#Bungie please don't do what I think you're going to do

[hotgirlsforredacted]

If anything happens to Osiris at all I'm just gonna have to die man

[erismourn]

So obviously Eramis is really going through it, but there are two other canonically wlw characters (Ana (lesbian) and Mara (bisexual)) with speaking central roles this season as well who AREN'T going through it (any more than any other character in this world). As a wlw myself, it seems unfair to claim Bungie has some sort of vendetta against wlw when they've got so MANY of them experiencing such a variety of plotlines in the overarching story? And not just wlw but such a wide variety of other canonically queer characters with a variety of emotional arcs?

tbh I don't think you're Wrong per se but I do think things could be better for destiny's wlw characters in the sense that like. we've never seen camrin on screen. sjur is still dead-not-dead. eramis' wife is ?????? i think she's in stasis floating through space on a colony ship. there are other **potentially** wlw characters who have had all of their relationships w women erased in favour of screentime with male characters. dyou get what I'm saying?

in terms of quantity we are Feasting, but like. have we ever seen a wlw character and their partner interact on screen.

my issue w bungie's queer rep in general is that like. if you want to have queer characters you have to Show Me That They Are Queer. I want in-your-face representation because we are still in an era where that is very much shunned. like, saint and osiris kissing on screen was beyond my wildest fucking dreams - talkign about saint and osiris gargling each other's tonsils on screen was a JOKE I made with my friends. now do this for wlw characters, please

(also to be clear because I feel like people enjoy misinterpreting me on the internet - I know many of the writers and other people who work on d2 are queer and want to see these stories represented. the issue is imo higher ups going wahhhh our gamer money how are we going to get microtransactions if there's homosexuals in our game)

+ another thing I do agree with your statement I just think it could be better. sorry if this is really unclear there is weed in my system atm. i think bungie is breaking so much ground w their queer rep but it could also be better, and the reason I make these criticisms is becuase I know the developers are more likely to listen. (the post ur referencing was just complaining though. however I have made criticisms in this vein before, more eloquently and politely worded)

[thefirstknife]

can we please. go one (1) week without the PVP obsessed people going off about how PVP is the only thing that matters in the game. im so very tired. "PVE people are probably about to find out that PVE can't carry the game because PVP is ruined and we're all gonna quit and play better games" please just can they shut up and go already instead of threatening us with a good time they never follow through on??

I saw that stuff as well, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's incredibly disingenuous and deliberately incendiary to cause more people to bitch about the game being doomed or whatever.

They are constantly using "steam numbers" to show that this is the lowest population count that Destiny 2 ever had and how that's proof that the game is being ruined and dying, that pvp bros and content creators are more important than we think they are, that Bungie needs to make Destiny 3 (yes, that is unironically stuff that people are saying) and other really incredibly tiring things.

Not to mention the vitriol towards the devs. Every time they bitch, more and more people show up in the comments saying awful shit about devs and how they are lazy, they don't work, they don't care, they are bad at development and so on. This is what eventually fuels harassment.

These "steam numbers" are disingenuous because they are taken out of context and they strip all other external reasons from the "low player count."

Is there a low player count? Yes! That is correct. Even when we account for console players, it's still low.

This is nothing new. This is a constant trend. Last month of the season ALWAYS has low numbers. People finished their story and their pinnacle grind and their seals and are doing other things.

More under for length:

Is this the lowest it's been so far? It seems to be, though the final month on steam charts isn't over so we can't fully tell yet, but it seems to be one of the lowest. However, there's been similar numbers before during seasonal end. It's quite literally nothing new. We go through this every season, except this season it's slightly lower than usual.

Why is that? Well, the chart Aztecross put to prove there's not many people playing happened on a Monday before the final Tuesday reset of the final week of the season. Yeah bro, very few people have things left to do in the season. They're not bothering. Unlike you, other people have other hobbies and games to play. I haven't played in days, I only got on on Saturday to finish my King's Fall seal and that took 10 minutes. This is what I mean by "disingenuous." It's a cheap bait tactic. Find the lowest number and ship it for cheap outrage engagement.

