In the weekly Destiny 2 blog post, Bungie talked a great deal about cheating in the game’s PvP modes, and discussed what it plans to do about it. According to Bungie, cheating in Destiny 2 has gone up by 50% since January, with an even bigger percentage at the highest skill level lobbies. The majority of that is on PC, of course, with Trials of Osiris being the most obvious target. The developer says weekly bans went up from 656 to 2133. Destiny 2’s unique network model makes it a target for certain hacks, but the developer is working on implementing some safe guards without changing the underlying tech. Outside of technical solutions, Bungie’s enforcement teams are being expanded to more rapidly respond to threats and be able to process reports at a much higher rate. There’s also major policy change that’s going to affect everyone. Bungie will now ban players who benefited from cheating, but didn’t cheat themselves. Examples of this include joining a cheater’s party and getting a boosted-win, or giving your account details to “carry” services that essentially play the game for you to earn you some of the rarest rewards. The best thing to do if you realise your teammates are cheating is to leave the match and report them. If you stick it out for an easy win, you’re going to get banned.
Bungie is also considering another big change, specifically for Trials. The developer is looking into allowing players to enter Trials only after meeting certain hours of play requirements. For instance, you may not be able to join Trials unless you have over 100 of game time. This is intended to keep new accounts (Destiny 2 is free-to-play, as a reminder) from easily exploiting the system. The developer, however, is aware that this may prevent honest players who haven’t put in the hours from joining their veteran friends, so it’s looking for feedback on this before it moves forward. A different way to approach this would be to gate access to Trials, such as locking it behind purchasing certain Season Passes and so on. This once again could prevent a great number of these hackers from attempting to cheat there, since it’d cost them money each time. Bungie said it may do this for future seasons.
