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This Week In Destiny - 06/29/2023

Jun 29, 2023 - Sam

Happy TWIDsday, Guardians! Oh goodness has this month flown by. Personally, I’ve spent most of it fishing, but we know so many of you have been Deep Diving, hanging out with Ahsa, and well, probably also catching fishies. Let’s get started with what you might have missed last week.

Last week’s TWID:

  • The Throne World Fishing Rally kicked off.
  • An announcement for the Bungie Day Giving Festival.
  • Get ready for Bungie Day festivities the week of July 7.
  • Our mid-Season weapon tuning preview is coming in early July.
  • Player Support Report.
  • Art of the Week and Movie of the Week showcase.

And this week we’ve got:

  • An update on game stability and next steps.
  • Next week is Lucky Week in fishing.
  • The Witness’s origins cutscene.
  • Final round of #DrownInTheDrip.
  • Current Prime Gaming drop extended to July 19.
  • Community emblem competition.
  • The latest update from the Player Support team.
  • This week’s Art of the Week and Movie of the Week picks.

An Update on Game Stability and Next Steps

First up, we have an update from the Engineering team:

The services that power Destiny 2 are a critical part of every player’s experience, and we are committed to improving stability and reliability long-term. Last month, we spoke about the backend upgrades we implemented to prepare for the year of Lightfall, and service stability issues that have recently affected players. Today, we’d like to dive into some of the technical details around Destiny 2’s service stability and provide a deeper layer of transparency about what we are doing to improve it throughout the upcoming Seasons.

In preparation for Lightfall and for future large releases, we invested in a wide effort to update our internal services with the long-term goal of improving scalability, maintenance, and levels of support for our service infrastructure. Specifically, we want to ensure that we have improved stability during moments or events of high player concurrency. This work resulted in the successful launches of both Lightfall and the Root of Nightmares World First Race. Both performed more smoothly than prior launches, and we expect that trend to continue for future releases. However, we’ve identified several issues with those changes that we are working to correct.

IMPROVING OUR INFRASTRUCTURE

When gameplay messages from Destiny 2 are received, they are sent to a key service called “Claims,” which then routes them onto the server that is responsible for your player data. This is an essential service for keeping the client and server in sync during every moment of gameplay. As you can imagine, this means Claims handles a tremendous amount of volume, routing every single kill, orb, or unit of Glimmer in Destiny 2 to the correct recipient.

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.

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. In these cases, even a rolling restart of our Claims service is not always enough to restore the service. Instead, a full restart of our Destiny 2 services must be performed to restore the Claims system, which we are rapidly working to correct.

Fixing these Claims issues is the very top priority of our Services organization right now, but we must do it very carefully. Done incorrectly, we could unintentionally make stability for players worse or create new issues. This is not a process that can happen overnight, and we must make sure that as we make these fixes, we guarantee that your gameplay messages get routed reliably so that your Destiny 2 experience remains smooth and stable.

Although Claims is just one of many services which are receiving ongoing updates and maintenance to improve the stability and reliability of Destiny 2, the improvements we are making are a crucial step in both addressing the immediate issues players are experiencing as well as better equipping us to deal with any potential future issues that may arise.

The Road Ahead

To give everyone a clear understanding of our next steps to steadily improve game stability, we’ve developed a roadmap with key milestones over the next two Seasons:

  • Ongoing:
    • We will continue to make improvements to our production and deployment processes to reduce the risk of disruptions for players while reducing our maintenance and deployment downtime windows.
    • We will also constantly improve our response procedures for incident recovery to bring Destiny 2 back online as quickly as possible when incidents occur.
    • This work has been ongoing and will continue throughout this timeline.
  • Mid-Season 21 (update 7.1.5):
    • We will make targeted improvements to our logging and alerting systems, allowing us to diagnose issues more quickly with Claims and related systems.
    • These changes are designed to minimize the risk of further degrading stability, while helping us to confirm the effectiveness of fixes further out on the roadmap.

  • Season 22 Launch (update 7.2.0):

  • We are deploying a large set of improvements meant to improve the “self-healing” ability of Claims and reduce the odds of us needing to bring Destiny 2 temporarily offline when an issue occurs.
    • We are adding functionality for services to detect Claims services that are in an unhealthy state and send their messages to healthy services instead.
    • We are additionally making six targeted fixes to Claims systems where we have identified issues that could impact Claims stability or recovery.
    • We are making an improvement to better evict old gameplay messages in our pipelines, which should help with faster recoveries and reduce the chance of a “death spiral” of slow messages causing more slow messages.
  • We are also deploying improvements that will help us to make Destiny 2 services even more robust in the future.
    • We are adding improved support for targeted “Chaos Testing” against our services, allowing us to better simulate different failure modes for our services.
    • We are adding more logging for non-Claims portions of our messaging pipelines to detect other issues that could lead to connection problems for players.
  • Finally, to reduce the odds of introducing new problems with these changes, we are also updating and expanding our Claims Unit Tests. This is automated testing that verifies code is behaving the way we expect it should.

