Hello, just wanted to do a post cuz I haven't in a while. I have barely played the game in the last two or three months, logging on primarily just to do GoS runs with the clan I had to merge my clan with because this game is dead and growing a new clan felt pointless. So, here are the three things I think are wrong with D2 that, if fixed, might help some people come back to the game. 1. The way the game is currently designed alienates newer or more casual players while causing the rest to avoid playing with each other. This issue is pretty huge, even if people don't much talk about it anymore. Dungeons and raids being at -5 is a big part of this. Less so for older raids but more so for newer ones. First encounter Crota still sucks to do with a group of intermediate players and Salvation's Edge is terrible to do with LFGs. Since this is the case, it's causing the player base to turn on itself. How many "oh I like the raid but I don't like doing it with LFGs" posts have you seen? I've seen hundreds. One of the biggest parts of this game was the ability to do nearly any activity with any player. Sure some folks have less patience than others, but I used to love hanging out with raid sweats to do 20 minute chill GoS farms and then I used to also love doing quadruple sherpa Divinity runs. Now, with the raids being at -5, I'm still doing 20-25 minute GoS farms but quadruple sherpa Divinity runs are a royal pain in the -blam!- now. This is no more personified than with Salvation's Edge. Each encounter requires participation of at least 4 players and upwards of 6. They all have time limits, and they are very unforgiving time limits. Plus, the most complex (not difficult, complex does not mean difficult) encounter is so poorly designed that it doesn't even give the player feedback that they're doing mechanics correctly. Imagine if you're doing a VoG and the oracles don't make any sounds, don't explode, and don't have kill feed notifications when you hit them. How much worse would VoG be to do with beginners? These things were designed to make the game "harder" but the unintended consequence is that they've turned the player base against itself, introducing myriad gatekeeps to get into doing this kind of content. By now I'd usually have 50-60 clears of a new raid, with about half of them being sherpas. Now, I can't bring myself to do a Salvation's sherpa because I know I'll be in there for 6 hours, assuming the event gets completed at all. I would rather have an extra 100,000 casuals roaming around willing to do LFG raids with me than 100 hardcore players who are "happy that everything suck" because it means they get that "dark souls challenge feel" out of a game that was never originally designed to be like that. 2. Grinds have become entirely meaningless Once upon a time, we used to light level for +10 every season with a big jump during DLCs. While it was annoying to do back then, we had the benefit of becoming stronger and that strength was reflected in the game. A new raid is only about about +5 over the light cap after a new DLC. So, the players who wanted a challenge could get the new raid seal immediately and get their bragging rights that they had it before everyone else. For everyone else, they could wait two seasons, become +25 (or more) over, and then the raid becomes easier since raids used to be capped at +20. The light level grind had an objective payoff. While the system had its flaws, the underlying system was genius. People who liked the challenge could do the hard stuff early. As the year progresed, casual players could out-level the content and do it easier, eventually catching up and by doing so, get more experienced with the game and get better overall. The benefit is that new content was always a little difficult since we couldn't light level out of it right away, but then as that content aged, we'd level out of it. This gave us an underlying feeling of progression while also allowing new players to experience old content faster, getting them up to spec for the next wave of new content. Again, GENIUS, even if it had its flaws. Now? We grind for light in a game where difficulty is completely static. We grind for weapons that are single-percentage points better than the weapons we already have. All content is the same all the time, making it more of a slog to get through as a new player, especially since the community has turned on itself in terms of "skill issue hurr hurr hurr". Seasonal challenges have upwards of doubled in terms of length while the payoff is exactly the same. People liked Pantheon because the loot was insane and the emblems were amazing. Doing regular raids at Pantheon difficulty for the same single-percent chance at a raid exotic sucks and it's not fun. Doing longer seasonal challenges for the same amount of bright dust isn't fun. Having to go back and grind glimmer when most of us had stockpiles of legendary shards isn't fun. Potions aren't fun. These grinds have become meaningless. Bungie has either forgotten or intentionally omitted the fact that back in the day, these grinds were annoying but at least they had a payoff. They have reintegrated old grinds and come up with new grinds while conveniently ignoring the payoff and the result is a LOT of game play that doesn't feel rewarding to do. 3. Core game modes have become stale No new PvP maps, no new Gambit maps, and instead of opening up the vault and bringing back the dozen or so old strikes we used to have, Bungie has instead decided to saturate vanguard ops with Battlegrounds that were not designed or intended to be repeated infinitely. It's boring, and stale, and is one of the biggest reasons people don't play those game modes. The results have been devestating on all three fronts. Nobody wants to hang out and chill while grinding vanguard ops anymore. PvP is a ghost town, preventing any well-meaning matchmaking system from ever working properly as the population dwindles, making it luck that people even get matches, let alone competitive ones. Gambit has actually regressed since 2020. It used to have two game modes (normal and prime) and there used to be gambit-specific armor that affected the mechanics like in raids. Now it's just a single round with no overly special loot like PvP and vanguard ops (via GMs) get. Bungie has to get back to the basics if they're going to fix this stuff. We need more PvP maps, and raids that people actually want to do, and for our grinds to matter again. I would happily get online and do pathfinders if it meant I could out-level content again. I would happily go back to doing quadruple sherpa GoS runs if those raids were at +20. Salvation's Edge would be infinitely easier to teach if people could out-level it again. Bungie, you have to take a step back and look at the big picture here. You are asking us to repeat all of these activities infinitely. However, you are making them less palatable to do at all, let alone dozens of hundreds of times. You have let your core playlists go to sh*t. You have turned your player base against itself, and you can't figure out for the life of you why this last month is the least people have played Destiny 2 in its entire history? C'mon now. You know what the problem is. Fix it.