By "earn" they mean time invested. Yes the loot is random, but the more time you invest in the game, the higher chances you have at actually getting good loot. But one things for sure: Trading is NOT the solution! Take any MMORPG with player trade and it ends up almost ruining the game in the long run. For starters, Destiny will end up appearing on gold selling sites. These are sites run by sweat shops, mainly in Asia, where they pay under-minimum wage people to play games 24/7, gather tons of ingame currency and loot, so that players like you and me can purchase them for real money. While some of you might find this to be a great thing, cause you're a rich @#)*@# and don't mind wasting your hard earned cash to quickly get better gear in a MMORPG, it's also leads to ingame advertisement spam and hacking. Do you really want to play Destiny, get dozens of random friend invites per day from complete strangers, only to realize all of them are glimmer sellers that want you to visit their webpage so you can buy X amount of glimmer for $50? Do you really want random people walking up to you every minute asking if you want to buy some rare Legendary or Exotic item from them? Even if Bungie added some kind of auction house system, wouldn't that make the game too easy and force players to quit sooner because they could simply reach level 20, go to the AH, buy a whole set of Legendaries and Exotic gear, reach level 30, raid, PVP and then get bored a few hours later? You see? Item trading is not the solution, especially not for this kind of game. I do agree that Bungie should somewhat revamp the loot system and reward those who do deserve better rewards than others. Like in that "NO TRADING" screenshot Aspersio posted above. That really needs fixing because that screenshot alone could influence thousands of players to not care and be semi-AFK in crucibles all the time cause they know they can win amazing loot for doing absolutely nothing. The game should detect which players are good and which players are bad, and give bonus "rolls" to their loot rewards if they performed well, and give penalty "rolls" to the worst players just to teach them a lesson that you need to play good if you want the best loot in the game.