Given my history with Ubisoft I'm highly dubious this post will really be seen by anyone of true importance within the Division team but I figure what the heck I'll give it a shot. I played the first Division and enjoyed it for the most part and stuck with it through the majority of it's life but fell off of it quite a few times because of the myriad of issues both big and small, therefore when The Division 2 was announced I'll admit I had little to no interest but I was lucky enough to get into the beta so I figured I'd try it out. To my surprise I greatly enjoyed it and decided to pick it up and now I have about 644 hours of time played. Up until Warlords Of New York I could say with confidence that I'd pretty much enjoyed every hour of that playtime.

When Warlords was first announced I was excited: to go back to New York, to finish the story of Aaron Keener, and to simply have more Division 2 to play. The Gear 2.0 System was truly my only area of hesitance because like many others I'd spent so much time building my perfect build but given the positive experience I'd had so far I was willing to give you guys the benefit of the doubt. After a significant amount of time with the expansion I can safely say I have never experienced an expansion like this in which more bad was done to the game then good.

First the good; the Re-Calibration Library was an absolute stroke of genius that I believe other looter shooters should learn from. The map is as detailed and fun to explore as the original D.C. one; and the story while not ground breaking was a lot of fun to experience for a long time fan such as myself. But unfortunately that's pretty much it.

The bad starts mainly with and centers around Gear 2.0, the first Division games gear system was pretty convoluted and needed to be fixed. I had thought you'd pulled that off wonderfully with Division 2, there was a level of depth but not so over done that something like spreadsheets were required and if you didn't care about that depth then the simple approach was just as effective in some ways. You had found a rare sweet spot that most other looter shooters still struggle with, but with 2.0 you decided to throw all that out. The depth is pretty much gone and has been streamlined to a truly disappointing level. And from this new system the other truly big problem is born, I feel truly powerless in the game and it just isn't that fun to play anymore; I imagine that's one of the biggest reasons this damage glitch became such a big problem; if your player feels like no matter what they do they can't improve then what's the point.

Obviously there are examples of others finding this power again all over Youtube but you are making a mistake that pretty much every game as a service developer does. You look at Youtube and think that is the majority of your community when it is the exact opposite. These are the people who have the time to sit and do nothing but figure out the most minute details of the game or to find a way to break it, and should those avenues fail to just grind their time away. They are the minority while the majority are left struggling to do even a Hard or Challenging mission and because of that unable to get the gear we need to improve. I am by no means speaking in defense of those who abused the damage glitch to an extreme level but as a devoted player I can understand the mentality of wanting to be strong again.

Before Gear 2.0 I was in a pretty good place in terms of power, I could do challenging content pretty well on my own but I was never truly untouchable because if I didn't pay attention I'd get dropped pretty freaking quickly. As of this writing I'm struggling with a hard mission and as such about 70% of the games content is unreachable to me including; truly improving my gear, some Exotics, and even the new league content. In the end this is your game and you are free to make the choices you have, and as of right now I can't say I'm truly done with the game, but if the trend of robbing your players of the chance to truly feel an improvement and to feel powerful continues I can see it happening. I love this game and I don't want to leave it behind but if I as player feel like no matter what I do I can't play the game in a balanced state of power and challenge then I will simply have to move on.