This is just a list of the things that have frustrated me in Edge of Fate, and probably other players, too. For the record, I'm a fairly average, fairly casual player; if you're hardcore, these might not apply to you. These frustrations may not reflect your own. Edge of Fate made a lot of missteps in its initial launch, some of those problems have been fixed, but I think it's worth remembering what didn't work and why it didn't work, if only to avoid making these say missteps in the future. [b]Tier 1-3 felt bad:[/b] Bungie figured "Well, Tier 2 is the equivalent of an Enhanced Weapon, and players loved Enhanced weapons during Echoes, so they'll feel good about getting a Tier 2 or Tier 3 now!" what actually happened was that Tier 1-3 became the new Blues. We knew we were getting the less powerful gear, and that felt bad; Tier 5 is the goal, less than that felt like a place holder. Tier 1-3 didn't give the dopamine bump Bungie was expecting. [b]Difficulty scaling in the portal was brutal:[/b] Graduating a level in the Portal often felt brutal, like we were being thrown in out of our depth. Modifiers increased the deltas and the difficulty, doubling down on making the content harder. Many average players bounced off of this difficulty wall, figuring there was no point in participating in high-risk, low-reward content. ("I did the Lighthouse flawless and got Tier 3s, what the heck!?") [b]Players did "hard" content only to get Tier 3s:[/b] Difficulty is subjective. Many of us had the experience of busting our butts in hard-for-us content and getting Tier 3 gear as a reward. We were expecting that higher difficulties would be more rewarding, not realizing that Tier was tied to Light Level rather than difficulty level. Running hard-for-us content felt bad because the rewards didn't seem commensurate. [b]We didn't know how to get Tiered gear:[/b] Bungie didn't tell us that Tiers were tied to Light Level, we had to figure that out for ourselves as a community. Initially we thought Tiers were tied to Guardian Ranks or the difficulty of the content, leading to early disappointments when players had ranked up their guardians and gotten no return, or run difficult content only to get Tier 3 gear. [b]Leveling was frustratingly slow:[/b] Leveling from LL0-LL450 took over a hundred hours at the initial launch of Edge of Fate, meaning players were expected to put in more than a hundred hours worth of work before getting to the rewarding rewards. This was too much to ask of players upfront, and many players felt like their time wasn't being respected, casual players felt like they could never reach the finish line. [b]Unstable cores locked players into builds:[/b] Unstable Cores made sense on paper, they gave players something useful in exchange for dismantling low Tier gear; in practice Cores made for a frustrating gameplay loop that either had us hunting for trash gear or locking ourselves into single classes and single builds; Unstable Cores often left players feeling stuck, and greatly diminished one of Destiny 2's greatest strengths: Its build crafting. [b]Featured gear diminished build crafting:[/b] There are some activities that only allow featured gear, encouraging players to prioritize leveling featured gear over unfeatured, but maybe preferred gear. The featured gear system was intended to highlight and emphasize gear that Bungie had recently created or reworked, but ended up putting limits on Destiny 2's build crafting and play-it-your-way strengths. [b]Lack of new events:[/b] There wasn't much to distract players from the Portal and Leveling process, the Sieve was fun but on cooldown 75% of the time, Reclaim didn't come till halfway through the season, Arms week felt like nothing, the result was that most of us were locked into the Portal running Ops we'd already run a hundred times before. The lack of traditional seasonal content made the vices of the Portal worse. [b]Portal made Old World content useless to run:[/b] This one is self explanatory. The Portal locked us into using the Portal in order to level up or get Tiered gear, meaning the Old World was essentially defunct, there wasn't a point in running it, in fact running old content slowed down the leveling process since we wouldn't be focusing on LL. It felt like the Old World was soft sunset. [b]Matterspark was frustrating for many players:[/b] A lot of players just didn't groove with the Matterspark gameplay; some found the puzzles enjoyable, others found them obtuse and frustrating. Players who come to Destiny 2 for its tight combat didn't find the frequency of puzzle solving very fun during the campaign. This also diminished the replability of the campaign. --- Many of these problems have been fixed in updates; the leveling is faster, Unstable Cores are gone, the difficulty scaling is smoother, Featured Gear is opening up in Renegades, and these fixes were all the right things to do - the problem is the damage that was done; if someone hasn't played Destiny 2 since July, they don't know the improvements that have been made. Edge of Fate got off on several wrong feet, like a millipede worth of wrong feet, and the problems that have been fixed took time to fix. I wrote this all out not to dunk on Bungie, but in hopes that they can learn from their mistakes and learn [i]why[/i] so many of them were mistakes. Mistakes happen, but they don't have to happen twice.