Destiny 2
Want to know what it looks like when you have to cut bone deep into the staff running your live service game? Look no further than what’s currently happening 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 forward-facing ones like Social Media and Comms, we are now seeing the result of other, less high-profile cuts, but hugely important ones all the same.
I’ve previously reported and ex-Bungie employees have now confirmed that Destiny 2’s Player Security team was heavily impacted during the cuts. As ex-community manger Liana Ruppert (who was also laid off on October 30) explained on Twitter:
This echoes what I had heard as well, that Player Security was hit hard. Liana goes on to say that the people cut were many of the ones who review and issue bans for cheaters, hence…a surge in cheaters now that they’re gone.
You don’t need to look far to see all sorts of complaints about cheaters in Destiny 2 now that Trials of Osiris was live for a weekend. Avid PvP streamer Gernader Jake, who Liana responded to initially, has said Trials this weekend was unplayable and that 3v3 would be dead pretty soon if nothing changed.
These Player Security cuts also go hand in hand with other cuts made to the new PvP strike team. While some people on that team like designers are still there, I heard a number of testers for that content were let go, on top of all this Player Support stuff. This is right after Bungie made its (fifth? sixth?) claim that it would be better supporting PvP from here.
The idea of a hacked down Player Security team also makes me question what’s going to happen when Marathon rolls around, an entirely competitive PvP game in an industry that’s always rife with cheaters, as we frequently see in games like Warzone. The hope is that they beef up their security teams by then, but in the meantime, it appears Destiny PvP players are going to suffer. While “Destiny PvP players are going to suffer” are practically the house words for the mode by now, this time around, it feels like it’s going to be worse than usual, and this is after a ton of work Bungie has done in the past to tamp down on years and years of cheaters, and it felt like finally maybe they were starting to make some progress. Now, that may be undone.
Given that so many Bungie employees were fired in abrupt, cold ways, we’ve seen many of them like Liana (especially Liana) start to speak out about what happened, which provides insight into why situations like this are arising. It does not seem like Bungie will be able to get a firm handle on this any time soon with a reduced team, as clearly they’re not going to hire back up terribly quickly after what just happened.
But Jake may be right, if nothing is changed, Destiny 2’s most competitive PvP modes might be close to dead.
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