Destiny 2
Want to know what it’s like when you have to cut to the bone deep in the staff running your live service game? Look no further than what’s happening right now with Destiny 2, where Bungie laid off over a hundred workers in late October.
While many, many departments were affected, including some of the most progressive ones like Social Media and Comms, we are now seeing the effect of other, less high-profile, but equally significant cuts.
I’ve reported before, and former Bungie employees have now confirmed that Destiny 2’s Player Security team was heavily impacted during the cuts. As a former community manger Liana Ruppert (who was also fired on October 30) explained on Twitter:
This echoes what I had also heard, that Player Security was hit hard. Liana goes on to say that the people who got cut were a lot of those who review and issue bans for cheaters, hence… an increase in cheaters now that they are gone.
You don’t have to look far to see all kinds of complaints about Destiny 2 cheaters now that Trials of Osiris has been live for a weekend. Avid PvP streamer Gerard Jake, to which Liana initially responded, she said that this weekend’s Trials were unplayable and that 3v3 would be dead very soon if nothing changed.
These Player Security cuts also go hand in hand with other cuts made to the new PvP strike group. While some people on that team, like designers, are still around, I’ve heard that some testers for that content have been let go, on top of all that player support stuff. This comes on the heels of Bungie’s claim (fifth? sixth?) that it would be better off supporting PvP from here.
The idea of a hacked Player Security team also makes me wonder what’s going to happen when Marathon rolls around, a entirely competitive PvP play in an industry that is always full of cheaters, as we often see in games like Warzone. The hope is that they’ll beef up their security teams by then, but in the meantime, it looks like Destiny PvP players will suffer. While “Destiny PvP players are going to suffer” are practically the operative words for the mode so far, this time around, it looks like it’s going to be worse than usual, and that’s after a tuna fish of the work Bungie has done in the past to combat years and years of cheaters, and it felt like they might finally be starting to make some progress. Now, this can be undone.
Since so many Bungie employees have been fired in abrupt, cold-blooded ways, we’ve seen many of them, like Liana (especially Liana) begin to speak out about what happened, which provides insight into why situations like this arise . It doesn’t look like Bungie will be able to handle this consistently anytime soon with a reduced team, as it’s clear they’re not going to be hiring backups terribly quickly after what just happened.
But Jake might be right, if nothing changes Destiny 2’s more competitive PvP modes might be pretty much dead.
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