What else could you do?

Semi-joking here... why don't they just own up to it being an MMO and charge a monthly fee?

So people are complaining that some of the activities that were accessible in the $60 game are unavailable after the DLC drops if you don't buy the DLC, and your suggestion is that they take away the entire game?

Or include a custom mode from the start. Players will quickly find and converge on fun settings on their own, which you can then use to inform your balancing decision.

yep, griffball and infection started out as custom gametypes

my post was in jest. Was thinking back to playing "How's Your Framerate?" on Midship.

But I'm serious, though. What better way to get a feel for what the community wants than to actually have a playlist with damages tweaked? Say that one week, Auto Rifles deal 2x damage, or grenades have a 50% Cooldown reduction. Fun over balance, and the most popular choices help them get an idea about future tweaks.

Or include a custom mode from the start. Players will quickly find and converge on fun settings on their own, which you can then use to inform your balancing decision.

Honestly, I think they'd lose a ton of players if they did that with the state D2 is in right now. Not that it is godawful, just that it's not worth subbing for.

Not only that, a subscription encourages padding content in order to spread things out so players will spend a lot of real world time playing.

my post was in jest. Was thinking back to playing "How's Your Framerate?" on Midship.

But I'm serious, though. What better way to get a feel for what the community wants than to actually have a playlist with damages tweaked? Say that one week, Auto Rifles deal 2x damage, or grenades have a 50% Cooldown reduction. Fun over balance, and the most popular choices help them get an idea about future tweaks.

What else could you do?

Semi-joking here... why don't they just own up to it being an MMO and charge a monthly fee?

Locking the end game activities to a DLC doesn't make sense unless you consider that you are building a glass ceiling for non-dlc owners.

Yes. This is the point. What you just said is like saying

Building a fence doesn't make sense unless you consider nobody can get in your yard.

Locking the end game activities to a DLC doesn't make sense unless you consider that you are building a glass ceiling for non-dlc owners. They will still be at 305 when everyone else will be at 325. If you want both groups together for IB, To9, and the old raid, then those need to be at a power level that the non-dlc owners can reach.

For trials, nightfall and IB, you could probably make the rewards drop at high level and thus give non-dlc owners a path to 325 that doesn't use DLC content.

The raid however is tough to balance for groups that contain both. Do you make it 305 and then try to individually scale it per player?

Locking it out may have made sense on paper, but it ultimately was a poorly thought out move politically.

There needs to be a reason to run basic, prestige, and challenge raids for both DLC and non-DLC owners. Usually, specific gear with unique perks and appearance would suffice. But that means leaving it at the old power level.

Not sure how to handle a dual incentive long term. Do you release a new gear set for each raid with each power level increase? Would this open Bungie to a reskin complaint? Would there be unique perk balance issues?

Ultimately, we would want D2 to have raids at the same power level to support raid groups hitting any given raid without having to grind for the latest one. This means we need to go with the unique gear per DLC, even for old raids. That is going to be additional work for the DLC teams.

Alternatively, a unique exotic released for each raid with each DLC might work.

What else could you do?

Sometimes I wonder if Bungie has test servers at all. It certainly would explain the massive downtime we have on the production servers every week.

Yes, I'm sure they do. But it boggles my mind how hard it would be to test anything on a test server and have it working even 70% of the time when it's in the wild...

I'd love to see Bungie do something like this, essentially Mayhem, but for guns. It would certainly help them get a feel for what people really want, even if it goes against their "weapons all feel the same everywhere" philosophy.

Reddit is already bitching about how the Raid will be useless again because they can’t get max power level gear from it.

They are not wrong lol