5 days ago • 97%

Destiny 2 Players Struggle To Find Fireteams As Population Drops To All-Time Low

thegamepost.com Destiny 2 Players Struggle To Find Fireteams As Population Drops To All-Time Low

Destiny 2’s player count is reaching an all-time low, with matchmaking becoming increasingly difficult for raids, dungeons, and other activities.

Games @sh.itjust.works Destiny 2 Players Struggle To Find Fireteams As Population Drops To All-Time Low

42 comments

"hey let's release the same thing over and over again, charge almost full game price for it, and whenever something new comes out, just delete everything they've already paid for."

"hey why aren't people continuing to buy our game..."

Yeah. Great mystery, that one.

Bungie will never get another dollar from me.

91
- In fairness, they did stop deleting content... but at the same time they stubbornly refuse to restore the content already deleted...
  
  44
  
  I'll never forget that sheer confounded rage I felt when I installed the game after a few years and suddenly didnt have any of the content I had paid for anymore. ~$120 at least was just fucking gone. They never even responded to my emails about it either. Garbage
  
  11
  
  Except seasonal content. I wouldn't care about the activities, but there is story stuff that directly continues story of one expansion and also leads into the next. Sometimes it is standalone, but also may or may not end up relevant later.
  
  I was really into Destiny but once I got off that train it felt like I just can't jump back on.
  
  10
  
  I completely stopped playing when they sunsetted the equipment that made my somewhat unusual warlock build work.
  
  4
  
  I hate that they deleted stuff but I can understand arguments against the size. It’s at 130GB without all of that missing content.
  
  0
- as a warframe player, it boggles my mind that bungie can't figure this out.
  
  32
- It's not the same thing.
  
  It's downgraded.
  
  10
I'll champion the death of any live service game, especially one that does it as egregiously bad as Destiny, but there are 20k concurrent players on Steam alone. If a fireteam is only 3 people, and you can't fill it with that many people online, it's just their matchmaking algorithm that needs to be adjusted.

34
Allow me to play on linux, and Il come back.

24
- Absolutely. I have a gaming PC and steam deck. Any game that doesn't allow me to use the hardware I paid for, doesn't get played.
  
  8
In addition to other comments here, I also stopped playing because I moved to Linux and not gonna keep a windows partition alive just to play D2.

28
I loved D1 and D2, putting in literally THOUSANDS of hours, and dropped it like it was hot when they cut out 1/2 the content in the game. Restore the vaulted content and I'll come back. Without that, it's clear you don't value the time and money I invested.

31
- Yep, fuck all that.
  
  Ignoring the stuff I paid for, I don't find any of the content they replaced it with (mostly if you buy more shit) satisfying at all. The original enemies were incredibly well designed and enjoyable. The taken weren't bad. Most of the rest very clearly didn't have the time put into designing them. They suck, and I don't want to play them.
  
  18
  
  The "new" enemies were just re-skinned old enemies.
  
  10
I stopped playing because the story's over. The storytelling was the main thing that kept me playing for the last few expansions, and with The Final Shape being the finale to the main story, I just don't have a reason to go back to it right now. The episodic content is way lower quality than anything Bungie's put out before, and I kind of regret buying the deluxe edition of TFS because of that, as I have no intention of finishing the episodes.

It is still sad to see, though. I made a lot of really good friends through Destiny 2 and have a lot of great memories of times spent playing. Even though I'm no longer playing, it still feels like a pretty big loss seeing the community begin to fade away.

25
It’ll continue becoming worse too.

Most of the people I know are fed up with the issues. When frontiers comes around, I will not be buying it, at any price.

Bungie have shown that they are unable to improve things long-term. It’s always a bungie (sorry) cord jump, except with every bounce they sink deeper instead

19
When The Dawning hit this year something in me just kind of rebelled, I was like "you know what, no, I'm not playing this 4x+ repeated event for mediocre rewards"

8
People blame the sunsetting decision, but most people stuck around. Honestly I don't think the stuff they sunset was all that good. The original planet designs were feeling tired. They have brought missions back as well... But it's been too long since I played to remember exactly how they brought them back.

The actual issue in my mind is they've decided making things hard means giving it a lot of health and make it take almost all of yours in one hit. So the only things that are viable are people's cracked builds.

