Players of Bungie’s open world shooter Destiny have been voicing their concerns over the apparent recent prevalence of cheaters in the game’s more competitive features, most notably the weekly Trials of Osiris event that promises lucrative rewards for Guardians who are deemed to be the best of the best.
As Polygon reports, various threads like this one have been popping up on Reddit rather frequently over the past couple of weeks which criticize Bungie over its apparent lack of inaction against cheaters in the aforementioned PvP move and, to a lesser extent, the Crucible.
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which target an individual’s IP address with a barrage of useless data to cause lag or disconnects is blamed as the biggest culprit, something that’s only made possible by the fact that Bungie uses peer-to-peer connections rather than dedicated servers. Some PlayStation 4 players have even reported having their inboxes barraged with spam messages that aims to obscure their in-game radar.
While options to report players in-game for such activities does exist, many have grown sceptical over whether or not the system works, prompting Bungie to address concerns in their latest weekly update. The statement reads:
Recently, there has been some concern about cheating in the Crucible, most specifically DDoSing in Trials of Osiris. This is a subject we take very seriously. To enlist you in the fight against cheaters, we spoke to our Security team to get some information on how they combat those who aren’t playing by the rules.
We have several team members whose full-time jobs are to ensure the security of your Destiny experience. They tell us that in-game reports are the best way to send us data on malicious activity. All in-game reports of cheating are monitored, and our security team closely examines all of the top reported offenders. If you are unable to send an in-game report, we have also setup an additional online reporting tool that can be used.
A lot of players believe that we only issue restrictions based on these player reports. Reports are an important part of the process, but we also have many additional automated systems in place. As a policy, we don’t publicize how they work so cheaters can’t learn ways to evade them.
Some of the offenders reported this past weekend in trending threads fall in this category and have played their last Trials card. Your reports help us make sure these systems are catching everybody they should be, so please keep them coming.
Ultimately, those questioning Bungie’s methods will have to take the studio’s word for it that cheaters aren’t tolerated and being actively banned from playing. Frustratingly though, DDoS attacks would become much less commonplace if Bungie implemented dedicated servers – something that we can only hope will happen in Destiny 2.
Destiny‘s own take on Halloween – Festival of The Lost – is currently live in-game, offering several bonus items.