Have you noticed that you don’t hear much about Destiny 2 anymore?

Destiny 2 seems to have fallen off the map, after launching to considerable sales and excitement just six months ago. It promised a bigger world to explore and more stuff to do than its predecessor did. The game launched to rapturous acclaim, from this outlet and from pretty much all the others.

So why does it seem like no one is playing anymore?

Microtransactions

2017 was the year game publishers tried to push microtransactions to the next level, and the audience pushed back. Destiny 2 and Star Wars Battlefront 2 were the worst offenders, and both games have become cautionary tales. Bungie built the sequel around the Eververse real-money economy, and this adjustment poisoned many of the features that should have been clear improvements over the original game.

Destiny 2’s Bright Engram loot boxes were filled with enough cool and useful stuff that it felt kind of crummy to ignore them, or to subsist on the paltry few you could earn for free. But buying enough of them to collect the stuff you wanted was so expensive that paying for them felt just as bad.

Bungie burned a lot of players’ good faith with bullshit hijinks like trying to rig the experience system to prevent players from earning too many free loot boxes, and running a holiday event that ended up being nothing but more loot boxes to buy. The studio also ruined an idea fans liked — and fueled outrage about Eververse — by turning shaders into consumable items.

The microtransactions were so pervasive, and so detested by the community, that it’s easy to just look at the current state of Destiny 2 and conclude that microtransactions killed the game. But there’s more going on than that.

There never should have been a Destiny 2

Destiny came out in 2014. It was essentially a massively multiplayer online shooter with persistent characters, persistent gear and persistent collections of things like ships, mounts and emotes. Players earned some of these items as trophies for different achievements in the game, and bought some through microtransactions.

Only three years later, Bungie asked players to leave all their collections behind and move into Destiny 2, which was supposed to be a whole new game.

The writers built an explanation for this into the story: Enemies destroy the Tower at the start of the Destiny 2 campaign. The in-game social area where players stored their stuff was gone.

But we end up in a whole new Tower at the end of Destiny 2 that is pretty similar to the old one, except that all our old collections are gone, and there’s a new loot box vendor selling stuff to replace it for real money. It didn’t feel like progression; it felt like a reset that led into a crummier economy.

Continuity encourages commitment. Players feel invested in their collections, in their characters and in the community, and that keeps them playing. When Destiny became Destiny 2, it severed that link. Bungie blew up everything the community had built, and took away everything players had earned and purchased. They came into Destiny 2 without the stuff that had tied them to Destiny, and that made it easier for a lot of players who had previously been heavily committed to the game to leave.

If you want your players to stick with a franchise over the long term, you can’t periodically take away all their shit. Why invest as much in Destiny 2 when you have good reason to believe it’s all going to be taken away?

The gear was too flat

Destiny is about loot. Your character may have nominal story-based goals to save humanity or stop some evil force, but your objective as a player is to grow more powerful by getting better stuff.

In the original game, there was a cap on the power level you could obtain through normal play, and then a higher cap that you could only reach by collecting gear from the most challenging activities, like hard-mode raids and the Trials of Osiris competitive PvP mode. That meant that players who were successful in those activities got better stuff than players who failed or weren’t willing to put in the effort to try to break into the harder content.

The original Destiny did not offer random matchmaking for its hardest activities. On unofficial looking-for-group sites and subreddits, experienced players often refused to play with people who did not meet high gear level requirements that new raiders could not satisfy. This left a lot of players feeling that the Destiny community was elitist and exclusive.

Continuity encourages commitment

Destiny 2 lets everyone reach the power cap by doing weekly milestones, most of which are pretty easy. Higher gear levels are no longer limited to high-end players. And the Trials of the Nine and Iron Banner PvP modes no longer give advantages to players with higher-level gear. Everyone who has kept up with most of their milestones over the course of a couple of months has the same maxed-out power level.

That may have been a big win for accessibility, but it was kind of a disaster for a game where the motivation to keep playing is a quest for more and better gear. In the original Destiny, raiders came back every week to keep inching their power level higher. For more casual players or nonraiders, events like Iron Banner or Sparrow Racing League, which offered raid-quality gear, were a big incentive to log back in.

I wrote shortly after Destiny 2’s release that the removal of some of the excessively grindy aspects of the original game was a positive development, and I still hold to that. Games don’t need to waste players’ time. But they do need to give us worthwhile goals to pursue and rewards for accomplishing them, or we stop feeling that there’s a reason to play.

With gear diminished as an incentive to do stuff, Bungie hasn’t been giving players a reason to continue playing. You don’t need to keep practicing to become excellent if the game treats you the same way it treats mediocre players, so fewer players are doing so. And that means more players are leaving Destiny 2 earlier than they left Destiny.

