Destiny

Destiny 2 was barely playable at all yesterday after weekly reset, thanks to a number of error codes being spat at players during login or travel. By evening, I couldn’t play at all, loading into empty activities that would promptly kick me out after a minute or two.

Bungie has now confirmed that these instability issues have nothing to do with the recent weapon superbug that they are in the middle of fixing, where some perks have been disabled as they press toward a larger solution. Bungie has in fact revealed these current attacks on Destiny 2 are the result of outside DDoSing. Here’s what the BungieHelp account said late yesterday:

"Over the past couple of days, we've seen a spike in error codes and disconnects. The team has confirmed that these error codes are not related to the planned fixes rolling out for the recent crafting issue and are instead a result of DDoS attacks. While we typically don't confirm…"

In the tweet, Bungie says that this has happened before, but normally they would not comment on it, as that can just aid and embolden the perpetrators. This time, they’re doing it because they didn’t want people to assume it was because of the ongoing major bug fix.

There have indeed been instances in the past when Destiny 2 was suffering from huge server issues where I was told it was in fact a DDoS attack, but Bungie couldn’t say anything due to the reasons above. But it’s a frustrating situation given that of course, the wider community will assume it’s Bungie’s fault (and I mean, sometimes it is just normal server problems) instead of an active attack. Though now in the future perhaps there will be a little more room for interpretation, given that this has happened before, it’s happening now, and it will happen again.

Bungie has been incredibly litigious as of late when it comes to people impacting the game or its community. They have sued and won judgements against several large-scale cheatmakers. They went after someone who issued false YouTube takedown notices. They were awarded a judgement against someone who terrorized their former community manager and his wife.

It stands to reason they may take similar action against a DDoSer, but finding them may be a tall order. They are doing way, way more active damage to the game than some of these other cases, but it’s notoriously difficult to hunt someone like this down. It has happened in the past, but rarely, if ever, for something like going after a video game’s servers. I’m sure Bungie would absolutely seek damages or criminal charges here, if it were possible. We’ll see what happens.

For now, the game seems to be working okay as of this morning, but it’s unclear if the attacks have ceased altogether. My heart goes out to every “fix things” team at Bungie between these attacks and the ongoing bug fixes for the wildest glitch in game history. Hell of a week (Lemon, it’s Wednesday).