Desert Perpetual is a good raid. The contest experience...absolutely terrible. I have never felt so helpless in a raid. My team had execution down flawlessly, we would get to dps consistently, but almost every single pull the game would apply some out of world debuff to us that would prevent us from clearing. Our portal runner would get the movement speed bug, the detain shield wouldn't parry properly and just kill us all, guns not firing at correct rpm and not hitting for the right numbers, effecting super regen, hardware crashes, interactive items being desynced, etc. The amount of bugs made this unclearable for our team to a point where we gave up, which is the first time I've given up well before the contest period ended. There is currently a lot of news being passed around from people scraping player data that around 70% of clears were cheated. Which I am not surprised in the slightest since I checked people I ran into on lfgs and 6 out of 7 had cheated. Bungie you need to address this issue and set an example out of these people. The entire integrity of contest raiding is falling apart at the seams and soon it will be a disheveled mess like crucible is on pc. You are effectively harboring a new era of paid carries for PvE content. If these raids are going to continue to be tuned to be damn near unclearable unless you either cheat or play with a full team of streamers for 40+ hours straight then I simply won't compete anymore. This is starting to incentivize unhealthy practices. The contest raid should be designed to be cleared in 24 hrs NOT 48. This last weekend it felt like I had wasted so much of my time getting prepared for an event that my team may have had a chance if the game decided to work as intended and not stack the deck against us. Demanding perfection from 6 players for 3 phases a boss when the game itself is the farthest thing from perfect is the most ludicrous design philosophy ever. Is it just assumed that every mechanic will work flawless without any bugs? Whatever testing enviornment these QA people are using, it is not anywhere close to an accurate depiction of all the server load and instabilty problems the game experiences when it is popular for 2 days out of the year. I doubt anyone on their QA team could clear contest facing the bugs my team did while also not being able to use banned weapons that were used in testing the raid(barring bravo who got SE worlds first and had QAed the raid so I'd hope he'd clear it for the emblem). Some of these bugs such as the desync on the final boss when the absolute player is activating were discovered only after 4-5 attempts, and they consistenly occur. I just find it so hard to believe some of these bugs were missed with how consistent they are, only having cleared the raid 5 times at this point of writing and it's been the same bugs EVERY SINGLE RUN. Did the QA team clear the raid one time and say "call it a wrap"? I feel like if I were QA/playtesting these types of things, they would be picked up and noticed fairly quick. It may be a hot take, and the elitist in my soul hates that I am even suggesting this, but if there was ever a contest raid that deserved an extension due to bugs, it'd be this one. I don't think theres any agrument to be had that the emblem will lose its prestige when it is openly known that 70% of people with it just cheated for it anyways.