I've posted this a few times about a month after HOW release, but not recently. Bungie was simply up against the wall with a number of design mistakes in year one. They really didn't have another viable option than to leave certain things behind. Early design philosophy was pretty simple. They would have a content patch every few months, with a few levels added to each release. Each release would have more and more powerful weapons, with most of that power controlled by a single big stat that would take a step up each release. This way people would always have something to play for, the next level. At the end of the patch would be a raid, with the hardest content and best gear available. Since that content would be gotten late in the release cycle it would be artificially inflated, with all the little stats overpowered. This was so that elite raiders could viably use it for a while even though they received it near the end of the previous cycle. This philosophy was pretty standard for the MMO environment, and well understood. And it was proven broken almost immediately in Destiny. The main problem was that weapons affect play style drastically in FPS games. You have abilities, you have armor, you have gear. But ninety percent of the time it's the weapon, and only the weapon, that matters. Add onto this the fact that those minor stats... those were what changed the play style. Sure that big number could determine theoretical DPS numbers the most, and in many more mature MMO titles that would have been hugely important to the overall weapon desire. But that's just not how Destiny played out. It's probably not how any future FPS MMO will play out. So when players received these great guns at the end of VOG, they didn't want to get rid of them. It felt great, it didn't have the limits other guns did, it had the best options. It was overpowered, except for the main stat. And since weapons informed so much about the way you play an FPS... it was unkillable. The main draws of persistent worlds are fun gameplay and a consistent desire to upgrade. And Bungie lost the ability to temp you with a more powerful widget, because the stat that was more powerful was the one you didn't care about. They took far too long to realise this. They then tried to live with it, resulting in Etheric Light and rerolled weapons. But then they watched everyone upgrade Vison and Black Hammer. They watched people avoid the new content and just rerun old content over and over because that was where the broken stuff was. They watched broken items become "required" for invites. They had a few options. Overpower the new stuff and dial enemies to 11. Nerf. Or just finally put the foot down on the original design goals and move on. They really couldn't go with option number one because they hadn't left themselves room to grow. If no gun has kick or reload issues then you just start losing too much of the uniqueness. And enemies are probably already up against the wall of AI and other difficulty settings. Option number two is a bit more viable... but it was too late. They [i]maybe[/i] could have done it in HOW, but the fact is there was just a lot of content to touch. And at the same time they had to add new content. Most of the team is on Destiny 2. There was also a big team working on TTK. And HOW was late. Touching everything old at that time just wasn't reasonable. They tried a different approach (Etheric Light and Reroll) and it just didn't work. Well now you have even more content to rebalance, most of it getting older and older. Cutting out the mistakes and moving on is the only reasonable option they had. Now, by reasonable I mean game designer reasonable. It sucks for the way we want to play this game. But they just didn't have a way to keep that going, they made some wrong turns early on and they ran out of road long after they couldn't turn around anymore. [i]PS: And I really thought they were going the nerf route when they talked about weapon balance a month or so ago; but no? It's like they are doing option nerf simply for PvP and going with option move on for PvE. That I don't really understand (although to be fair I think option nerf will fail so...).[/i]