I found every chess piece on my own. They're in common areas for the season and show up on radar when close enough. Even the ones that were "out of the way" were often placed where you'd go if you were looking for the generic secrets to begin with, so I wasn't annoyed by that step at all. In truth, the only reason to use a guide on this part is to know if you found them all for that zone, which is a failure in design transparency. What bothered me is the follow-up. More and more often, game developers have been trying to ape the ARG craze that's basically already dead and it's been one big misfire in design. They go into these things knowing that there's a small group of dedicated superfans that will obsess over the tiniest thing, so they decide that putting in clues and hints that anyone but the extremely obsessive will miss will be fine because "they'll solve it, then post the answers anyway." It's boring, lazy, and just encourages everyone to mentally check out and not bother until said obsessive group finds the solution (and sometimes it fails so spectacularly that Bungie just has to disable the trigger mechanism and give it to everyone without anything being solved). Things that are secrets and hints meant to be followed should be able to be figured out by the average player putting in just a little time and effort to see the strings and care about finding the end. Bungie consistently fails on this front.