If you’ve been attempting to play Destiny 2 for the past few weeks or even months, chances are you’ve been running into an escalating spiral of instability, error codes or the game outright being taken offline to fix things.
This has led to a Destiny 2 community speculation-fest about what’s going on, including the general ideas that the game is too old or too big and is simply breaking apart. As such, they have been demanding answers from Bungie and this week, Bungie has…delivered a lot of answers. But as expected, it’s a whole lot of technical language that the larger community may not understand. I’m not being condescending, as I am also in this group and have had to parse this information for a while, but here’s a breakdown of what we’ve learned:
What happened was that stability changes that were supposed to increase the uptime and reduce lag or disconnects during things like raid races or dungeon launches have caused inadvertent problems. These changes were implemented when Lightfall launched, which is why we’ve seen these issues escalate mostly since February over the course of the last few months. So while things like the raid race were a lot more stable this time around, that has come at a cost in other places. Namely…the entire rest of the game.
The issues stem from something called “Claims,” a key service that keeps the game and the server in sync at every moment of gameplay. That’s a huge volume for Claims alone as it’s essentially…everything thing happens in the entire game being routed through it.
They tried to improve Claims with the Lightfall launch, but there were in turn errors happening with Claims’ error recovery functionality where now it’s not recovering as expected from a usual slate of problems that create disruptions, hardware issues, network issues, etc. These create the kinds of error codes players have been seeing instead of these issues being resolved like they’re supposed to through the Claims service. But the errors are so pervasive that even restarting Claims alone isn’t enough to fix them, hence why everything often has to be restarted, all of Destiny 2, which is when we’ve seen the game come offline.
Over the next few seasons Bungie is determined to fix these issues, and next season in particular will bring a lot of changes to Claims specifically that will aim to resolve the biggest problems. There will also be some fixes in a mid-season patch before that happens. Later on, in season 23 (the season after this season) they will keep working on larger architectural improvements to make sure the game is stable in the long term.
As Bungie has said previously, Destiny 2 is not ending with The Final Shape, and more expansions are planned after that, a new “saga” which is likely to last until the end of this current console generation, if you ask me. So they will have to keep plugging away at these issue. Given that this is all Bungie server architecture and tech, this probably has the potential to affect Marathon at some level (even with dedicated servers) or whatever follow-up to Destiny does come in the years to follow. So it has to be a top priority fix for them.
This many not be an ultra-satisfying answer for players, as the end result is still…a whole lot of annoying problems on a day-to-day basis with true fixes coming next season at the earliest, and we don’t know if those will fully fix the problem. But at least Bungie attempted to explain what’s going on here and correct misconceptions about game size or player population and such. That’s about all they can do.
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