In its latest This Week in Destiny post, Bungie explained the online architecture issues that have led to a recent uptick in cheeky animal-named connection errors. Bungie also provided a roadmap of what fixes players can expect and when, but the promising-sounding “large set of improvements” won’t be coming until the start of Season 22 at the end of August.
Essentially, Bungie says that its efforts to scale up its server infrastructure to handle more concurrent players introduced issues in how that infrastructure responds to small issues like “hardware failures, network hitches, or problems with other services.” The new wave of failures apparently originates with the “Claims” service that routes player data between Bungie’s various servers.
While the changes Bungie introduced in Lightfall allow Claims to handle more concurrent players, they also introduced a brittleness that wasn’t there before, and small issues that used to get smoothed over now result in “Baboon” or “Weasel”-coded disconnects. What’s more, it doesn’t sound like relief will come soon: “Fixing these Claims issues is the very top priority of our Services organization right now, but we must do it very carefully,” the TWID explains. “Done incorrectly, we could unintentionally make stability for players worse or create new issues. This is not a process that can happen overnight.“
Bungie provided a bulleted timeline of when to expect these fixes to roll out, with the rest of Season 21 seeing changes “designed to minimize the risk of further degrading stability, while helping [Bungie] to confirm the effectiveness of fixes further out on the roadmap,” while Season 22 at the end of August will get a launch patch featuring “a large set of improvements meant to improve the ‘self-healing’ ability of Claims and reduce the odds of [Bungie] needing to bring Destiny 2 temporarily offline when an issue occurs.”
It’s some more admirable transparency from Bungie, but another wave of animal-named connection errors with a long road to recovery feels like a bit of an eternal recurrence with Destiny (incidentally, PCG senior editor Wes Fenlon pointed out to me that “Eternal Recurrence” sounds like the name of a Destiny gun).
I remember being at the lowest, most depraved depths of my Destiny playing during, paradoxically, one of its worst seasons: early 2020’s Season of the Worthy which had its own server instability episode. It felt like I just couldn’t trust my connection anymore, constantly getting dropped and faced with those cutesy animal names, sometimes even with the added injury of a temporary ban as punishment for “quitting” too many matches in the slightly-more-competitive Survival playlist.
A stable, healthy Destiny 2 always feels “in-progress” to greater or lesser degrees, and the more definitive-sounding Season 22 launch fixes for Claims issues won’t be coming until Season of the Deep’s projected end on August 22. I know you can’t fix these things “overnight,” but man, this just keeps happening to Destiny in a way that stands out from other live service offerings.