agree with a lot of that, thank you for posting and taking the time to write and that you wrote in a thoughtful way. so, our clan-of-3 is RL-brothers. we like playing together, we know each other very well, it's comfortable, and it gives us a chance to just chat about nonsense since we live far away from each other. we'll spend hours doing jumping-nonsense at the Reef, or sitting at Crota, just bullshiatting to each other, and talking and theorizing and occasionally trying/wiping. but sometimes (no, actually a lot of times) we each like playing solo, or even mark the xbox as offline if you don't even want to get messaged by someone. we've played D1 to death (well ok not so much raids lol) and so we don't mind each other barging in. but for D2, it's all still so new to us, and it's really nice to solo the story just to experience it without any influence even from the people most important to us. it's also really nice to have someone stand at your shoulder / back. but only if it's the right person. esp. now, some of the planetary questories have some really ugly super-long darkness/nospawn zones where it really bites to wipe solo and be set like 5 stages back. or in D1, one of our best stories is a Nightfall where 2 of us died and the 3rd brother was sitting up in a semi-cheese spot with a sniper on the Archon Priest, and the three of us stayed there for literally 30+ extra minutes while he slowly, slowly worked on the Archon, because we were all unwilling to wipe. or, like, a few days ago picked up that Rat King progression and it requires more than 1 person. which, ok, I know I have brothers to count on, but it's kinda Bungie artificially forcing us to do that, which, boo :( I usually don't mind strike matchmaking, is always entertaining even when it turns bad/ugly. I generally don't want to voice-chat, either ppl don't care or e.g. my Titan (I still have no idea how to use lol) gets scolded for using FeedbackFence (wuuuuut?! I love those! and someone takes the time/effort to complain about the fact to me, on party chat?!) - and also, over the last 3 years of D1, the 3 of us actually made 2 really, really good friends. (who, TBH, those two are ***way*** better than us at the game lol!) - and we really enjoy playing with them and voice chatting with them, but, yeah, sometimes it can be too much. sometimes you just want to shut off all the noise and grind solo, the grind is real / the grind is medetation. or experience the story solo and interpret the story in only your own way. I really like what one of the other Guardians posted in this thread, "We should totally not hang out and play destiny." ha. so, I think I get it. again, thanks for being brave enough to post your thoughts.