Basically without a full team of good shooter players, even easy mode dungeons are out of reach. Things just do so much damage and have so much health, it's just not fun. Everything feels like a slog unless you go look up a cracked build someone made.

Actually, not everything feels like a slog. The content that doesn't, everything just dies without any challenge.

So the options to play are roughly:

comically easy

this will take forever

this will take forever + 1 and hit like a truck

this will take forever + 2 and you instantly die

With some content having only the last 3 options.

They added some new enemy types recently, but it just hasn't been enough to really make the game feel refreshed. Like, Remnant II showed how to do this well, different enemies, different ways that they attack you, different ways to ideally kill the enemy (i.e. lots of weak spot variety), lots of different attacks for the bosses (and death is a matter of avoiding the attacks not being in a 12 hour fight), every bullet takes a significant chunk of their health bar, etc

The locations have also felt a bit underwhelming, but that would be okay if the fights felt challenging and rewarding ... not just like various reskins of the same enemies with either no or way too much health.
12
GOOD I will never forgive them for the sunsetting bs they pulled after delivering forskaren

9
Maybe they're all deep diving in the newly extended iceberg that is Warframe lore

3
The story is done. Even when it wasn't, the game felt like you were getting eight paragraphs of story per season spread over one paragraph per week.

I mostly pvp, the population is so bad that matchmaking has necessarily become terrible or there would be no matches. Every lobby has outliers on the high and low skill. The algorithm seems to put the six best players on the same team. I am either slaughtering the other team or getting slaughtered. A competitive match is a super rare occurrence. Anyway the lack of players makes the experience bad which is causing a death spiral. Anyone new is virtually guaranteed a bad experience, because most of the people left are the sweats.

I don't know why I still play. Habit I guess. I have a huge backlog of games I ought to be playing instead. I game to relax and investing in the learning curve of a new game doesn't feel very relaxing.

6
Out of the loop. Why is Destiny 2 sinking? Didn't the game use to print money? Did the money not get reinvested back into the live service (like how FFXIV funds get vacuumed away to prop up the rest of Square Enix), or did Bungie make some bad artistic choices, or what?

5
- There are several contributors here.
  
  Halfway through the lifecycle of Destiny 2 so far, Bungie realized that they have an insane amount of technological debt, and started cutting content out of the game, because it was unsustainable otherwise. The original promise was to rotate the cut content back in, but it was essentially just a lie.
  
  One other outstanding issue is how bland, underdeveloped, and uninspired things are. Every update is "two tokens, and a blue". Every new event is either standing on a plate, or throwing a core. Core game systems don't work. The entire new season is fundamentally broken, and took away thing people still liked, just to return a ton of things people despised.
  
  There is a lot more to it, but the core of the issue can be narrowed down to the business leadership being completely out of touch with reality, and bleeding resources
  
  14
  
  Thanks. It would be really interesting to know what's going on behind the scenes. My understanding is that once a live service game makes it to the big leagues, like D2, resources aren't a problem if they get reinvested into development. For example, Genshin gets an annual budget of around $200m (basically one AAA a year), and pushes updates on a 6 week cycle. These big income earning projects all ought to be capable of doing crazy stuff that other studios can't match.
  
  What sometimes happens is that the company milks the game to fund other stuff, so not enough is reinvested (like FFXIV). But it's so strange to see it happening to Bungie, because the whole point of the Sony acquisition was to have a healthy ongoing live service game.
  
  1
- Game had its big final several years in the waiting boss show up and its storyline basically ended. Now it feels more like we're doing post game sidequest stuff.
  
  Also theres various reports of bungie firings and d2 being in maintenance mode while they try to push out a tarkov knockoff
  
  12
  
  Everything I've heard about marathon is that's it's becoming less and less like tarkov.
  
  5
  
  Thanks. That sounds remarkably like the same slump FFXIV is currently in, actually. You'd think professional writers would be able to see this problem coming a long way away, and find a way to pivot smoothly to the next storyline. Especially with so much $$ at stake in a live service game.
  
  2
They all went to Marvel Rivals

3
I only ever played the free stuff of the game. Decent shooter, but too expensive for my cheapass BRL tastes

2
It’s like 7 years old now. Let it go Bungie, it’s time to move on.

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