In 2023, the servers of Destiny 2 were offline for hours due to a bug, and when they came back online, there was a rollback, a reset of the game to an earlier time. A developer now admits that his team was responsible for.
What kind of confession is that? The Destiny developer Alan Blaine reports to the English-language magazine PCGamer that Bungie saw a significant decline in Destiny players at the end of 2022 – that was in the months following the expansion “The Witch Queen”.
During the same period, the developers noticed that the mood among the players was noticeably worse. Bungie then formed a team including Blaine, tasked with improving player retention by quickly identifying and fixing issues.
According to Blaine, however, this quick action led to them introducing a serious bug into the game: “In our haste to deliver quickly and vigorously, as was our duty, we inadvertently released a nasty character-damaging bug that forced us to take the game offline for 24 hours and execute the second rollback of a character database in Destiny’s history.”
Bug robbed players of their valuable achievements
What was the error? On January 24, 2023 some players reported that they lost some of their triumphs after an update – including triumphs for completing raids. Additionally, some players were missing catalysts and seals.
Actually, the update was supposed to bring a small “Quality of Life” improvement by moving unachievable achievements to the archive section of the triumph menu. Blaine describes this as a small, nice change that they simply should have discarded during the planning phase given the consequences.
This is the nightmare of all MMO players: Bungie responded to the bug and took the servers of Destiny 2 offline for emergency maintenance. In order for players to regain their hard-earned achievements, Bungie executed a rollback on January 25, 2023, resetting the progress of all players to January 24 at 5:20 PM.
A rollback is considered a nightmare for MMO players because it causes them to lose the progress they made between the rollback and the state to which the progress is reset. Many developers want to avoid a rollback for this reason. When progress needs to be reset, it is often a sign that something really serious has gone wrong and they had to resort to extremes.
“None of us took it seriously”
What caused the error? Blaine explains that there were actually several reasons for the bug: “The error had many causes: a misconfigured tool, outdated documentation, not enough time to understand the risks of the solution.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the bug had already occurred in a test, yet Bungie still released the update – and the bug – into the game: “During a test run, the symptoms of the bug were indeed identified, but none of us took the bug seriously enough or understood the cause,” Blaine admits.
Not every bug causes severe problems in Destiny 2 and corrupts your progress. Some gameplay errors even provide real enjoyment for players of the loot shooter. One such bug is now allowed to remain in the game: Popular bug becomes a feature in Destiny 2 to let Guardians have fun
