Yup, that tracks. I think it was a total of about $150 for me starting Y3 and up to the beginning of Y4. When D2 is good, it’s REALLY good, and nothing quite compares to grinding that game with a bunch of friends who are also super into it.

My friends I used to play with I actually met in-game when I was F2P. I couldn’t buy the DLCs myself at the time so they just bought me the DLCs (which I still think is wild and I’m unbelievably grateful for). But the content got stale as hell at around Y4 and they stopped playing for the better part of a year. By the time they were back, they still didn’t wanna do most of the content and I was getting burnt out on the power grind every season. Raids became more about the loot, less about having fun. Eventually we all kinda fell off it. By the time I could pay for it myself, only some of them were playing sporadically, and the monetization kept getting more and more insane (like fuck Bungie for thinking dungeon keys were a good idea).

I really miss those days though and I’d pay in a heartbeat if it meant playing like we used to.

The good main stories are Forsaken (can’t play this anymore afaik), The Witch Queen (may be worth it), and The Final Shape (from what I hear, no context on this one). There’s also some good stories in specific seasons but I don’t know how they’re handling older seasons and whether or not you can still play them. Back when I was actively playing they were cycling them out every year.

A lot of the value in these is the endgame content though. Unless you’re interested in the loot game, lost sectors, exotic missions and/or plan on getting a group together for dungeons and raids, I don’t think it’s worth it. If all you care about is the story, I think you can get much better stories elsewhere.

That sounds about right. It’'s easy to spend ridiculous amounts of time playing during a good annual expansion or particularly good season, especially if you’ve got a clan that plays and raids regularly and/or you use the LFG discord. I used to be the same way, 40-50hrs a week at my peak. But I was in college, I don’t know if I’d have the energy for that and a full time job now.

I put 1.2k hours into it during lockdown. Not enjoying Destiny 2 is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to your wallet tbh

I have an init.sh file I run from my dotfiles. Pipe my sudo password to it and leave it alone for about an hour. Gets things 95% of the way to how I like them.

I should migrate to ansible like u/[email protected] but time :(