While Destiny 2 has been on a pretty good content/decision-making hotstreak lately, a new technical error is making the game unplayable for many.
It’s a bizarre situation where if you know a secret method, you can target individual players with friend quests to quite literally give them a “Pony” error code and knock them offline.
As of yesterday, the method has been widely distributed online by a player trying to go “scorched earth” on the bug, attempting to share it widely to get Bungie to address it faster (they are already aware of it).
I won’t share the exact steps here but it’s a truly wild combination of events which involves specific raid bosses, specific weapons and the friend request add. I have no idea how anyone figured this out in the first place (I enjoyed one user commenting that it was something that sounded like “voodoo that a demon whispered in a dream”), and I’m not sure if this is the only way to do it.
I…don’t know if blasting out the process to do this out there is going to help matters. Bungie already knows about it so all this will do is increase the frequency until it’s fixed, and we don’t know how complicated the bug is to fix. Obviously, very hopefully, it will be fixed before The Final Shape is out in two weeks as that would have the potentially to utterly ruin launch for those who get targeted.
Right now it seems the main way to prevent this, now that you are aware it exists, is to disable friend requests entirely, which should prevent the targeting. Not sure if that’s a guarantee or not, but it’s worth taking the preventative measure, even if it’s making you a bit anti-social for a while.
I’ve seen a good amount of bad bugs in Destiny 2 in my day, but targeting other players with error codes to knock them out of the game is kind of a new level in many ways. This can happen to anyone, but streamers with their names publicly shared all the time make them even bigger, more obvious targets for something like this. And this is all certainly not something Bungie wants to have to deal with in the run-up to The Final Shape. I have to imagine it will be fixed by then, but it’s a tough situation all the same.
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