I still can’t decide if I love or hate Destiny.

I fell off playing it pretty hard back in October… I think I just reached the limit of what I was interested in committing to the game at the time. At the cusp of a big game release season, the time required to grind gear and do the raids just didn’t mesh with my schedule. On top of the frustrating randomish loot system, I figured I’d gotten about all I was going to get out of the game.

I’ve popped on a couple of times since, just to shoot some stuff. Destiny does a great job with the shooting of stuff. But whatever has kept people fervishly playing week after week all this time… I guess that particular bug neglected to bit me.

Still, I remained hopeful that with most of the major new releases behind us, and some patches and an expansion dropping, that I might find reason to return to Destiny. If it’s there, I’m having trouble locating it. Please let me know if I’m missing something, because if I understand this correctly… You now need to either farm for all new exotics with better values, or you need to trade in your existing exotics.

In order to do that, you need to wait on Xur (who only shows up on weekends), and hope that he has the item you want to exchange for in stock? And if he doesn’t, you just hope for next weekend?

If he does have the exchange in stock, you can grab it for a huge chunk of cash. Oh, but now you need to start all over leveling the item up again.

Destiny always felt a little grindy. I don’t necessarily have a problem with grindy, in the right format. And it fits for Destiny. But it seems a little like Bungie is placing arbitrary roadblocks to slow progress and make it feel like there’s more to do than there really is.

I think the idea of a vendor that only shows up periodically and for short times to sell some rare stuff is a really neat idea. Also requiring a player to wait on said vendor in order to progress forward in the game seems like a really shitty idea.

Again, I’m getting my information second-hand here from talking to people that have played since the expansion and reading about the new exotic system. I’m open to the possibility that I’m missing some crucial piece of the puzzle here, and would be happy to hear if that’s the case.