Others are constantly also posting the cummulative steam chart for every month of Destiny since the game came to steam and they're pointing out that we have lowest numbers now. Which is, again, posted for cheap outrage. They look at the number and see it's low and their conclusion is "game is dying." They don't care about the trend (every season end is "dying"), they don't care about external reasons (other game releases), they don't care about overall how some seasons are just weaker and have less interest (not the first time), they don't care about anything.

They just want people to be mad enough to harass the devs. Because like, what do they think is going to happen when they spend 2 months blogging to hundreds of thousands of people about the game being ruined by evil devs who don't do their job? When they constantly talk about how everything in the game is bad, pvp is bad, pve is boring and easy, story is bad, seasons are bad, events made for fun are bad, small community event is bad. What's going to happen is thousands of people are going to harass the devs. That's what going to happen.

I took the "steam numbers" chart that people are throwing around and I went into it in-depth to explain what the numbers mean and add context to them. You can see it here. It's a big image but you can zoom in and explore. It makes more sense when you see it separated by seasons; you can CLEARLY see the main trend of "low population at season end."

Another thing to consider with these numbers is the scheduling pattern. Shadowkeep released in October, Beyond Light released in November after a delay. October-November are usually months with a lot of other game releases and holidays. In 2019 and 2020, Bungie had an expansion themselves to cover that time. In 2021, there was no expansion in Oct-Nov; and that was the last time the game had the lowest population record ever. WHAT A SURPRISE. In this period, if Destiny doesn't have an expansion, people move on to play other games!!!! WOW! We have the technology to decipher the low numbers!

It's important to also note that back in 2021, that was the first time a game was delayed properly and significantly, so the year was without an expansion and there was a lull in Oct-Nov period. However, at that time, it was the first time this schedule happened and people generally didn't know how will it go. We were also kept in the dark about the seasonal story end (the infamous When Is Exorcism incident) so people had to keep coming back. Now, we're in the same situation; no new expansion in Oct-Nov, seasonal lull, nothing is happening. However, now, we know how this goes. People know how this schedule works AND we're not dealing with an extended season. We know when this season ends and there's nothing to wait for. People are more comfortable taking a break. So there's less people in Oct-Nov 2022 than there were in the previous lowest point, Oct-Nov 2021. It's almost as if there are reasons for this that go beyond "game is obviously dying."

These people also seem to be incapable of understanding that some players just... stop playing. For no specific reason. The game isn't dying, some people just lose interest. Content creators are especially guilty of this, because THEY can't stop playing, because they tied their income to a single live service game. To them, quitting the game is losing a job. Curious, maybe that influences their views about the game and about burnout and taking breaks and the quality of the content?

They simultaneously want Bungie to drop FOMO and reduce burnout, but they ALSO want for there to never be "content droughts." Which one is it? Because these two things cannot both be gone. If you want less FOMO and less burnout, then there will be less content. If you want more content, then you have to get on that burnout grindset.

It's the end of the god damn season. Yeah, nothing is happening. Yeah, fewer people are playing. Players finished their grind in the Destiny mines and are doing other things before the new season drops. Stop catastrophising it for cheap outrage bait. You not being able to take a break and having to keep making new content even when the season is ending and there no new content is your problem. Not Bungie's, not the other players'.

Bungie is not going to force their devs to crunch 80 hours per week so you can have brand new content every Tuesday that no regular player can catch up with. As it currently is, I want MORE downtime. I want seasons to be 4 months and to have less time and more downtime to catch up with stuff. Imagine the outrage though. Genuinely, society if these people would actually deliver on their promise and leave. Someone else will take your place, bro.

Also, as a final note before a dissertation in the tags: these pvp mains are weak. They whine about only having 2 new maps in 2 years. Gambit got -2 new maps. Like, literally we had 6 maps and now we have 4. LMAO. Crucible has a total of 24 maps and 8+ modes, constant updates, Iron Banner rework, multiple Trials reworks, incoming competitive rework, Crucible labs, three different sets of armour, prestige weapon loot, three different seals, entire twabs dedicated just to it. And they whine about not enough attention for the Crucible?

It's getting more attention than any other core playlist. Their problem is that they're not the ones being catered to. An update doesn't count if it doesn't satisfy mister Crucible Main #37. Fuck everyone else I guess! They are the most entitled selfish childish little pricks I've ever seen. They do not deserve Bungie talking the players at all.

