I loved the game and I was an extreme casual, even had a 0.4 K/D. Oh and all my 80+ Destiny friends (at the time) were all extreme casuals. (Yes I know that's just a small minority of players but it does show a point, these were all random people online too)

That's great, but Bungie re-formated the game into Y2 for a reason. If Y1 was successful, they wouldn't have done it.

Yep, year 1 was a failure. 25 million copies sold, but an absolute failure. Year 1 was the most exciting time for this game. Remember the screams of "I got Gjallerhorn" or "I got the Vex"? People were excited to get those exotics. Now you might hear a "Oh, I got Trespasser, cool" or something similar. I am not an alpha, beta, or even a day 1 player. I got Destiny because so many of my friends were talking about this failure of a game that was super exciting to play. So the critics may have given Destiny bad reviews, but the sales and the average daily player base of over 3.5 million players putting in an average of 3 hours of play time speaks louder to the success of year 1.

Sure, it was so "successful" that Bungie totally revamped it. The Division sold 4+ million copies at launch, and they had to completely change it because it was losing players left and right.

They changed the game because of idiots like Luke Smith being mad we were playing the game the way we wanted to play it instead of how he wanted us to play it; also, because they started listening to streamers they mistakenly believed represented the player base of this game because they had followers. They listened to the vocal minority and ignored the fact that the majority of the player base, the casuals, do not watch streamers or even visit the forums. And I assure you, the majority of the player base is casual because you don't sell 30+ million copies of a game without a majority of them being purchased by casuals. As to the Division, Ubisoft has become notorious in recent years for launching games that were flawed from the onset. I speak from experience and as an owner of over 15 Ubisoft titles. The Division lost players because you could beat the whole PvE side of the game in a few days with absolutely no replayability value at all. The Dark Zone was an utter joke with higher level players using exploits to take advantage of lower level players; for example, entering zone 1 with crappy gear and then changing to their higher level gear so they were extremely op. The challenge modes were near impossible to complete, causing players to give up and abandon the game. The incursions were fun once or twice, but very quickly lost appeal. The list goes on and on. Destiny had a very strong player base at the release of TTK and they lost lots of players because they changed the game; completely the opposite of what Ubisoft was attempting to do when they made changes to the Division. Ubisoft was trying to keep players from ditching the game while Bungie was trying to force their vision of how they wanted the game played.

In TTK, Bungie was trying new things, it wasn't necessarily better or worse, and as TTK was a really fun experience with quests and all, but then there wasn't much of an end-game anymore, or meaning to anything you carried in your inventory from how easy it was to receive and upgrade. It turned into a game that was for short-term or PvP players, making it only really really popular in the short term. And yes, the Division did sell 4+ million copies at launch, but what does that prove? Only that it was very hyped for. But as Intolerable Me said, year 1 maintained a high amount of players, most of which are 'long-term' players, what Bungie in Halo always went towards. So I'm sorry you won't be able to understand, after all, you never did the activities in year 1 that we speak so fondly of. You didn't even complete your Y2 moments of triumph, you must have still been in the lot of short-term players that year 2 was directed towards. But you talk like you knew the game, act like Y2 was such an improvement, but it was, only to help the wider player base, to you unloyal naive nitpickers!

Meh... TTK was fine, but by removing all year 1 stuff they screwed up

Not "removing" per se, it's abolishment of any creativity that sank the game really low.