[quote]The core grinding and farming for a looter-shooter, especially but not exclusively for godrolllled loot, is completely incompatible with expiry dates[/quote] Absolutely wrong. 1. No loot game OWES you---or anyone else---a perfectly rolled weapon. Nor does it owe you the ability to keep it forever if you should be lucky enough to get one. Destiny is the only loot game that allowed this misguided notion to take root...and they did it because it covered UP for Bungie's inability to keep the game adequately supplied with content. 2. Every loot game retires power from the game. They have to do this because it is the only way to keep players chasing after loot. The only difference is that those devs who are actually SKILLED at these kinds of games NEVER tell you that you can keep anything forever (!). Plus they do a much better job of HIDING how they go about doing it. So they don't have to call ATTENTION to the fact that it has to be done, after telling you for five years that it wasn't necessary. [quote]As they dial it away from its core the gameplay content has to take over for game satisfaction and that isn't happening.[/quote] Wrong again. If you've ever played a Boderlands game, you'll find that you spend the vast majority of your time grinding a very small amount of content over and over again, trying to optimize your load out. Same with Diablo 3 and other loot games. The reason why the formula works is because what drives play is the perpetual loot chase, and the power gains that come with it: [i]Kill stuff. Get loot. Use that loot to kill even more powerful stuff. Get more powerful loot. Rinse and Repeat.[/i] That is the fundamental game play loop that every successful loot game is built upon. The reason why Destiny has struggled at times, is because many of the devs at Bungie either didn't understand this.....or didn't RESPECT that this is how loot games are played. The only changes that Bungie needs to stop using very low drop rates to cover up for a lack of loot. Having someone run 50 raids just to get 1K Voices or an Anarchy IS incompatible with a loot game, and Bungie needs to stop that crap. The game needs to be more generous. The other change is that Bungie needs to OVERHAUL a weapon system whose perks were designed for PVP balance...and not PVE power-progression. That system has HAMSTRUNG this game for the last three years, and made it a struggle for it to create loot that is worth pursuing. Without that, this game eventually self-destructs. Especially WITHOUT sunsetting. Because---as Smith said three years ago, "How do you make your tenth Better Devils interesting?" Only now its "How do you make your tenth god-rolled 150 rpm hand cannon interesting?" The answer to both questions is, "You can't." ...and letting people keep weapons FOREVER, only complicates this survival-level problem for the game. How you avoid that problem is how every loot game deals with the problem that players chase power...and you can't keep giving power to the player forever. YOu do it by taking power AWAY from the player in one part of the game, and giving it BACK to them somewhere else. Which is what Bungie has been doing now for years. They've just haven't been frank with us about what they were doing and why they were doing it until now. [quote]Indeed they're burning the candle at both ends, removing replayable content like Menagerie, etc whilst diminishing the collectability of loot and any sense of character progression - our loot was our characters.[/quote] That sounds like a personal preference issue. Because, with games pushing nearly 200 GB in size, and consoles coming out that are going to be even LESS upgradable than what's currenly on the market....the inability to simply let this game keep growing forever is real. Also no veteran loot gamer plays a game like this and expect to keep things forever, so that is not a design issue. Lastly, Bungie realizes that failing to progress the character skill tree was a mistake....and one they seem to be addressing. But that was a design FAILURE that was foisted upon them by a design team that was designing Destiny for e-sport PVP, and not as a loot game or action-RPG. Bungie has been in the position of trying to literally re-engineer this game from the ground up....while we continued to play it every day.