Destiny 2 community left fuming over newly-announced plans to "sunset" weapons, armor

One problem that Bungie has constantly faced with the development of Destiny 2 is for a way to engage players in obtaining new weapons in armor.

Bungie has almost set themselves up for failure in this regard due to such powerful weapons being released in the past so there is simply no reason to use newly released loot.

Recently Bungie has divulged a large amount of information on how they plan to combat this problem but unfortunately it seems it is not one that the Destiny 2 community is keen to embrace.

In the most recent ‘This Week at Bungie’ blog post the developers of Destiny 2 have put forward a new system that will be implemented in the coming Seasons known as ‘Sunsetting’.

For those of you out of the loop here’s a quick rundown of what this means:

Sunsetting will be a new change to Infusion that will cause a piece of Legendary gear to have a max power that it can be upgraded to. This max power value is set to the power cap 3 Seasons after the release of the gear which means there will be a 1 year period where the piece of gear can be upgraded to the current Seasonal cap.

After this 1 year period, this particular piece of Legendary gear will slowly be left behind as its max power is capped out and the Seasonal cap slowly edges further and further away from it.

By Season 12, a significant portion of our current loot collections will be unable to be infused up to the new power cap, making them useless for high difficulty activities like Raids and Nightfalls.

There are a few more ins and outs when it comes to this new sunsetting system so be sure to check out the full blog post on Bungie.net.

This new system has seen instant and widespread backlash from the Destiny 2 community across social media. One quick look at the new threads of the Destiny subreddit reveal that 90% of these are complaints about sunsetting and the way Bungie is choosing to implement it.

The amount of complaint threads got so overwhelming that the moderators of the subreddit had to auto delete all of these new threads and create a sunsetting feedback megathread as a way to contain the explosive amount of displeasure towards the system.

Here is a little sample of some of these threads:

“So, 90% of weapons are irrelevant in high end pve already, why are you going to take away more of the tiny amount left?” - u/Hipmrsnoodle

“Bungie needs to stop trying to change player behavior. They need to follow it instead.” - u/Volsunga

“The problem with sunsetting is that we have no faith that Bungie will deliver new loot to replace the sunset loot.” - u/byteminer

One thread in particular by Pwadigy titled “What is now going to determine the fate of this franchise is if Bungie can, for the first time, actually get over their pride and can an idea that is obviously bad *before* it is implemented.” gained massive traction with over 7,000 upvotes and 1,500 comments.

In this thread the poster calls for Bungie to listen to the community and to revise the sunsetting system before it is implemented into the game.

“I’m calling it right now, there isn’t another “Taken King,” or “Forsaken” opportunity for this game.” says Pwadigy. “Bungie came back from the brink twice, and the “Destiny is going to be good forever now” shield has been broken twice.”

Pwadigy then finishes with the following scathing comment: “It is very clear that Bungie, without feedback, will choose to consistently make massive, outright terrible changes to the game unless they get months and months of feedback after they already made the mistake.”

It could be that this is simply the vocal minority making these complaints but it is just simply too widespread for this to be the case.

It seems that most players believe that at its core the new sunsetting system is a good addition for the overall health of Destiny 2 but the game lacks the foundations to make it work.

Players simply lack faith in Bungie to deliver on sunsetting in a way that will benefit the game.

This lack of faith comes from Bungie struggling in recent Seasons to create a large enough amount of loot to keep the player base satisfied.

Even the usual addition of 3 Ritual Weapons was cut back in Season of the Worthy as Bungie didn't have the resources to create Ritual weapons and Trials of Osiris weapons.

For Sunsetting to work Bungie will have to be constantly generating new, unique weapons and armor to replace the ones being rotated out by sunsetting, something Bungie has shown they are unable to do.

Even Datto, popular Destiny 2 content creator, tweeted the following in regards to loot sunsetting: “But what I will say is that weapon retirement will be a failure if not executed on properly."

If Bungie simply remakes guns of the same archetypes with the same perks over and over, it is a failure in the eyes of the community. Bungie must bring heat," the Twitch star added in his post.

It’s clear that loot sunsetting is a very hot topic amongst the community at the present time and it will likely spark much more discussion between now and next Season when it will have its soft launch.

The real questions are whether Bungie will choose to revise the system before it launches based on player feedback and will Bungie actually be able to deliver on a proper execution of the system?