It is uh, weird vibes in the Destiny 2 scene lately, as I’m just not sure how to describe it. While players complaining has always been the norm, it feels like things have reached a new level of hostility lately, and in return, Bungie has met that with a new level of silence. It really does feel like the two sides of the game are in a…fight? So what’s going on here?
One difference between past issues and now is that really none of this seems to have to do with Season of the Deep specifically. Players have complained about lackluster seasons or storylines before, but that’s not really what’s happening here. Current issues include:
- The instability of the game where rarely a day goes by without server issues, animal code errors or the game fully being taken offline. When this happens it can disrupt everything from Crucible games to solo dungeon runs.
- The lack of support for PvP and Gambit seems endless, with another year going by of just one new PvP map and zero Gambit maps, and lackluster rewards for both activities despite being two pillars of the game’s “rituals.”
- In the past few days, a number of Destiny speedrunners were banned without being given a reason, and were told to appeal if they thought it was a mistake. At least one of these speedrunners has already been unbanned, and it’s unclear what they were supposed to have done wrong in the first place, leading to a lot of frustration.
- Finally, the existence of Marathon is being used as a scapegoat for many of these issues, with people saying Destiny is suffering because so many attention is being paid to that upcoming release, which incidentally is where most of the PvP team went years ago.
All of this results in…a lot of yelling, and the formerly communicative Bungie has gone almost entirely silent.
In many ways, it’s hard to blame them. I watched Joe Blackburn post a thoughtful thread about the challenges of taking feedback and live game development in response to a conversation I was having with a Polygon writer, and he proceeded to get yelled at by hundreds of players who lambasted him for “not addressing any of the game’s issues!!!” in a thread that wasn’t supposed to be about that.
The Destiny 2 community management team was understandably tired of their personal Twitter accounts being used as the official receptor of Bungie complaints, so they made a new dedicated Destiny 2 “Team” account. But the account says very little of relevance, restrained by what Bungie does or does not want them to say.
TWABS, now TWIDS, have often become record-short in terms of the info they give out. Team members that formerly may have chatted with the community on reddit have gone silent. Some have quit Twitter entirely. Other have gone on blocking sprees of players because they were tired of the constant toxicity. And in the past, in at least a few occasions, this has escalated into very real, personal threats against people like ex-community manager DMG.
It’s an endless loop. The Destiny 2 community is angry about things Bungie is doing, they yell at devs and CMs, the devs and CMs go silent, Bungie does more things people don’t like, Destiny 2 players yell. It goes on forever. It feels like there used to be ways to bridge this gap, but the community is madder than ever and Bungie appears to be more exhausted from dealing with them than ever. I’m not sure what will fix this, but it doesn’t seem to hinge on the quality of seasons, as that really has nothing to do with what’s going on right now.
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