• Bungie has addressed the growing problem of stability issues in Destiny 2.
• The issue stems from systems in the game that aren’t able to properly rectify themselves without a full system restart.
• While the developer is working on improvements, these will take most of the remainder of 2023 to implement.

Right now, Destiny 2 should be flourishing. There is a new Raid, a new Dungeon, entirely new systems, and a season brimming with mystery. Alas, Destiny 2 is in troubled waters and the stability of the game is a core issue.

Since the launch of Lightfall, players have noticed an increase in the amount of time the game is inaccessible or so unstable, players can’t even match with others in the multiplayer game. After months of relative silence as regards why this was happening, Bungie has said something.

The issue comes down to a service called Claims. These Claims carry every bit of information in the game to keep the client and server on the same page. They contain the number of units you’ve killed, orbs you’ve collected and so forth. However, fixes introduced in Lightfall to deal with a large influx of players have unintentionally caused problems for these Claims.

“Ahead of Lightfall’s launch, a few improvements were made to the Claims service. We made updates to some of its underlying communication technology and made changes that allowed Claims to scale out to more servers so that during moments or events of high concurrency, the service could make use of those extra resources and avoid getting bogged down. While the updates achieved our scale goals, we discovered issues around the service’s error recovery functionality,” Bungie’s Engineering team explains.

“Normally, if Claims has its communication channels disrupted to other services, it is designed to automatically restore these connections. These disruptions can happen for a wide variety of reasons, including hardware failures, network hitches, or problems with other services. However, despite rigorous testing, the updated system is not always recovering as expected in our live game environment. If these channels are permanently disrupted, this can be one of the causes behind Weasel, Baboon, or other error codes for a large subset of the player base,” the team added.

When these disruptions occur, Bungie needs to restart all of its Destiny 2 services in order to restore this one system. This means emergency maintenance that can run for hours at a time and even then, issues could persist.

While Bungie is working to fix this problem, it’s tantamount to doing urgent thoracic surgery on the back of a truck travelling 140kmph down a busy highway.

The bad news is that the process of fixing these disruptions is going to take months with Bungie targeting “deeper and broader architectural improvements” by Season 23 which is at the tail end of 2023.

“Please note that some of these changes will be structural in nature and could introduce additional instability as we initially roll them out. As always, we will work to minimize this risk with deep testing and around-the-clock monitoring, and will implement the most appropriate response needed to get everyone back online as quickly as possible when instability occurs” Bungie concluded.

While we understand that Bungie’s systems are incredibly complex, this is bad news for the developer as players grow increasingly disillusioned with it and the game itself. Stability issues are also bad news for a game where the player base is tasked with completing activities that can take upwards of an hour without leaving the game.

The good news is that Bungie is working to improve the problems and we should see more stability in the game as these improvements come online. Well, at least that’s the hope.