Destiny 2 Is Deleting Players’ Characters
There is a game-breaking bug going around that has been wiping Destiny 2 players' characters from existence.
Destiny 2 players have been panicking for the past few days, and not for naught. Imagine the horrors of logging into your favorite game only to discover that your character, the one you’ve put an insane amount of hours into, was deleted. Well, that’s precisely what happened to the online shooter game, and Sony-owned Bungie has confirmed that they’re dealing with some form of a delete bug that deletes the gamers’ characters.
As reported by Forbes, Destiny 2 players took their grievances to Reddit, claiming that their characters, along with all the good gear, were simply wiped from existence. The initial post was met with plenty of skepticism, but the situation soon escalated to a point where Bungie tasked the whole development team to dig into the missing player’s character, only to discover absolutely nothing. They couldn’t find any evidence that the player had deleted the character, but they acknowledged the issue and restored the missing character to the player.
Bungie’s task force did say that this is a unique situation, and they came up with a one-time fix. They also acknowledged that the player’s feedback for the Restore-a-Character feature had been noted. And that was when about a dozen more Destiny 2 players turned up, explaining that the same thing had happened to them; they logged in, and the specific characters just weren’t there.
Losing a character in Destiny 2 isn’t a big deal, as most of your vault-bound items remain intact, but you’d still lose character-specific items and loadouts. Not to mention the hours of grind invested in now-deleted characters.
More reports from players started pouring in, and Bungie finally acknowledged the issue and tasked specific teams with helping players restore their characters. Admittedly, the number of affected players is rather tiny, but the issue has a lot of people scared to the point where they don’t want to log in until Bungie issues an official confirmation that the issue has been fixed. Others aren’t scared enough to stop playing, but they expressed concerns about having something like that happen to them.
Bungie still hasn’t offered a solution to the problem, but the gaming community has offered several pieces of advice to gamers who happen to encounter this bug in Destiny 2. Some advise players to refrain from making a new character, as it would overwrite the lost one, and just don’t play until the weekly server reset. Some have reported fixing their lost character issue that way.
Other Destiny 2 players suggest switching to a disposable loadout before logging off. That way, if you indeed lose a character, all the good gear would be safely stored in the vault.
While both methods have some reason to them, we’d advise anyone encountering this bug to report it to Bungie. The number of people affected by the Destiny 2 bug might be small, but if we’re loud enough, as a community, Bungie will have no issues but to investigate more thoroughly and examine whether there’s truly an issue. Similar things have happened in the gaming world before, with several titles serving as a cautionary tale to gaming developers to take the fandom more seriously.
The best examples of this are Cyberpunk 2077, which is now playable again, and massive disruptions to Activision Blizzard’s monetization caused by gamers over the sexual misconduct and gender discrimination lawsuits.
