“Toxic” Destiny Players Banned, Strike and Raid Changes Outlined

Bungie published its latest Weekly Update last night, bringing all the latest behind-the-scenes news on Destiny. Among the subjects discussed were the bans dished out to the divisive shooter’s “most toxic” players, as well as the nerfs coming to some Strikes and bug fixes for the Raids.

On the subject of player bans, Bungie has imposed temporary restrictions on Guardians who have track records of jumping into Strikes and PvP matches and being “chronically idle”. Basically, they’re punished the plonkers who sit back and let everyone else do the hard work.

“Unfortunately, there are a few individuals who have put in that same level of monomaniacal effort into being jerks,” said User Research Lead John Hopson. “Sitting idle in Strikes and PvP has been on our radar for a while now, but it’s become clear that a small number of the worst idlers are responsible for damaging the experiences of thousands of other players. One player not contributing in an activity might seem like a small thing, but it can make a Weekly Heroic Strike unbeatable or make a Crucible match unwinnable. Those little bits of damage to the experiences other players adds up over time.

“This week, we’ve restricted a small number of the most toxic players from matchmaking,” Hopson continued. “The restrictions we’re putting on their accounts are temporary and apply only to the activities where they were chronically idle. If the affected players keep up this behavior after the restrictions lapse, we will apply stronger and (eventually) permanent restrictions on their accounts.”

Promised in the next couple of weeks is a patch for Destiny’s Strikes, making some of the activities a little easier by nerfing bosses. Receiving particular attention are the Cerberus Vae III Strike and the PlayStation exclusive (for now) Dust Palace Strike, both of which are believed to take too long to complete.

“To create a better standard for the way these cooperative missions challenge a Fireteam, we’re issuing new walking (and fighting) orders to the Bosses,” said Bungie community fella, Deej.

“The Cerberus Vae III Strike is arguably the longest and hardest Strike in the game,” said User Research Lead John Hopson. “It has one the lowest completion rates of any of the Strikes. Even when players complete it successfully, it takes longer than almost any other Strike activity at 27 minutes on Normal difficulty. When it’s appeared as the Nightfall, it’s actually had the lowest completion rate of any Strike activity in the game. The Dust Palace Strike isn’t quite as hard, but it still takes longer to complete successfully than the average Strike at 23 minutes on Normal difficulty.

Production Engineer Brenton Woodrow added, “Our goal was to ease the difficulty for the least-completed strikes. In order to do this, we focused on the final boss encounters, which were fairly lengthy on higher tiers. We addressed this by reducing the strength for several of the major combatants. We also felt that the bosses themselves could use some tweaking. We reduced Valus Ta’Aurc’s health by a third and reduced the Psion Flayers’ shields by about 15%. We locked these changes after several playtests with the designers and feel that they bring these encounters in line with the rest of the Strikes.”

Last up are the Raids. They’ll be receiving some attention too, in order to smooth out some of the wonky elements of Destiny’s greatest challenges. Of particular note are changes coming to the Atheon and Crota boss fights. Bungie didn’t cover all of the upcoming improvements, but they did outline some of the issues being looked at.

“Fixing bugs for the Raid is most challenging in two ways: figuring out went wrong and devising a safe way to fix it that won’t break the rest of the game,” said Activities Engineer Sean Chan. “The Raids have some of the most edge-casey content in the game, so the bugs can get really tricky. For example, we had a bug where players weren’t doing damage to Minotaurs with the Relic shield. Turns out that the complicated hit test we use to detect a melee hit just missed the combatant because of the long-legged shape of its body. Some of these bugs were truly baffling, but we dug deep and went to great lengths to improve things.”

All of the changes to both Strikes and Raids are promised as part of a larger update coming in the next couple of weeks, ahead of the release of House of Wolves. You can find a little more detail over on Bungie.net.

Too little, too late for many, many players, unfortunately.