One week ago, there was a 90-minute rollback and a 9-hour emergency maintenance in Destiny 2 . Resetting player progress is a last resort for a gaming studio when nothing else works: It is the red button. Bungie takes the incident with humor: They should have fixed the timeline, they say.
What happened? Last Tuesday, Bungie was actually only supposed to deploy the small Patch 2.7.1. They did that. But when players logged in around 7 PM, Guardians suddenly missed items and currencies:
- Large amounts of Glimmer
- Ascendant Shards
- Enhancement Prisms
- Some even reported losing Silver – the real money currency
Bungie then took the servers down and worked on a solution.
Servers down for 9 hours, players upset
What was the reaction? Since Tuesday evenings are usually “Destiny time” and regular players want to get started after the reset, there was unrest because the servers were down and Bungie could not provide a timeline for when the servers would be back up.
On the cool website MeinMMO.de, there were 253 comments, about half of which came from an upset reader who could not understand why he could not play Destiny on Tuesday evening, after he had been looking forward to it.
The reader made fiery accusations against Bungie and the universe, which apparently conspired to ruin his Tuesday evening.
This was Bungie’s solution: For 4 hours, Bungie reassured players with the information that they were working on the problem and would update as soon as they knew more.
By 11 PM, it was announced: A rollback will occur. All player accounts will be reset by 90 minutes – back to the state players had reached at 5:30 PM. Everything that happened in the 90 minutes afterward would be undone, so it would not count retroactively.
Only at 4 AM German time did Destiny go back online.
We had to fix the timeline
This is what Bungie says about it now: Bungie takes the incident with humor. Later, it was mentioned in the weekly blog, “we had to fix the timeline.” We had to repair the timeline – a reference to the time travel Season 9, which was also introduced with “Fix the timeline.”
Bungie looks back at the hours on Tuesday and says they acted immediately and took Destiny 2 offline for maintenance to minimize the problem. Ultimately, they had to resort to the “first rollback in Destiny’s history,” so players would not lose materials they had worked hard for.
Bungie apologizes for the inconvenience and promises to continue working on the game to make such problems less frequent. But they also state: Some bugs will always slip through, and then you wait for them with a fly swatter.
Rollback – the big red button
What is a rollback? A rollback is “the last resort” that an MMO can resort to in order to solve serious problems caused by a misguided patch, an exploit, or a strange accident. It is like the “system restore” on an operating system: The servers are reset to a state when everything was still functioning.
The cases in which a game resorts to such a measure are rare:
- In the MMORPG Bless, the game was rolled back by 18 hours, apparently because a “gold exploit” had caused huge damage in the economy
- In Atlas, the servers were rolled back by 5.5 hours because someone took over an admin account and went on a rampage
This is what’s behind it: Especially with economic exploits, players often demand the servers to be reset, but developers usually resist fiercely. A good example was a bug on the PC EU server of the MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online.
In ESO, there was such a severe server lag that huge amounts of gold were created out of nowhere and distributed to players. Calls for a rollback quickly became loud. However, the ESO developers manually removed the “surplus gold” from the game instead of rolling back.
This is an example of how much developers shy away from rollbacks when immediate server downtime does not occur to contain the problem. Because if all players on a server lose several hours or even days of gameplay progress, it is a massive intrusion into the game and comes with a loss of trust.
In Destiny 2, the rollback was “only” 90 minutes. Therefore, Bungie’s quick action to take the servers down ultimately prevented more frustration, although the 9 hours of downtime were certainly not ideal.
