TL;DR at the bottom. I'm pulling this from my response to another topic, but want to discuss why I believe why Niobe truly failed, and did not receive the reception from the community that Bungie expected. For this illustration I'll be using the Last Wish Raid content unlock as a comparison to explain why this concept of unlocking content via player action worked in that case, but failed here. The primary difference was that we didn't know we were waiting on the Last Which raid to unlock a bunch of additional content (The Corrupted Strike, Weekly Missions, 3-Week Corruption Cycle, Shattered Throne, etc.) We knew some of this was in the game through data mining and references in other places such as triumphs, but Bungie didn't give us a hard release date so the only expectation was that we'd see it eventually. So when the first team beat the raid and we all got a notification saying all this new stuff was happening, it was exciting because it was a pleasant surprise and kind of cool that they tied their roll-out to a player event rather than a fixed date and it played well within the context of the story they were telling. What happened on Tuesday was not the same. Bungie had given a firm date for the next BA content release, so there was a reasonable expectation by the community that upon log in we would have a new quest or activity to participate in. Instead what we got was a tweet from Bungie stating what we were expecting was actually locked behind a very niche activity in the form of a complex and not particularly well thought out puzzle (as evidenced by the fact that more than 48 hours later it still hasn't been solved), which most of the community either didn't want to participate in or felt they would have little to offer by participating since only one team would be credited for solving. Discussions about the complexity and quality of the puzzle aside, I firmly believe Bungie's primary mistake here was creating a gap between the expectation they set and what was delivered. By providing a release date for Niobe and having set a trend through the other BA releases, and then delivering something which appeared made for a very small portion of the community, they should have expected that many players may feel like there had been a bait and switch. For comparison think about how different the reaction to the Last Wish Raid unlock might have been if they had set the expectation we'd be getting a bunch of new content on that Friday along with the raid and everyone who showed up to play that new content was then told they'd have to wait for one of the elite teams of streamers to finish the raid before they could play. Then add on top of that 20 hours of waiting, still with no completion. I think it's safe to say we would have heard a lot of the same complaints about Bungie catering to streamers and it all being a ploy to get them more viewers, etc. On the other hand think about how Niobe might have been received if Bungie had not announced that Niobe Labs or the fourth forge was being released on Tuesday and instead the just slipped it in unannounced for a player to find. The community would have been excited about the discovery of this strange lab hidden in some new area of the EDZ with a cryptic puzzle that needed solving. Because nothing had been promised the community wouldn't have felt like something they were promised was being withheld, and I think the anticipation would have only grown more over the 2 days+ it might take to solve the puzzle. TL;DR: The real reason the Niobe unlock concept failed while the Last Wish Raid unlock worked is due to improper management of expectations (content release date) being provided for Niobe, and the community being surprised by the Last Wish unlock. Had Bungie just slipped in Niobe unannounced like the Whisper quest for example, I think reception would have been much warmer and they may have been praised since it would have been seen as a cool bonus no matter how long it took to unlock as opposed to withholding something that was promised as paid content.