[thefirstknife]

I've been fighting in the trenches on twitter over this ever since Saltagreppo replied to me when I told a dev that defended him that he's constantly spewing ableist shit.

This is my series of tweets I made to a tweet from one of the community managers. The community manager made fairly good points: please don't harass people on social media because you disagree with them.

The problem I have is that Salta has been the one starting shit for ages now, and the way he starts shit is to be incredibly elitist and ableist. So I wrote that. I wrote that gaming communities are full of ableist rhetoric and anti-accessibility sentiments and that harassing people on social media is incredibly common when a popular personality (and their fans) do it to random twitter users with 10 followers.

I specified that the issue is much bigger than just this and that Salta has been saying stuff like this before (provided examples from ableist bullshit from the most recent stuff about Divinity where he is straight up claiming that some content should simply not be playable for some people). I also added that this is why people feel heated, because some of the statements about the game coming from Salta are hurtful and bad.

I also said that I'm glad the community manager made it clear that Bungie is NOT just listening to content creators and that they also look at feedback from other players. It's very nice to be reassured that is the case, but I did point out that unlike content creators, us (average players) can't possibly know if our voices are being heard. And that our contribution to feedback is incredibly difficult to get seen as opposed to big content creators with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers.

Out of nowhere (because he is monitoring every fucking tweet about himself I guess), Salta showed up to reply to me how no, he isn't ableist and I am actually toxic for saying he is ableist.

Since he showed up, my notifications have been in shambles. I receive about 10 notifs per minute and it's been going on for hours. People have called me toxic, a dumbass, implied I have a "slur" mentality about this and added other mocking comments about pretty much every possible strawman they could think of. It's typical gamer dudebro stuff. I've been replying to pretty much all of them because I can do nothing as well as argue with people so it's fine with me.

Naturally, the whole thing just proved everything I said in my original tweet to the community manager. The content creators harbour incredibly hostile and toxic communities that thrive on gatekeeping and elitism and measuring their egoes based on arbitrary numbers in a video game. He was replying also to my friend yesterday when my friend jokingly quote tweeted his Divinity essay and told him "skill issue?" which is obviously a joke given that Salta is a three-times World's First winner. But Salta got upset over this and had to be snarky to my friend and then his horde of followers showed up to call my friend slurs (I also briefly commented and got basically told "you're a 33 yo woman, have some shame" which is truly a relic of the past, getting told to go back to the kitchen over a video game).

During the whole argument on twitter, I have only strengthened my position that Salta is ableist and that his fans are ableist and that he doesn't care. He only got mad and cried "harassment" for being told "Hey buddy, you are using ableist arguments." Ironically fully confirmed by having ableist arguments from his supporters in my notifs all day.

Also saw you on twitter in another thread! Same hat!

This whole discussion has been one of the worst things recently involving the Destiny community as it revealed so many people who literally are just genuinely evil. I don't know what else to call them. Salta has been brigading on twitter for months about how the game is "too easy" and everything that helps people needs to be nerfed (nerf well of radiance, nerf resilience, nerf Divinity). And everyone who supports him is parroting his lines.

They keep moving the goalposts from "Divinity problem is just the debuff" (there are other debuffs and with Divinity you lose one person on dps so the debuff has to be higher?) to "actually you SHOULD have to aim better to do raids" (some people can't aim and can't get better and also who cares how much other people aim, there are also a million no aim weapons) to "actually this is all just about the competition of day 1 raid race" (day 1 raid race is 2 days per year and affects literally 1% of the players, a weapon should not be nerfed because of that) and in a circle, depending on what someone replies with. The issue never seems to be that some content creators are just incredibly disconnected from how regular players play the game and how average players experience difficulty and how difficulty is relative and how this is all inextricably tied to accessibility and disabilities.

And of course, the moment you say "just don't use Divinity and resilience and well then?" they swarm with "bad take" replies and never actually explain why that is not the solution here. Outside of saying shit like "That's not a real solution because Divinity is bad for the health of the game." And then we're back at the beginning of the circle. Incapable of understanding that their experiences are not universal.

For the record, lowering the debuff from Divinity would be fine, most players would not notice the difference most likely. I'm okay with that if Bungie decides that's for the best. People will still use it and I will still say it's helpful and accessible. The problem is that if Divinity is removed from the "meta," these content creators will find something else to take its spot. And then months later, they will demand that to be nerfed too.

