Context: I've been playing destiny 2 for a while now (1.2k hours) and mostly been a solo guardian, here are some of my takes [i](pls take them with a grain of salt since everyone has a preference)[/i] 0- What drew me to the game is the ambience and how it captures the space-like atmosphere in a very surreal way. Amazing views and fun combat. It's a game i can play for hours after work because it doesnt require insane mechanical skills (i stay away from crucible lol) 1- there's so much [i]"untapped"[/i] content in the sense that players never get to do raids or even dungeons because they dont have matchmaking. They'd do the campaign and quests then skidaddle. I understand that they dont have matchmaking for a reason (comms), but perhaps there can be a middle ground here. It makes no sense to have your "peak" content somehow hidden behind having 2-5 other friends to play with. A subset of people will use fireteam finder, and another subset will use discord LFG, we already lost players at that point. D2 tried a nice thing last year when dungeons came with "baby mode" difficulty where they guided you on what to do. I think we need that for dungeons AND raids to actually have the players explore every bit of content in the game (there is a LOT). Perhaps it can be per encounter where you jump in and select your role for the encounter, or get a quick tutorial on what you're supposed to do to finish it. 2- I cant exactly pinpoint what it is, but the game feels lacking in the community aspect. Maybe it's the matchmaking, maybe it's how the fireteam/arena strikes are designed, but theres almost no need to communicate whatsoever. Other guardians in matchmaking feel like they may not be real people. I sometimes even type to them in tower/mission chat and they never respond lol. It's a shell with a gun. This is fine ofc from time to time, but becomes a problem when thats almost every matchmade game you get into. It also doesnt help with bringing the community together and potentially lead to new friends or clanmates. 3- It seems like we're in the era of streamers. Whatever games they play, a big influx of players goes towards that game. Unfortunately this only applies to big streamers, but I do feel like D2 is lacking a big content creator. People like [u]burntpeanut [/u] can single handedly double player counts for games like arc raiders, rust, or even apex. 4- perhaps the game listened to the "community" too much? you cant please everyone after all. [i]"game is too grindy[/i]" so they take out grinding....now [i]"game is too easy, i miss grinding for guns"[/i] [b]bruh...[/b] Im not sure what bungie is basing their decisions off of, but it would be better if they were more data driven like Valve. If you have a handful of people complaining that something is too broken....welllllll just ignore what they say and look at the data. Does this gun have an absurdly high win rate? Does this hunter ability dominate in this game mode....etc, and base your decisions off the data not off the perhaps vocal minority. You also gotta keep in mind that some people make (or want to) a living off of social media attention grabs. You will always see titles like "THIS BUILD IS TOO BROKEN" or "YOU MUST GET THIS WEAPON NOW" ...etc, once again the easiest solution is to look at the data. Another thing to keep in mind is...who is this affecting? If a gun is too broken in PvP, there will be way more complaints than if the gun is too strong in PvE. Does bungie even care to make a balanced game? I personally couldnt care less for PvP so I will abstain :) 5- I never worked for bungie but I can tell there's a lot of inconsistency with the content, especially newer ones. Some social areas have matchmaking (like venus, europa...etc) but others dont (like kepler and pale heart). Makes no sense why as there are kepler quests that require you to do these pseudo missions...and it's tough as solo so you need fireteam finder or LFG (again...this is a barrier to people that i believe is unnecessary) 6- My understanding about taking out old content is concerns over game size getting too big. This problem already existed in other games, and the way it was tackled is by allowing the player to choose. Would be nice if D2 can do that and basically allow you to pick which DLC/campaign you want to download. If campaigns alone dont fix the problem, then perhaps you can do it per destination and campaign. You cant do it on DLC because the exotics/items need to be available everywhere, so it's not super straightforward, but I think it's solvable. Anyway these are just my thoughts on D2 so far, i still love the game and will continue to play. I tried hard (and failed) to convince others to play, but im persistent :) Catch you around guardians!