Destiny 2’s PvP changes were unpopular

For Destiny 2, Bungie switched from a six-on-six PvP format to a four-versus-four format. The studio also slowed the time-to-kill of virtually all weapons, and moved many of Destiny’s most powerful special weapons to the power-weapon tier, making sniper rifles and shotguns share a slot with rocket launchers.

This was a response to some problems with Destiny’s PvP metagame, but the changes weren’t well-received. Getting kills tended to require coordinated fire, which was hard to achieve in solo-queue modes. Super moves took longer to charge than they had in the old game, and with fewer people in matches, there were far fewer opportunities to pull off spectacular multikills. PvP felt slower and less exciting.

This happened at a time when Destiny’s polished but aging Halo-style shooter gameplay was already starting to feel a little stale, compared to the new spins on the shooter genre we were seeing in games like like Overwatch, PUBG and Fortnite. It was a bad time for Destiny PvP to get less exciting.

Destiny 2’s first expansion disappointed

December’s Curse of Osiris expansion felt light on content. The missions were short, the new patrol area was tiny and the Infinite Forest, which had been teased as akin to a procedurally generated environment, was underwhelming. It was just a bunch of hallways randomly stitched together that you run through on the way to some mission objectives.

The expansion did come with a new activity called a “raid lair.” Raid content is always the best Destiny content, but Leviathan, Eater of Worlds wasn’t really a complete raid, and didn’t reinvigorate the community. Expansions should get players excited about coming back if they’ve left the game, but Curse of Osiris was easy to skip.

Can Bungie turn it around?

The good news is that the Destiny’s developers seem to be getting the message.

Bungie rolled out a “masterwork” system shortly after Curse of Osiris that allowed players to improve weapons, and more recently, introduced a masterwork system for armor. Masterworks for exotics are on the agenda. Raids now provide more masterwork gear than other activities, and Bungie also added special mods as raid rewards that give perks for the raid.

In late March, a major game update increased the speed at which Guardians move, made supers recharge faster and raised the amount of power ammo in the Crucible, injecting some adrenaline into Destiny 2’s PvP. Bungie also brought back the 6v6 format for Iron Banner events.

In January, Destiny 2 game director Christopher Barrett announced that Sparrows, Ghosts and ships will eventually be available from activities, and promised more ways to earn loot through gameplay. He also said we’ll be getting more a-la-carte sales as an alternative to loot boxes, and promised that the loot boxes would suck less.

“We recognize that the scales are tipped too far towards Tess at the moment, and Eververse was never intended to be a substitute for end game content and rewards,” Barrett said.

Some of these changes rolled out with the Crimson Days Valentine’s event, which had more opportunities to earn exclusive stuff for free than the universally panned Dawning event, and added duplicate protection to loot boxes.

These piecemeal improvements are collectively making Destiny 2 much better; Bungie is fixing a lot of the things that alienated the community. But Destiny is still lagging on the Twitch charts, and my list of Destiny friends is still very gray when I log into the game.

Some of these changes seem to have come too late — recent improvements to raid loot came months after most raiders had already moved on from the raid, for example. And lapsed players aren’t likely to log back in for routine patches, so the real test for Destiny 2 will come when its second expansion drops in May.

Destiny is about loot

A lot of players probably bought the Expansion Pass, or a special edition of the game that came with the first two expansions. So they’ve already paid for this content drop, and will probably be interested in checking it out. We don’t have a lot of details about this expansion yet, but according to Bungie’s roadmap, it will contain the prestige mode for the raid lair but will not include a new raid.

Further out on the horizon, Bungie is promising a Taken King-scale expansion at the end of 2018. The Taken King reinvigorated and vastly improved the original Destiny, and brought back a lot of players who stopped logging in daily or even weekly during the lackluster six-month reign of House of Wolves, so Bungie may be able to right the ship if it can pull off a similar feat.

However, while Bungie is finally correcting course, the Destiny franchise is at a low point, largely because of the misguided focus on Eververse in the early months of the game. Bungie is in a hole it dug for itself, at a time when it faces unprecedented competition from other shooters. Winning back lapsed players often means pulling them away from Fortnite and Overwatch. And the sentiment among the community seems to be different than it has been at previous low points for the franchise: People may have hit their breaking point.

Destiny has been a flawed, troubled enterprise since its launch, but in the past, the community sentiment has usually held that the game was moving in the right direction. That has changed this time. What Bungie and Activision have done with the Eververse microtransactions wasn’t merely a misstep; it was a betrayal. And fixing the game won’t be enough this time — Bungie has to figure out how to earn back the community’s trust.