I have yet to see any of these content creators suggest something like adding more support-type weapons like Divinity and other weapons that help with accessibility. They don't really care about any of this, they just want to "level the playing field" so they can consider themselves superior. Not realising that the playing field is not levelled. The playing field is heavily skewed towards them, people who play Destiny as a full time job. Things are already not fair and they want to make them even less fair and more in their favour because they're bored when the game is better for more people.

If you're so good at aiming, I'm sure you can hit that deinstall button and move to something more challenging for you.

[fox-fic-and-ink]

Some points of interest

-Ace means WAY more to Cayde then the few journals we have lead us to believe. His kid isn't just someone Cayde occasionally wrote to- that child is a huge cornerstone for Cayde's memories.

-Cayde didn't just abandon his old family after he sold himself to the Exo program he actively looked to reunite with them.

-Player Cayde confirmed. *rolls eyes* Getting kisses from strange twins, falling for Maya Sundaresh, collecting trashy novels...I think Cayde loves the idea of romance ya'll.

-There's got to be a longer standing relationship between Cayde and Variks. No certainty what kind but you know it would be hilarious and cut with an undercurrent of danger at every interaction and I am SO disappointed we didn't get to see that gold mine of interaction!!!

-What does Variks do with his captured Ghosts!?!?! Does he keep them in a fish tank, fondly collecting them because they remind him of servitors and shanks? Or does he tear them apart to study the Light of the Traveller who left the Eliksni behind? Can they somehow be used in ether production??? Come to think of it, does Variks have some kind of cobbled together ether equipment with all the aesthitc vibe of a moonshine distillery???

-Cayde, honey, what kind of relationship do you have with the Reef Awoken that you fear looking them in the eye and their Prince is ok with shooting you in the face?

-Also please elaborate on the Queen's powers that you think could help you find your family! There's such an air of gripping, dark mystery to the Reef but Bungie has to kill Cayde instead of exploring things that already catch my attention and make me shiver at the possibilities!

-Cayde has been wiped for containing sensitive information. It's not just failing memories or conciousness/body rejection, Clovis Bray would apparently reset an Exo anytime they knew too much sensitive info (or probably got cheeky enough, knowing Cayde) and we're STILL not going to talk about Bray's ethics in-game?!?! I know lots of information was lost during the collapse but there's a point of willful ignorance Destiny is portraying at this point.

-This also fully supports my theory that Banshee has always been a weapons expert and a large number of his wipes are a result of employers wanting to keep trademarks or research and development secret.

-Andal. Dear sweet, shafted Andal. I'm sorry we don't ever talk about you for more than three sentences and you might as well not exist for all the emotional impact your presence creates in-game. I must have thought you were cool or something but you're dead and my creators tell me 'Destiny is a living world' so guess I don't have time to chime in or emote even in missions where we avenge your murder. -from the journals of Cayde-6

-Why can't you just tell us what the dare is? There's mystery and then there's lore cuckolding!

-'When you come back, this seat is yours.' Implies Cayde either ran from the position after losing, and Andal was extremely forgiving of that, or the bet was made across some distance and Andal cannot leave until Cayde returns to the Tower to tag in.

-This also implies that Taniks killed Andal after Cayde became Vanguard or Andal snuck out of the Tower while waiting for Cayde to return and claim the position. You know which my fanfiction loving heart is watching onto. (Stay tuned for the piece where Cayde hunts Taniks instead of returning to take the Hunter Vanguard spot and Andal pays the price for tracking down Cayde at the wrong moment.)

-Cayde knew Ikora was on Io after Ghaul attacked. Cayde just know where she would retreat to (as the cinematic seemed to portray) or were the Vanguard in communication after they fled? Was there any sort of cohesive plan or was Zavala the only one trying to get the band back together while Cayde played action hero and Ikora was the only one having some kind of emotional growth? Bungie, showing us what happens between locations and plotpoints is important! It gets players invested, set-up to care about what we're doing instead of, 'well I guess I'll do whatever npcs tell me until they tell me to find another npc.'

This wasn't meant to sound so bitter...xD

Anyway heres all the missing Cayde journal entries, will bungo ever patch them in? Who knows.