Bungie shut it down two days ago Fate 2 servers while the studio is looking into an issue where players were losing their progress on in-game challenges. The outage lasted a little longer than anyone expected, with the free-to-play loot shooter offline for nearly 20 hours. So what happened? Today, Bungie pulled back the curtain and explained exactly what went wrong and why they had to pull the game back, erasing hours of people’s quest progress in the process.
January 24 around 2:00 p.m., Bungie tweeted that it is taking Destiny 2 offline as it investigates an “ongoing issue that caused certain Triumphs, Seals, and Catalysts to lose progress for players.” A few hours later, at 5:51 p.m Bungie tweeted probably found a fix for the problem and is testing it, but can’t say when or if Fate 2servers will be back online. About four hours later, Bungie tweeted the last time he announced it that night Fate 2 will not be played that evening. About 12 hours later, around 9:55 am Bungie has finally announced that it has fixed the issue and the servers will be back online after the fix. The nearly 20-hour outage had some players worried about the health and future of the game. After years of bugs and broken updates, it’s really starting to feel like it The seven-year-old shooter was caught with the glue.
So what happened during those 20 hours, and why was the game suspended for so long, with seemingly little warning? Bungie explained what was broken, why, and how it was fixed his last blog post. And surprisingly, the developer is more transparent than you might think, going into the technical details of the matter.
According to Bungie, shortly after releasing the previous update (Hotfix 6.3.0.5) for the game, players started reporting that many Triumphs, Seals and catalysts were missing. Bungie realized this happened after moving some “currently incomplete” issues to a different area of the game’s data. To do this, Bungie used a “very powerful” tool that allows the studio to work with the player’s game state and account. Apparently, due to a configuration error, Bungie accidentally “reimplemented the old state migration process” used in a past update. Due to this bug, the tool migrated old data from this past update to the current version of the game, which basically invalidated some players’ recent in-game achievements.
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“Once we identified that the issue resulted in a loss of player state,” wrote Bungie, “we took the game down and rolled back the player database while we investigated how to remove the dangerous change from the build.”
After creating a new patch that removed the mistaken change the issue was fixed, and following some testing, Bugnie deployed the update. However, as a result of this patch, all player accounts had to be rolled back a few hours before the troublesome update went live. This means any player progress made between 8:20 and 11 a.m. on January 24 was lost. Any purchases made during this time got refunded, too.
While it sucks that the game was down for so long and that the team was forced to spend what sounds like many late hours trying to fix their mistake, it’s refreshing to see a developer be so open and honest about what happened and how it was fixed. In a time when games feel buggier than ever and players are fed up with delays, outages, and broken updates, it’s smart to pull back the curtain and show everyone just how hard it is to make, maintain, and sustain video games as complex as Destiny 2.
Hopefully, new next month Fate 2 Enlargement, Light falland the upcoming Season 20 rollout will be a little smoother than this last 20-hour hiccup.