The game is becoming more difficult year after year and I think Bungie is losing players because of it. We don't hear from them, because they are gone, they just leave.
I think things have steered to much towards movement, making it so that players must zip around everywhere to survive. Which is a little harder to do on controller(console) than mouse and keyboard.
......
I just deleted my other thoughts on this because I don't feel like listening to elitist comments. I was merely expressing my opinion that this game is leaning towards being too sweaty for casual gaming. I think a lot of us don't really care about raids, dungeons, and exotic missions. They are not worth the time and effort.
-
I typically consider myself an endgame player, but these past two expansions have been a nightmare for any endgame content, aside from Root of Nightmares (which is somewhat ironic). All Bungie has really added is frustration and making content much slower. In their developer streams, they have gloated about making the longest Exotic Mission ever, or how they enjoy making GM players suffer. Challenge isn't typically bad, and most of the hardest content can be overcome, but this usually only happens if you are using the most broken loadouts or are otherwise cheesing the encounter. Due to that, there are so few players engaging with Raids or even Dungeons (until Rite of the Nine) which is a shame because often it is the best content the Bungie has made. They need to make their game less of a pain to play, even at the expense of endgame players not feeling "challenged." The average player shouldn't have to juggle 3 different tasks during an encounter, like trying to stay alive while attempting to solve a math problem and also having to collect enemy drops. It's good to have things like Master or Challenge mode but it is only going to be useful for about 10% or less of us. If we do not feel challenged then we have options to make challenges for ourselves. Low man runs, speed runs, low power runs, using only white/green gear, etc. are all staples of creating challenge in games where none exist, it is not necessary for the developer to make challenge for us. Personally, it just takes imagination and the community can already do that. Hopefully with the new system of selecting your own difficulty, it will be easier for average players to engage with endgame content, but perhaps Bungie should pay attention to how many players will continue to play on the lower tiers.