Crafting could be neat, but it could also be awful. Seems like at the end of the day it’d just be more grinding.

Granted the community at large seems to just want structured grinding, so maybe that’s not a bad thing.

You mean, the community that talks the most. Which is a very small percentage of the destiny community.

I am personally at a loss as to whether I want specific ways to get specific guns solely for the fact that if that gun is great, then you have a subset of people dominating with a gun that is very hard for some people to get. That, I think is why Bungie kinda stepped away from it. Or maybe not, I can't read their minds.

Increasingly, I feel like I'm living on a different planet than most people.

Increasingly, I feel like Bungie is living on a different planet than most people.

If people want to shoot into a cave for hours on end, what’s the harm? It’s honestly hardly different in terms of effort than actually playing the game.

Because the very next thing that happens -- the very next thing-- is the complaints about how the game is boring because the "best way" got get stuff is to do something boring and repetitive.

If the game encourages people to chase experiences instead of stuff, the problem solves itself.

Whether it does or not it also includes stuff, and some people are both stuff-centric and confident about it.

At that point why not just make them bespoke guns?

I don't see how having a handful of possible rolls/variants on a gun make them a custom/guardian_specific gun.

I envision fun stuff like this happening:
Some Gun - C: Icarus, & two other meh perks. But dude, I run a Titan with Lion Rampant greaves which have "Jump Jets: Provides additional aerial maneuverability" (I don't know how this would really work, it's just something I came up w/ for the sake of discussion). Suddenly Some Gun variant C is extra fun with my titan, or any other armor/class/perk that has extra in-air abilities.

I'd like to see named sets of perk variants and the gun name would end with the variant you got, so: Matador 64-A, Matador 64-B, Matador 64-C. So the Matadors would all essentially be the same gun, only w/ one different set of perk nodes...

A perks: Aggressive Ballistics, Knee Pads, Rifled Barrel
B perks: Rangefinder, Full Auto, Performance Bonus
C perks: Reinforced Barrel, Fitted Stock, Field Choke

or something along those lines. That way Bungie could easily add a lot of variety to the weapons, give a greater chance for emergent behavior, allow for tuning specific god rolls that get out of hand (or buffing crappy rolls), all the while keeping the name of the weapon significant.

And you could do so much with this as well, such as quest-exclusive versions of the same gun, or variants that drop from different bosses. That way you can get a default version from Vendors, and if you like it, you find out which activities drop which variants, and do those.

The funny thing is that Destiny 1 had weapons like this, such as the red-colored Legendary variants of the exotics that you could get from Crucible (Eyasluna anyone?)

You could even implement a crafting system, where you can buy white (let's call them MK-1) versions of a Legendary, which have all of the base stats, but no perks. You then do a series of things to add perks and bump up the weaapon's rarity, up until you have one of the A/B/C variants of the Legendary. meybe you could even integrate an exotic mod that grants it an interesting perk (such as double orbs from Masterworks).

But the issue is a drop in variety, mixed with less moments of excitement, and I put the blame on that to boring weapons and less abilities - both in regard to skill trees as well as rate of use. There are no longer emergent experiences with new weapons due both from everything being unlocked from the start and having less perks-per-weapon. Oh, and a single set perk that does anything interesting, instead of two which interact.

The weapons and abilities are boring precisely because of the investment system.

If weapons and abilities can interact in cool, fun, powerful, and skillful ways, then that puts people who roll the RNG correctly at a giant advantage, and conversely those who don't at a huge disadvantage. If you remove randomness, you can now have all of that since it's just a part of the game and not a random roll.

Bungie went wrong because they removed the randomness of the perks, but left in the randomness of the drops, AND THEN removed powerful interactions. The correct thing to do is to remove both random perks and random drops while keeping cool elements of multiplicative design.

I don't lament the loss of random perks on guns. I think the removal is a good thing, and I agree that the loss of the fun interactions is what has killed the fun here. However, I think Bungie went a little too far with the complete removal of randomness.

I'd like to see named sets of perk variants and the gun name would end with the variant you got, so: Matador 64-A, Matador 64-B, Matador 64-C. So the Matadors would all essentially be the same gun, only w/ one different set of perk nodes...

A perks: Aggressive Ballistics, Knee Pads, Rifled Barrel
B perks: Rangefinder, Full Auto, Performance Bonus
C perks: Reinforced Barrel, Fitted Stock, Field Choke

or something along those lines. That way Bungie could easily add a lot of variety to the weapons, give a greater chance for emergent behavior, allow for tuning specific god rolls that get out of hand (or buffing crappy rolls), all the while keeping the name of the weapon significant.

EA sports game developers often say ‘we’re listening’ right before implementing something that the community hates.

Not really related, I just found it a humorous coincidence that it happened here as well.

Reading this from my desk inside EA sports HQ and nodding my head.

Remember when it used to be "EA sports. ITS IN THE GAME!"

Lol it's ironic it's not in the game anymore but in DLC!

EA sports game developers often say ‘we’re listening’ right before implementing something that the community hates.

Not really related, I just found it a humorous coincidence that it happened here as well.

Reading this from my desk inside EA sports HQ and nodding my head.

Not really related, I just found it a humorous coincidence that it happened here as well.

But the issue is a drop in variety, mixed with less moments of excitement, and I put the blame on that to boring weapons and less abilities - both in regard to skill trees as well as rate of use. There are no longer emergent experiences with new weapons due both from everything being unlocked from the start and having less perks-per-weapon. Oh, and a single set perk that does anything interesting, instead of two which interact.

The weapons and abilities are boring precisely because of the investment system.

If weapons and abilities can interact in cool, fun, powerful, and skillful ways, then that puts people who roll the RNG correctly at a giant advantage, and conversely those who don't at a huge disadvantage. If you remove randomness, you can now have all of that since it's just a part of the game and not a random roll.

Bungie went wrong because they removed the randomness of the perks, but left in the randomness of the drops, AND THEN removed powerful interactions. The correct thing to do is to remove both random perks and random drops while keeping cool elements of multiplicative design.

D2 doesn't have the complexity of D1, and I do think that's part of the loss of interest. I can't make up my mind about it all. I'm glad I'm not staring at perk trees trying to glean what I should do like I felt I was always doing in D1. I'm still in love with so much of the streamlining--not going to orbit all the time, fast travel, no variations between armor/guns with the same name, and so on. I've yet to hit the cap, and it' hasn't kept me from anything but prestige mode. Maybe I'll get to that. But I'm still tickled by is the lack of anxiety regarding my progress.

I don't know the answer--maybe they'll hit the sweet spot? Here's hoping.