Dear Poria Torkan and the Bungie team, Before anything else, I want to be transparent: I used AI to help organize and rewrite this email so that my thoughts would be easier to follow. The experiences, opinions, and reasoning are entirely mine. My request is that someone actually read this letter rather than relying on an AI-generated summary or a list of bullet points. I hope you'll take the time to understand the perspective of one player who has been here since the beginning. I started playing Destiny in eighth grade, near the end of middle school. I'm 25 now. I played the original beta and had never experienced anything like it. Even with the level cap at eight, I kept replaying the same strike boss, hoping for a better gun. I didn't realize it at the time, but I'd fallen in love with the core loop of a loot shooter — I just knew I wanted to keep playing. When the beta went offline, something was missing. I couldn't wait for release and preordered the highest edition available. Once the game launched, I was hooked. Then I discovered raids, and that was it. My friends would throw pebbles at my window trying to get me to come skateboard while I was on my hundredth attempt at Atheon with my fifteenth raid group, because the previous fourteen had disbanded after enough failed tries. Those are still some of my favorite gaming memories. I've played every Destiny 1 expansion, the Destiny 2 beta, and every Destiny 2 expansion since. Last Wish is my favorite raid of either game. My playtime is 3,325 hours and 43 minutes in Destiny 1, and 1,521 hours and 45 minutes in Destiny 2. I want to be upfront that this gap isn't about growing up, work, or having less free time. What changed was my reason to keep logging in — and I think that reason is the actual problem you should be investigating. The core Destiny 1 gameplay loop was at its best before you started stacking on light levels, somewhere around Crota's End and The Dark Below. Here's what made it work: Legendary weapons were genuinely hard to get, and I made it a goal to collect all of them. On top of that, they had special rolls, which gave me an entirely separate reason to grind loot caves and Crucible even after I'd gotten the base weapon. Exotics took that further — they were rare, unique, and could change your loadout, and you'd grind for months chasing a specific one. Light levels worked the same way. If you came into a raid as prepared as possible, you'd cap around level 28; you needed raid gear to hit 30, and that gear was pure drop chance. Your light level wasn't artificially suppressed the first week and then quietly made easier later, and there was no "easy mode" version of the raid to shortcut it. You had one goal — raise your light level — and the raid was how you did it, every week. That's the part I want to draw a straight line through: because raid gear was the primary way to actually progress your power, the raid itself became the engine for everything else. Once I'd cleared my weekly drops, I found out secret chests could give extra loot — that's actually where I got my first exotic, Ice Breaker. Then I learned that running a second character meant a second shot at those same raid drops. I started an alt not because I was bored, but because raid gear being the peak progression path made "more chances at raid loot" worth the extra grind. The whole system had no easy way out, and that was the point. Now you have prime engrams and guaranteed light level drops. You can choose your rolls on legendaries. At one point you could even choose which exotic you'd get from an exotic engram — one of the worst changes I've seen made, because it took the one thing exotics had going for them (you might not get the one you wanted) and removed it. I want to be direct about something: you guys have never had trouble making incredible raids, stories, and cinematics. That was never the problem. The problem is you stopped protecting the grind underneath them, and you kept caving to the loudest complaints by making things easier, year after year. Back when the grind was still intact, I'd finish my raid drops for the week and then go grind Crucible for a god roll, or hold out hope for a Gjallarhorn. Then you made Gjallarhorn available through Xûr "to make the game easier" — and that decision is a perfect example of straying from the core loop. Making the chase reliable didn't make the weapon feel better to get. It just ended the chase. When vanilla Destiny 2 launched, I played it exactly the way I played Destiny 1 — except this time I already knew how the grind worked. I got my power level up, beat the raid, and then realized there was nothing left to chase. It felt like a skeleton of the game I knew. I didn't care about hunting a specific exotic anymore, because I could just choose it — and so could everyone else, which meant it stopped being special. Legendaries didn't feel special either, and raid gear stopped mattering. That got worse with every expansion, right up to today. There were real exceptions — Last Wish and a handful of other expansions pulled me back in and kept me grinding — but outside of those, the cycle became completely predictable: week one, grind and maybe beat the raid boss; week two, definitely beat it, because prime engrams have already pushed your light level up and, on top of that, you've intentionally stopped suppressing light level after the first week, so the raid itself gets easier at the same time your power is rising; then move on to the smaller grind, like Trials of Osiris god rolls; by week four, I was done, and I'd wait months for the next expansion to give me a reason to come back. That predictability is the core problem. Raid drops are hard-won and feel rewarding the week you earn them — but by the next week, the light level requirement has already been eased and you're no longer capped, so the difficulty you just fought through stops meaning anything. Hard mode is fine — I actually like it, because adept gear is genuinely rare — but it can't fix a gameplay loop that prime engrams have already broken everywhere else. You shouldn't be able to pick exact rolls on legendaries either. Exotics should feel exotic and rare, and owning one should feel like an asset to your raid team, not a checkbox. I don't know what your plan is for Destiny 2, but I think it may be too far gone to fix without a full wipe — and I understand that's a massive ask that would come with real backlash. I'd personally be fine with it. What I'm asking is that you put real resources into comparing what the gameplay loop looked like before House of Wolves against everything that came after, all the way through the most recent expansion. Figure out specifically what kept players playing back then, and what's different now — what changed for the better, and what quietly gutted the loop. One more example worth digging into: why did Trials of the Nine fail, given that it was the successor to a genuinely beloved Trials of Osiris? I think the answer is that the loot stopped feeling rare. In Trials of the Nine, you could get largely the same gear at three or five wins that you could get at seven. Original Trials worked because going 7-0 without a loss was genuinely hard, and the gear you earned from it was something you could only get by going 7-0 — the reward was tied directly to the difficulty of the achievement, not just to participation. I also want to flag Iron Banner, across both games. It's always felt like filler — stale, and with no real reason to care about it. For me it's functioned less like its own mode and more like a checkpoint marking where the current content cycle happens to be. Whatever changes you make based on everything above, Iron Banner needs its own rework too, or it'll stay dead weight while the rest of the loop improves around it. I know plenty of players will disagree with parts of this. I can only tell you what kept me playing for thousands of hours, and what made me stop. From where I sit, every change meant to remove frustration also removed the anticipation that made Destiny worth returning to. I'm writing this because Destiny meant enough to me that I still remember ignoring pebbles at my window for one more attempt at Atheon. I'd like to feel that way about it again. Thank you for your time, and for building a game that gave me this many hours of genuinely unforgettable experiences.