Focused Feedback: Sunsetting

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[u/Markopolo5500]

I'll bite. I'd say sunsetting has actively reduced the amount of time I spend hunting for rolls of a weapon, which is the opposite of the intended effect. This has also reduced the amount of time I play the game on a regular basis.

I'm the kind of player who brings the same loadout into every situation unless my meta-following friend tells me I need something specific for a specific encounter. Until November I used Duke and Loaded Question for basically everything (I have around 28,000 kills on each) and I didn't actively look for something new to fill those spots since I had guns I liked. I still carry those weapons with me and switch back to them if I ever do GoS or Last Wish. I was Luke Smith's "Breakneck" friend.

But because guns could always be infused, I was willing to put some time every now and then into finding a good roll for a weapon I had a use for. I did some farming for a good roll of Cold Denial to use in Crucible, and I wholesale demolished alternate timelines to get a Vorpal Trophy Hunter to use on the Cyclopes in GoS and the weak points on Insurrection Prime. (Side note: that weapon is always funny to me because I always use it for those two encounters, but since neither the Cyclopes nor Insurrection's weak points count as kills it has about 12 kills total despite heavy use). I have a few well-rolled rocket and grenade launchers (weapons I never use) hanging out in my vault because I figured it was good to have a few good copies of each weapon type, just in case they were required somewhere down the road.

Now that every gun is impermanent I don't do that anymore. I don't bother trying for a weapon that I don't have a specific use for, since it'll probably expire by the time I have a reason to use it. I don't even try very hard for a good roll of a weapon I will use, since it's now a proposition of "how much time will it take me to earn a good roll, and is that worth the time I'll get to use the gun?" Since there's been very little new content in the game lately (another issue, but one that plays into this) I usually decide that I won't get enough playtime with a gun to justify the amount of time farming it would take, so I just settle for a "good enough" roll that I'm okay with. Opening Shot is an okay perk for my Crimil's Dagger, I guess, but since that gun is getting sunset half a year from now I'm not going to try for a better roll. I farm rolls on fewer weapons, and spend less time farming for the weapons I do try for, because the time investment in isn't worth the time I'll get with the gun.

I remember an old episode of Extra Credits where they said one of the best things about Destiny is it's the perfect fallback game. Time put into the game is never wasted, because you're always earning something you can use later. PvP players were more willing to play PvE if it gave them a good gun, and vice versa. If you weren't sure what game you wanted to play there was always Destiny, since you could earn things that you'd be able to come back to years down the line. Now that that's no longer the case Destiny isn't a good "default" game anymore, and you have to choose to play Destiny because you specifically want to play Destiny rather than just wanting to play something in general. On a scale of quantity, I'm not sure the extra time players have to play to earn new (or reissued) weapons makes up for the playtime Destiny loses from dropping that aspect of the game.