I don't expect Destiny to be "free" but I don't expect it to cost me $100 to play a year either. I'm not even opposed to paying $100 a year to play a service game comparable to an MMO, as long as it's good and there's enough to keep me engaged. They failed on both accounts and clearly I'm not the only one that shares the sentiment.
On the subject of negativity surrounding Destiny 2, they didn't do themselves any favors by time gating customers in their progression behind dailies and weeklies if they didn't cough up the extra $40 and the fact that the expansions were huge disappointments that were spread so far out between the first year of the game pissed off the people who did buy into the season pass stuff. Am I supposed to be surprised that the discourse surrounding the game is largely negative when they pissed off people who paid for the season pass and people that didn't in a service game?
I'm not going to shitpost about Destiny being a dead game. It's not but it's certainly bleeding players, especially on PC where it had 7,000 players in April. It has problems that need to be fixed. It lost a lot of the appeal for Destiny 1 players and it was beyond idiotic to throw away three years of base game+expansion content when Destiny 2 still has a drought of content to this day.
I just think it's important for Activision and fans of the game to realize that if they want to charge $80-$100 a year all content releases accounted for, they are competing with the likes of Guild Wars 2's living story, Elder Scrolls Online's boxed/DLC expansions (which do come to about $80-$100 a year but there's little debate about how it's not worth the money), Warframe's practically monthly content updates, Path of Exile's quarterly updates and now they're even going to be up against The Division 2 which seems to take all of this into account with a roadmap of free and regular content updates.
Even if I were a fan of Destiny 2, I wouldn't be acting bewildered that the game is generally disliked and bleeding players.
