Author's note: I love Destiny. I love playing it, and I love talking about it. As players point out, Bungie certainly has areas in which they can improve, and they're working on them. Just to clarify, the problem this article discusses isn't about expressing negativity towards Destiny, but it's about those expressing their opinion with hate and abuse. This is a small, yet unfortunately vocal, minority in the community, and doesn't reflect on the community as a whole, nor Bungie itself. Thank you for participating in the discussion and offering your opinion: there is no right or wrong answer. Original story follows...
Destiny is a game that’s simultaneously full of exciting promise and crushing disappointment for an equal amount of people. Because of reasons including a misleading hype-up before launch, an under-delivered story, the unpopular loot system, and many others cited since launch, players have taken to actively attacking and abusing Bungie and their community manager, DeeJ. This is disgusting behaviour, and it has to stop.
The Bungie community has always been incredibly vocal, especially when it comes to feedback about their developer of choice. This took a turn for the worse when Destiny launched and the forums filled with gamers spewing hatred and bitterness at the developer because they didn’t like the end result. DeeJ, as Bungie’s public face, cops the brunt of the abuse.
Bungie updates their website, cops abuse; updates Destiny, cops abuse; rides with Guardian Radio, cops abuse; updates the game again, cops abuse. It seems that no matter what Bungie do, they can’t escape the wave of hatred that gamers fling at them in droves.
The main reasons for such abuse vary from complaints about the story to not getting the gear they wanted in a random drop, followed by pleading Bungie to gift it to them.
I you browse Bungie’s Weekly Updates and you’ll find players accusing Bungie of bad game design and just being poor developers (admittedly, amid others who are legitimately trying to help improve the game), and if you browse forums you’ll generally find more bad than good, but among any of those posts, you’re almost guaranteed to find someone attacking DeeJ.
Some people go out of their way to accuse DeeJ of doing too much talking and not enough changing the game (even though all he can do is relay the feedback to the developers at Bungie, and it takes time to implement change), and then they flip the coin and accuse Bungie of not being transparent enough. So they take out their frustration on the face that they can see.
One user in a Reddit forum put it best:
“Honestly people here are treating him like ‘those’ customers do in retail. The ones who think that because they don’t like the decisions or policies of a company, they’re entitled to yell, scream and abuse the cashier. Those people are scum, don’t be those people.”
Those who complain about the ‘lack of transparency’ or that DeeJ doesn’t give enough answers also fail to realise that the world of Public Relations is full of comments you are and aren’t allowed to make – if you were to say mention something you weren’t supposed to, there goes your job.
Is Destiny a great game? I think so. Does it need improvement? Absolutely. Does it call for people to personally threaten and abuse a company and a man? No. Never.
There’s an old adage where if you have nothing nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything; and yet, no one is saying anything nice.