I have played and replayed and played again. They took my time through giving me a goal and forcing me to repeat content an absolutely insane number of times, rarely if ever giving me what I actually need to feel like I've accomplished something.
Bungie knows how to make games where the reward for playing is the inherent fun you feel while playing. They've done it before, many times. Fair, interesting gameplay systems that promote fun over all else. They've overshadowed this with something much darker and more sinister. Now the gameplay is a means to an end, a certain number that says only that I'm luckier than you, or spent much more time playing than you. There is no measurement of skill that can be seen just by looking at a player anywhere inside the game.
These elements, these specific random elements, have not contributed to my enjoyment of video games. I'm not talking about random gameplay elements, but the false drought of positive emotions created by a carefully crafted intentional starvation. No reward without punishment in excess first. Does it matter how good you are? No. Will it ever, at least with Destiny? No. It's dumb. There's nothing fun about it.
Bungie, you went the wrong way. Find a way to make us care, find a way to make us want to be better players rather than convince us that all we need to do to achieve the goals you placed before us is spend more time playing for another chance to roll the dice. Again, you've done it before. Measure our skill, show us, show other players, and reward that. Like you used to.
Edit: I'm making this addition to the OP to address the most common response to my thread:
Plenty of other people have pointed out that marks and rep can be used to buy legendary gear. Yeah, I did that in the first week the game was out. Once you do that, winning doesn't matter anymore. Once you have a full legendary + one exotic set your new wall is the raid, which you have to play once a week to get a chance to roll the dice for better armor. I think everyone missed my point. I've been wearing faction armor since before the Vault of Glass opened, and I have been playing it every week. And every week, I do not get any raid armor. It took until my third run for me to get anything other than ascendant materials, mostly energy. I hit the progression wall of Destiny within just a few days. The game was too shallow and I have been hitting my head against RNG for weeks. I wanted Destiny to be a game I could always come back to and have something to work towards, but the reality is the random drop design of the raid is just delaying me from putting the game down by dangling level 30 above my head.
There is a solution for people like me, people who have done and seen everything but want a reason to keep playing between their weekly raid attempts, and something to keep doing once they're max level. PvP, as it has always been for Bungie, would be the right place to do that. A separate balanced mode that tracks our skill level would make me want to play every day rather than once a week, and would keep me playing indefinitely. But as has also been said in this thread, this can't possibly exist in Destiny because it would conflict with the idea of gear and a persistent character. The need for this system to run beneath every element of the game has crippled is longevity and prevented hardcore players from wanting to stick with it long term.
