I have been playing Destiny for quite a while, and I have noticed its - at places massive - shortcomings and Bungie's unwillingness to deal with these in a thouroughly positive and constructive way. I have been trying to figure the motivation behind this. It took me quite a while, but I think that I am now having a picture of what is really going on here. Bungie's main goal is to make as much money as possible with Destiny. Their goal is not to make players satisfied or happy with their game. Their goal is to hook them to the game and make them come back whenever they are selling another expansion. If you follow the breadcrumbs by reading the proper posts and online articles, you will notice that Bungie is optimizing the incentive given to Destiny players to expose that behavior by exploiting behavioral research and fine tuning Destiny to make the best possible use of it by gathering statistical data about player behavior and habits in this game. This is why loot drops work the way they do, why you usually get bad loot, why some loot is very hard to come by, and why Bungie rather fixes bugs that make things for players too easy than fixing glitches that break the game for players. The reality behind Destiny as an industry product is cold and brutal, and players are feeding it with their time and money. I think it is out of the question that a computer game has to offer the kind of rewards and reward mechanisms Destiny is offering. However, imo these should be just a part of a bigger gaming experience, the spice on a meal consisting of healthy ingredients. In Destiny, these rewards are the core of the game, and the way they are exploiting the human mind has a strong tendency to turn the gaming experience into a laborious grind instead of an enjoyable experience. This is emphasized by the tendency Destiny has to draw out its grinds and the fact that the design of Destiny is to reward players by getting some hopefully good loot at the end of the grind, and not by offering entertaining and diverse ways to acquire such loot. I have found myself playing Destiny far beyond the extent where I found it to be entertaining, relaxing and fun, and where it became a simple matter of forcing myself through it just to finish some of the challenges it offers for the n-th time to hopefully get some good loot - loot the only purpose of is to make playing through the same challenge the next time for even better loot easier. I am talking about the Oryx raid here - the single high profile PvE end game activity Destiny offers, because the others have been sent to oblivion in order to make players purchase the next expansion. I would like to illustrate this by comparing Destiny to Borderlands, which imo is a fantastic game with a rich game world, well thought out reward system and a great story with interesting protagonists making that game world come to life. Playing Borderlands is fun because it offers so much game lore just while playing, has so many different characters and locations, so many twists in its plot, and because the plot gives sense to the player actions and involvement in this game world. It is enjoyable to just play through Borderland, visit all its places, meet all the "people" in it, and unravel its story. Compared to that, Destiny is bland and hollow. Its lore is a mix of hardly connected, confused pseudo philosophical nonsense (yeah, I have read all the grimoire and tried to figure the meaning behind the pompous trash literature it is - the kind of literature an amateur would come up with whos self image as a writer is in no relation to his gift of story telling, or rather the lack thereof). However, the real problem I am seeing behind this is the cold, unrelenting business calculus behind this. In my opinion, the driving force behind Bungie / Activision, the people in charge, lack acceptable ethics. It is ok for them to exploit people the psychological and mathemical/statistical way Destiny does. There's no law against it, and there's a lot of money in it. The sad thing about this is that a morally intact person doesn't need regulation by laws, but obviously the moral compass of the people in charge at Bungie / Activision is broken. This is exacerbated by Destiny so shamelessly replacing content and quality with psychological tricks to make players keep playing and returning to it. Bungie / Activision give a flying crap about whether you actually enjoy Destiny or not as long as they can make you come back and wave your tail while drooling in front of the food bowl for more, by exploiting and manipulating your psyche. In my opinion this is hubris. TL;DR: Destiny is a treadmill, and it is on purpose and by design, to exploit the human brain's reward system to the max with the goal to hook players to the game and come back and pay more for it when the next expansion is released.