So, there are a lot of posts of people complaining about year 1 gear being made obsolete when The Taken King expansion comes out, and admittedly there's little in the way of real explanations as to why this is a bad thing. All anyone is saying is "Rargh this sucks! Why can't we keep using our old weapons?!" and while everyone is communicating with their feelings, there are NO posts communicating with facts. That's where I hope to come in. You see, since the beginning of the game, with the basic (vanilla) version, players have been able to use some powerful weapons and armor that was earned either by RNG or by hard work for the Vanguard or Crucible. With the VoG you could get the most powerful weaponry in the game through dedication and teamwork. Unfortunately, that raid marked the end of the most BASIC content. Make no mistake, this is entirely YOUR fault, Bungie, for not thinking ahead. It's all well and good to give players powerful gear as they continue through the game, but you designed this gear with no thought to the other 10 years that players were planned to play this game. Add onto that the fact that you try, even as futile as it is, to balance the Crucible and so ruin all weapons for everyone, and of course people are clinging desperately to their old gear. First off, let's talk about the weapon types, using the original Vanguard weaponry as an example. Each of the weapons available to a player suits a different play style and effective range. Originally you gave players two options for Auto Rifle, Pulse Rifle, and Scout Rifle, where one was focused on more accurate, long-range combat while the other was focused on CQC, spray-and-pray tactics. This is all well and good, especially when the weapons had perks to accentuate those particular play styles, but then you reversed course. With The Dark Below, you suddenly decided that these weapons should fit only ONE play style, and that was spray-and-pray. You gave two options for those three types again, but they were all locked into nearly identical base stats that were far, FAR worse than the original weapons offered. The other weapons that only had a single offering, such as the Hand Cannon, Sniper Rifle, and others almost all had worse overall stats than their previous counterparts, and few good Perks to round out the weaknesses. You went from offering The Devil You Know to offering The Devil Noone Gives a -blam!- About. At least The Dark Below offered some good weapons for doing the raid, but you continued course by offering low-tier weaponry in the House of Wolves expansion, and then you decided to even push this to your "end-content" weaponry from Variks, where the stats were decent but the Perks were terrible. I mean... Shank Burn, really? - - - - - Second, and another big part of the problem, is that you've tried over and over to balance the Crucible. I'm sorry to break it to you, but not only is the Crucible broken, it will ALWAYS be broken. You could have talked with Activision/Blizzard about how PvP works in their MMO World of Warcraft and they would have told you the same thing. I understand that you want there to be a semblance of fairness to the Crucible, but in your drive to make it balanced you've destroyed the usefulness of most weapon types and several Exotic weapons for all [b]PvE[/b] players. Surely you gave some thought to how your changes would affect the people who don't play the Crucible? Surely you didn't think those changes would be appreciated by them? You did right by increasing the damage of Shotguns to become useful in PvE and thus proved that you could do balances separately between PvE and PvP, but you have done nothing since to make previously-balanced weapons more useful in PvE. This has made half of your player base angry that entire weapon types are now useless, while doing little to make things more fair for the other half as they simply adapt to new balances. - - - - - If you can give players more powerful weapons with stats equal to what has been offered in the past then many players will be happy to try new weaponry, but if you're once again offering players weapons with shit stats and useless perks then they will continue to cling onto old weapons because you're offering nothing viable in return. I hope you do any tweaks you need to do before The Taken King comes out, because if you stay the course then people will see their effort as being wasted, and see your new weapons as junk.