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Bungie Targets The End Of August To Roll Out Fixes For Endemic Destiny 2 Connection Errors: 'This Is Not A Process That Can Happen Overnight'

In its latest This Week in Destiny post, Bungie explained the online architecture issues that have led to a recent uptick in cheeky animal-named connection errors. Bungie also provided a roadmap of what fixes players can expect and when, but the promising-sounding "large set of improvements" won't be coming until the start of Season 22 at the end of August.

Essentially, Bungie says that its efforts to scale up its server infrastructure to handle more concurrent players introduced issues in how that infrastructure responds to small issues like "hardware failures, network hitches, or problems with other services." The new wave of failures apparently originates with the "Claims" service that routes player data between Bungie's various servers.

While the changes Bungie introduced in Lightfall allow Claims to handle more concurrent players, they also introduced a brittleness that wasn't there before, and small issues that used to get smoothed over now result in "Baboon" or "Weasel"-coded disconnects. What's more, it doesn't sound like relief will come soon: "Fixing these Claims issues is the very top priority of our Services organization right now, but we must do it very carefully," the TWID explains. "Done incorrectly, we could unintentionally make stability for players worse or create new issues. This is not a process that can happen overnight."

Bungie provided a bulleted timeline of when to expect these fixes to roll out, with the rest of Season 21 seeing changes "designed to minimize the risk of further degrading stability, while helping [Bungie] to confirm the effectiveness of fixes further out on the roadmap," while Season 22 at the end of August will get a launch patch featuring "a large set of improvements meant to improve the 'self-healing' ability of Claims and reduce the odds of [Bungie] needing to bring Destiny 2 temporarily offline when an issue occurs."

It's some more admirable transparency from Bungie, but another wave of animal-named connection errors with a long road to recovery feels like a bit of an eternal recurrence with Destiny (incidentally, PCG senior editor Wes Fenlon pointed out to me that "Eternal Recurrence" sounds like the name of a Destiny gun).

I remember being at the lowest, most depraved depths of my Destiny playing during, paradoxically, one of its worst seasons: early 2020's Season of the Worthy which had its own server instability episode. It felt like I just couldn't trust my connection anymore, constantly getting dropped and faced with those cutesy animal names, sometimes even with the added injury of a temporary ban as punishment for "quitting" too many matches in the slightly-more-competitive Survival playlist.

A stable, healthy Destiny 2 always feels "in-progress" to greater or lesser degrees, and the more definitive-sounding Season 22 launch fixes for Claims issues won't be coming until Season of the Deep's projected end on August 22. I know you can't fix these things "overnight," but man, this just keeps happening to Destiny in a way that stands out from other live service offerings.

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It Feels Like Bungie And The 'Destiny 2' Community Are In A Fight

Destiny 2

Bungie

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.

Destiny 2

Bungie

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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Destiny 2 Stability Fixes Will Roll Out Across Season 22 And 23

Season of the Deep has seen a few technical issues plague Destiny 2, and to address these problem areas in the game's infrastructure, Bungie is planning some big updates that'll roll out across several seasons. According to Bungie, players have encountered a problem with its key service called "Claims," which is responsible for keeping the player and server in sync during every moment of their gameplay, as it routes "every single kill, orb, or unit of Glimmer in Destiny 2" to the correct recipient.

While Lightfall saw several improvements made to the Claims service and to some of its underlying communication technology, issues around the service's error recovery functionality were later discovered and Bungie says that the updated system is not always recovering as expected in its live game environment. "If these channels are permanently disrupted, this can be one of the causes behind Weasel, Baboon, or other error codes for a large subset of the player base," Bungie explained.

Bungie's plan is to gradually roll out fixes, so as to avoid creating new issues or making stability worse for players. Ongoing support includes improvements to the production and deployment processes to reduce the risk of disruptions for players, and in a mid-season update, targeted improvements to logging and alerting systems will help the studio better identify issues that may arise.

Season 22 will see a big update go live, and will see all manner of functionality tools tweaked, added, and improved upon. In Season 23, "deeper and broader architectural improvements to improve the service stability" to Destiny 2 will be added in that update and will include a range of additional improvements. You can see the full roadmap below of what to expect across the next couple of seasons.

In other Destiny 2 news, a new Exotic quest that involves catching an Exotic fish has gone live, seemingly hinting at a powerful new weapon being added to the game this season, and after this week's major revelation about The Witness, Bungie has pledged to credit and compensate an artist whose work was referenced in a recent cutscene.

Destiny ongoing stability fixes

We will continue to make improvements to our production and deployment processes to reduce the risk of disruptions for players while reducing our maintenance and deployment downtime windows.

We will also constantly improve our response procedures for incident recovery to bring Destiny 2 back online as quickly as possible when incidents occur.

This work has been ongoing and will continue throughout this timeline.

Mid-Season 21 update

We will make targeted improvements to our logging and alerting systems, allowing us to diagnose issues more quickly with Claims and related systems.

These changes are designed to minimize the risk of further degrading stability, while helping us to confirm the effectiveness of fixes further out on the roadmap.

Season 22 launch update

We are deploying a large set of improvements meant to improve the "self-healing" ability of Claims and reduce the odds of us needing to bring Destiny 2 temporarily offline when an issue occurs.

We are adding functionality for services to detect Claims services that are in an unhealthy state and send their messages to healthy services instead.

We are additionally making six targeted fixes to Claims systems where we have identified issues that could impact Claims stability or recovery.

We are making an improvement to better evict old gameplay messages in our pipelines, which should help with faster recoveries and reduce the chance of a "death spiral" of slow messages causing more slow messages.

We are also deploying improvements that will help us to make Destiny 2 services even more robust in the future.

We are adding improved support for targeted "Chaos Testing" against our services, allowing us to better simulate different failure modes for our services.

We are adding more logging for non-Claims portions of our messaging pipelines to detect other issues that could lead to connection problems for players.

Finally, to reduce the odds of introducing new problems with these changes, we are also updating and expanding our Claims Unit Tests. This is automated testing that verifies code is behaving the way we expect it should.

Season 23 launch update

Based on the results of our 7.2.0 updates and improved logging, we will be targeting deeper and broader architectural improvements to improve the service stability and rapid recovery of Destiny 2, which will include a range of additional improvements.

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