you.

@hestilllives19 any numbers on the actual amount of people in PvP/trials over the last month?

@pyrodactyl: You made that comparison, not me. You said it was being kept 'alive' for almost 3 years, and you said D2 is 'dying'. I guess what you mean is just Twitch and not actual liveliness. In which case, yeah, it is being watched less. But don't pretend D1 would've been watched the same amount with the influx of Battle Royale at that time either. Twitch is a more flexible platform in viewership than playernumbers across games.

Arguing over whether the game is dead or not is inherently moot since you can just boot the game up and check for yourself. If you queue into a match, you'll find one as fast or faster than any time in D1's lifespan. You look for Trials group, you will find one faster. Or you did before The Dawning launched anyway.

@pyrodactyl: Trials isn't doing so hot for Destiny 2 at all. Honestly it's weekly average is lower for Destiny 2's history than the entire history of D1, which is especially troubling when you consider D2 is on a 3rd platform. Destiny 2 hit with a bang, we don't know week 1 numbers, just like we don't know a few other potential big weeks due to the API being down like Week 1-3 ever back in House of Wolves and Week 1 of Taken King, but Rise of Iron's launch held the previous record of just shy of 900k players on 2 platforms (which was just slightly higher than Taken King Week 2 at 750k). Prior to the PC launch, Destiny 2 shattered that with 1.1m in Week 2, and slowly fell by about 200k players for it's first month to hold around 500k (which is historically about the average Trials playerbase per weekend for Destiny 1). But by the time the PC version launched, Console Trials participation had dropped to about 250k. Week 1 on PC brought in 150k PC players, but dropped another 50k on Console, bringing totals up to 350k that Week. So, important to note, the historic low for Destiny 1 Trials was 205k on a full weekend (since half weekends that got cancelled don't count, a week on Blind Watch was cancelled on Friday due to a glitch only 6 afters after launch, which obviously was the historic low at like 75k players), which happened during the D2 Beta, which is a surprise to absolutely nobody. So 3 Weeks after the PC launch, on only it's 3rd weekend, Trials participation crashed on PC, dropping down to like 50k. Coincidentally, numbers on Consoles started also hitting historic lows Week after Week until Curse of Osiris, dropping as low as only 135k Console players the week before CoO. Curse picked numbers back up a bit, but it seems like sales of Curse on PC are real bad, as Trials participation on Week 1 of Curse was only 20k and has stayed there. Console numbers jumped back up to around 220k, almost a 100k jump, but dropped by 40k last week bringing it back down to 180k. So far, two days in, this week has only seen 98k players, 55.4k PS4, 11.8k PC, and 30.8k X1.

So to think that Destiny 2's PvP community hasn't been hurting since launch would just be ignoring facts. 1.4m players played yesterday, only 267k of those touched PvP. That's real bad. And the blame for that can almost exclusively be laid at the feet of Jon Wisniewski, and Sandbox Updates that both took way too long and did way to little.

Note: I did not fact check these numbers, they are all coming from memory since most of them aren't stored anymore and I would have to spend an hour or more searching Google Images for dates and Twitter Posts by Trials Report and DestinyTracker. Though they are all relatively correct and won't be off by much (I look at this type of stuff often and have posted about it, so I'm sure you could search even this Forum and the D1 Forum for stuff I posted when this information was Public Record and before sites like TrialsReport stopped tracking it after the actual Week), but keep this in mind. The only truly factual numbers are the DestinyTracker numbers from yesterday and this weeks current Trials numbers.

Update: Only 133.5k Console players for Trials on Christmas weekend ending 12/26. Lowest in history.

Looking at Lives' numbers makes me think my analysis was pretty spot on. D1 survived because of its solid PvP community. D2 is out on one more platform than D1 and the PvP numbers are in the gutter. The game is only a few month old and the DLC just came out, D2 should be thriving right now but PvP is basically at an all time low. I'm glad this isn't just an impression and people are actually leaving this game in droves. This is the only way Bungie will ever make a better game. Speaking out isn't enough. If it was they would've heard all the criticism they got over the last 3 years and released something better than Destiny 2 last September. Now they either fix their damn game or poison the brand forever.

@pyrodactyl: Oh there is no doubt they are getting hammered. Both from a nobody seems to have purchased Curse of Osiris standpoint (hurting their wallets) and a basically livid community right now. Major gaming media posting negative articles on a near daily basis is having some major impact, and even the outrage at Eververse like this below that is reaching a fever pitch currently.

(Keep in mind Briar Rabbit is one of the biggest Destiny Defenders out there, as one of the original Planet Destiny Podcast Members)

Luckily, some at Bungie seem to actually be listening. Remember me talking up Christopher Barrett awhile back as one of the best employee's at Bungie, and one of the key reasons a lot of D1 content got better (House of Wolves, April Update, Rise of Iron, The Dawning, Age of Triumph, he was in charge of all of that, and all of those are some of the best Destiny 1 had to offer). Here is some of his latest tweet today.

• The next Iron Banner and Faction Rally will contain themed Sparrows, Ghosts, Ships, and Shaders (things currently only relegated to Eververse).
• Next year they are "refactoring Raid itemization across the game" and "The most difficult activities will be the most rewarding". This leads me to believe these will get the "Eververse" treatment just like IB and FR are getting which would be a very good thing.
• "we hear your feedback on Eververse. We both want our players to feel respected, and to deliver great content regularly to our community. Expect lots of discussion with the dev team and an update on our path forward after the new year." While I don't have a problem with Eververse's existence, I do have a problem with a lack of any meaningful cosmetic type items given for in game Activities. Hopefully Bungie realizes that Eververse can't be the one size fits all for these items like it has been. IB and FR having them finally is a good start, but they need this type of awesome item for Raids, Trials, Prestige Nightfalls, etc as well.
• "One more for good measure. We have short term and long term solutions for Vault space in the works". This likely means Kiosks in the longterm and actual Vault Space increases in the Short. We need both.

Add this stuff to what we already know is coming early next year also via Chris (Masterwork Armors, revamped Mod System, Custom Matches for Crucible, some form of Ranked PvP) and I hope by the time DLC 2 comes around Destiny 2 will be in a much better place than it has been, but I'm afraid they will have lost any and all of the goodwill they had from the community at large due to what they did throughout Destiny 1. I don't think any of us expected Destiny 2 to be in this bad of shape right now, and it still blows my mind that what is needed to make Destiny 2 better is make it more like it's predecessor, something Destiny 2 should already have been at launch.

Edit: Found this later by TrueVanguard. It really delves into what is wrong with Crucible right now. It's a good video, and he talks about why he has kind of quit Destiny 2 himself right now.

@hestilllives19: As with the criticism of the campaign in D1, the complaints about the loot boxes in D2 are not touching on the fundamental problems with the game. All of Barrett's fixes are incredibly superficial. They're just unfucking stuff they fucked up themselves. His tweets basically promise D2 won't be worse than D1 in PvE at some point when they fix all these issues next year. That's not what I want. I want D2 to be BETTER than D1. More gameplay variety, more repeatable activities, more interesting subclasses, better designed exotic armor. How the hell are we more than 3 years in and they're still constantly fixing their own mistakes instead of improving the game?

That's not even mentioning the sorry state of PvP. TrueVanguard seems to have the right idea but the lead PvP designer made it pretty clear he has his own (bad) vision of what crucible should be and is sticking to it. Making Mayhem a permanent game mode wouldn't be enough either since I'm pretty sure I would hate it as a hunter with the supers available to me. They need to rebalance PvP entirely. Faster cooldowns, faster time to kill. I won't come back until I'm sure I can have fun in solo queue and trials again.