It is a nightmare for every gamer in Destiny 2 and beyond: the deletion of one’s own character in the game. Normally, such a thing does not happen without active intervention. But what if it does, as happened with the Guardian CyanSolar? He reported a mysterious error that led to the deletion of his character, causing a stir in the community.
After investigating a very small number of reports of missing characters out of pure caution, we are confident that no characters or progress have been lost in error by our systems.” (via Bungie Help)
What exactly happened? The Guardian CyanSolar has already spent over 2000 hours in Destiny 2 and accumulated significant progress. A few days ago, he wanted to log in again with his Titan. When he selected this character at startup, he only saw a black screen and the message “Contacting Destiny 2 servers”.
The game then brought him back to the character selection screen. However, there was no trace of his previously selected character, the Titan.
With that, not only his Titan was gone, but also all the individual items he possessed at the time of deletion. Among them were most of his handcrafted God-roll weapons. And he’s not the only player with this issue.
The affected player then turned to the official Bungie forum and also to Destiny-reddit.
Initially, however, he only received the standard information for such an incident. The ninja moderators responded to the “help post” with a reference to the guidelines.
Normally, this results in a deletion being final, marking the irrevocable end of a character. Especially since characters in the game can only be truly deleted after a long button press, and it often doesn’t happen “by accident”. Surprisingly, however, this time it was different.
Bungie responded on reddit and, after a review, initiated the official rescue of the character. Apparently, this unintentional data loss of the player was real and something that the developer takes very seriously.
Bungie restores deleted character
A one-time solution: In this unique case, the community manager of Destiny 2, Liana Ruppert, assisted the player CyanSolar. She facilitated a rare and complex exception from the developer, involving several Bungie teams, and emphasized that it was “a one-time solution”.
Via reddit, the community manager stated:
[…] Several teams have addressed this issue and we found no indications that other accounts or characters were affected.
Bungie stated via reddit
Since this was a unique situation, we were able to find a one-time solution to restore the character. While we understand that players want to restore deleted characters at any time, this was an extremely complicated process that required several teams and many hours for implementation for a single account, but the feedback for this feature has been noted. […]
If Bungie had not intervened, the player would have had to repeat and unlock many game contents just to get back to where he was with his Titan.
Character loss was not a fear for the Guardians until now: Ideally, no player should fear permanent data loss in Destiny 2. However, the many error codes and crashes of the past weeks have left their doubting marks on the Guardians.
- First, access to the API was repeatedly lost.
- Then the game was plagued by several error codes, especially at launch.
The scenario described by the affected Guardian was therefore all too familiar to most players. So it was no wonder that this active intervention by the developer, contrary to guidelines, led to much speculation.
Should players now fear for their characters?
What underlies the fears? In recent weeks, the Guardians have had to endure quite a few bugs in Destiny 2. The deletion of a character without intervention and the fact that a server error had occurred in the game beforehand, worried many players who read the post.
They fear for their own characters and that this might be a bug known to Bungie.
- There have already been many postings about “accidentally” deleted characters. However, it has happened very little to not at all that Bungie made it a formal matter so quickly.
- The affected player is no longer alone. Others, like the player Bladedancer, have also come forward and reported a similarly mysterious deletion of one of their characters.
Although Bungie stated in its announcement that this case was merely a one-time event, the new player reports of the same issue suggest that this may not be the case after all.
MeinMMO wanted to find out and inquired with Bungie directly whether and how far this issue could affect other accounts. As indicated in the update from January 22, Bungie has ruled out that this is a bug.
Account gone? Here’s what you should do: If something like this happens to you, the recommendation is to immediately exit Destiny 2 and also close Steam, if you’re playing on PC. It’s also important that you avoid creating a new character or clicking that option.
Then restart your PC or console immediately and try to log in again. If the character is still not visible after re-logging in, your only option is to contact Bungie support.
It can, as seen in the special case of CyanSolar, also be helpful to involve the community and additionally create a post in the Destiny 2 reddit.
Do you find this error disturbing as well and fear for your own characters now? Or do you believe that the deletion of a character cannot happen so easily? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments about the developer’s response.
