I am no stranger to highlighting Destiny 2’s problems and suggesting fixes, and while I can write an entire post on individual issues pretty much every day, I thought it would be interesting to sort through a recent thread I came across asking the community what they thought the game’s biggest problem currently is.

As such, I think there’s something of a ranking order based on the number of upvotes answers have received, and I also think there’s a clear #1. We have:

6. Monetization – Some players think monetization in Destiny has reached a tipping point because there are so many avenues, it’s just exhausting. At this point we have yearly expansions, individual seasons, a “dungeon pack,” the 30th anniversary dungeon, the Eververse store and even transmog. It’s a lot, and only expanding in time.

5. Poor Netcode – This is just a general technical complaint, but it’s not wrong. This has been affecting Destiny for an extremely long time and remains one of the biggest barriers for its online play.

4. Buffs Capped Onscreen – Not sure I can be persuaded this is the biggest issue, but given the sheer amount of buffs and effects that you activate in any given Destiny build these days, it is borderline impossible to keep track of them all, as with a cap of four, many are shoved offscreen. This seems like one area of the UI that needs an overhaul.

3. Stale Core Playlists – This would be the strike, Crucible and Gambit playlists, which are supposed to be the central fixture of the game, and what can be accessed by new players, but they remain very stale. We lost a ton of strikes to content vaulting, and only recently have started to make that up with Battlegrounds. We still do not have enough interesting modifiers there, however. Crucible and Gambit are in desperate need of new maps and have been for years now. Slowly, this may be starting to turn, but it’s taken an extremely long time and there’s a lot more work to be done.

2. Competing Against Teammates – This is a complaint about how many challenges or bounties require you to get last hit kills on enemies, so you are constantly at war with your own teammates to try to get kills. As a tangent to this, there’s a related complaint about bounties/challenges essentially forcing you to throw games because you are playing so un-optimally, or your teammates are doing it instead. The challenge system is frequently designed to make you work against your own team in one way or another.

1. The New Player Experience – Far and away, this is cited the most frequently as the biggest problem facing Destiny 2, and I agree. It’s wild that I play this game for a living, enjoy it as much as I do, and if you ask me a simple question, would you recommend this game, I’m not sure how to answer that. Nor do I know how to even tell people where and how to start playing, between content vaulting removing the first three years of content, and how disparate all the monetization for expansion, seasons and dungeons has become.

I am also concerned the new player experience does not appear like it is going to get a significant overhaul until the end of the Light and Dark saga after The Final Shape, which will be some level of reset and reintroduction. I am not sure Destiny can afford to wait 2.5 more years to refocus on the new player experience, as right now, it needs far more than Shaw Han and a bunch of tooltips. Whether this is reformatting the entire purchase path of Destiny or reinserting lost content that used to be a much easier introduction, I’m not sure, but this is absolutely what I’d consider the highest priority issue with the game right now. Adding new content to appease existing players will only get you so far if you cannot substantially attract new players to the game over time.

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