[b]TL;DR:[/b] Disconnect rewards from Light Level, reward players more generously and earlier; Solstice was a great example of rewards done right. I'm about to say something controversial: I don't think the intent behind the Portal was a bad idea. The Portal had good intentions, players would onboard into Solo Ops, graduate to higher difficulty levels as their Light Level increased, gain the skills necessary to do high-end multiplayer content, and ultimately graduate into doing Raids, Dungeons, Pinnacles, and the like. The game would teach us to be high level players by putting us in higher and higher difficulty content, rewarding us with higher Tier loot and higher Light Levels along the way. Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems with the Portal's implementation; the grind is slow, the rewards often feel unrewarding, Light Level isn't itself very rewarding, and many of us have struggled with the increased difficulty. I'm an average player on above average days, I don't really want to do Master and Grandmaster level content, that's not what I find fun in the game; but on the flip side, I also don't find it fun to get Tier 2 and Tier 3 loot, that doesn't feel very rewarding to me. Speaking just to my personal experience with the current system, I'm at LL360 and struggling with Master level content, it feels bad to die twenty times during a run. Master level content isn't the hardest in the game by a mile, but for me it's very challenging, and Fireteam Ops feel downright impossible, I'm sweating a lot of the time - and then I'm rewarded with Tier 2 and Tier 3 loot, which also feels bad. If I go down a level in difficulty, so does the quality and quantity of the loot I get, I get lower Light Level rewards and longer grinds. And I'll be honest: I don't care about Light Levels, that's not what I play the game for, I play the game for Loot. Light Levels are not a reward people want to chase, it doesn't itself feel rewarding, what feels rewarding is getting good Tier 4 and Tier 5 loot. The current Light Progression system feels like a treadmill within a treadmill; "First you have to run 500 yards for LL400+, then you are allowed to run an additional infinite number of yards to get your god rolls." This is not a fun solution, it's too many layers of abstraction to feel rewarding. Here is what I would propose, if it could be implemented: Scrap the Light Level based reward system and instead reward up to Tier 4 gear in Expert level Ops, keep Tier 5 gear sequestered behind Master and Grandmaster levels. (Or make Master Tier 4, maybe; Solo Ops are easier than Fireteam Ops, so that could still get good Tier 4 loot into a lot of player's hands.) Pinnacle level content, Raids, Grandmaster Ops, stuff like that, should give top Tier rewards, but lower level content needs to be rewarding, too. So to recap: - Disconnect rewards from Light Level, connect them instead to difficulty. - Give Tier 4 rewards starting at Expert level Ops. - Give Tier 4 and infrequent Tier 5s for Master level Ops. - Give Tier 5 and shiny(?) drops at Grandmaster level Ops. - Average players would still have a rewarding experience, high skill players would still be rewarded for their patience and effort, all players would still have the opportunity and incentive to graduate to the highest level content. Get Tier 4 gear into player's hands sooner, let us opt out of the sweat and still get good gear, let people opt into the sweat and get even better gear. Solstice was the happiest I have seen this community since the release of Edge of Fate, everybody was grinding, player counts were up, now Bungie just needs to do that to the rest of the game. Alternatively, get players to LL400+ [i]way,[/i] [i][b]way[/i][/b] faster. I mean even faster than right now with the Bonus Drops, I'm talking about it taking players a week of good play to get from LL200 to LL400, get them through the first treadmill faster, make the Tier 4 and Tier 5 grind the focus of the game. I don't think the Portal was a bad idea, I see what Bungie was going for. What Bungie forgot was that not all of us want to graduate onto harder and harder content; I don't raid, and I'm fine not being a raider, I've tried Master level Fireteam Ops and found them unpleasant, but the rewards for the "low end" difficulty just aren't very rewarding. I didn't stick it out to LL400+ because the game got tedious, I was either asked to do what for me is very hard content, or do easier content and get lousy rewards; these are fixable problems. Mind you, this won't fix all the problems with the game, I'm just focusing on the Portal here. Improving Unstable Core economy, giving us more tools or more room for Vault management, creating Tier 4 and Tier 5 Exotics, there's a lot more Bungie can do, but I think the biggest problem is the effort to reward ratio currently in the game, and fixing it would bring a lot of players back. Disclaimer: I am not a game dev, for all I know I just told Bungie to turn lead into gold and then gold into puppy dogs.