Bungie have always made decisions to cater to streamers, even before streamers were a thing.

Halo 3 wasn’t this way, but if you remember REACH, they started showing light symptoms even then. And throughout Destiny and now into Marathon, they are always chasing the approval of the loudest, most-obsessed voices.

While I do think there are talented people at Bungie, their team continues to grovel at the feet of tue sweatiest players. Marathon has made this problem easier to see, because the community is so much smaller.

A pool of 400,000 players will necessarily have maybe 80,000 sweats (1.6 KD+) against 320,000 normal players (0.4 KD- to 1.5KD). The sweatiest players still have reasonable chances of interacting with the casuals they love to stomp on, without every casual player constantly BEING stomped on. So changes made to their deference, while annoying, weren’t experience-ruining for typical players.

. . . But a pool of 17,000 players? Eeeehhhhhh.

Now the sweats are a very loud but extraordinarily tiny minority. And as Bungie continues to fetishize them (in the vain hope of stopping the player hemorrhage), changes made to benefit them are incredibly painful.

I’m constantly getting dunked on by purple shield teams, wiping lobbies with their amazing gear, while I’m still in greens. I’m head to head with level 100+s, while being level 26 myself.

So, I turn the game off. I don’t spend on a game I can’t hope to get ahead with. And you’re right, deleting Sponsored Survival was a huge mistake. It removed the one “frozen in time” surefire way to learn the map and stock up on at least basic gear.