  • Season 23 Launch (update 7.3.0):
    • Based on the results of our 7.2.0 updates and improved logging, we will be targeting deeper and broader architectural improvements to improve the service stability and rapid recovery of Destiny 2, which will include a range of additional improvements.

We hope this sheds new light on what’s been causing some recent stability issues, the methods we’re using to track them, what we’re doing to improve game stability in the short/medium/long term, and when to expect those updates to go live.

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. Our goal is to give Destiny 2 players the best possible experience, and we look forward to seeing the results of the work we’ve been doing since Lightfall’s launch to improve stability. Thank you for your patience and feedback as we work toward achieving the milestones above.

Feeling Lucky?

How's the fishing going, pals? Whether you are having a shocking good time on Nessus, catching a break in the EDZ (at least it’s a carp, you know?) or spending time in the misty Throne World, we have some exciting news for you.

Starting at reset on Tuesday as part of our Bungie Day celebrations, we will have a new fishing perk: Lucky Week! What does that mean exactly? Well, for one week, Nessus, the EDZ, and Throne World will have a bonus that doubles the Exotic fish catch rate. Need to finish up that Triumph? Get ready to get on out there, Guardians, and watch for more Bungie Day details coming next week.

The Witness’s Origins

“Before you can confront the Witness, you must understand it.”

Last week, our sweet friend Ahsa came through and introduced us to the Witness’s origins and we had a few of our most pressing questions answered.

What even is the Witness? Where did it come from? What does it want?!

If you haven’t watched this and want to save the moment for the game, this is your spoiler warning.

Drown in the Drip

Today we are announcing our final picks for the #DrownInTheDrip fashion competition. There were choices beyond choices, and we really had to dig through your closets—we mean screenshots—and we thank you for that. And if you like events like this, be sure to sound off on socials! So, without further ado, here are the final winners.

“You merely adopted the Deep, I was born in it!”

The Ghost of the Methane Ocean

Feeling myself

Luck

It’s Prime Time, Guardians

Heads up! The current Prime Gaming rewards are being extended through July 19. If you haven’t had a chance to sign up for Prime Gaming, now is the time to do it!

Not sure what Prime Gaming is? It’s a neat program with Amazon that gives Guardians a few Legendary and Exotic items. It’s really easy to set up, and if you already have Amazon Prime you already have Prime Gaming. So just follow this link to learn more and get your account linked to snag these awesome items.

Community Emblem Competition

The time has come to flex those artistic skills and win the opportunity to have your emblem design featured in-game! To kick off this year’s Bungie Day Giving Festival, the Bungie Foundation and Community team are inviting all Guardians worldwide to join in our first ever global emblem competition.

The support shown to the Bungie Foundation over the years and the desire to do good in the world is #Emblematic of the true nature and spirit of this amazing community. With this in mind, we wanted to do our part to give back a bit and celebrate the community roots of Bungie Day in July. Over the years we have been inspired by so much of the incredibly talented fan art we’ve seen, and we wanted to give you the opportunity to have that talent enshrined in-game. One winning design will become the featured emblem during a future charity campaign.

Beginning today, Guardians can submit their designs on Twitter. All submissions will be reviewed by our selection committee and three finalists will be chosen. The final three designs will be voted on internally by a group of Bungie employees to determine the winner. The winner will work with our art team to finalize the design and ensure it meets all necessary requirements.

Below are the guidelines for submissions:

1.Nameplate dimensions are: 474 x 96 px.

Other components of full emblem design (the icon and the header) are not required for submission.

2. There are no theme or color restrictions. The world is your oyster.

3. Art must be 2D and non-animated.

4. Submissions must include the hashtag #Emblematic to be included in the competition.

5. Branding, logos, or any third-party intellectual property cannot be included.

6. Any hateful or explicit imagery will lead to immediate disqualification.

7. This is not a popularity contest. All submissions will be presented to the voting panel without identifying information about the original artist.

8. All submissions are subject to this policy: https://www.bungie.net/7/en/Legal/submittingidea

The submission period will be open from today until July 13. The winner will be announced in the July 20 TWID via official social channels.

Please reach out to charityevents@bungie.com if there are any questions.

Good luck, Guardians! We can’t wait to see those emblems!

PLAYER SUPPORT REPORT

Fish are friends, not food, Drifter

The Player Support team is Back,

And ready to inform,

About the bugs and known issues,

Sit back, relax, and watch them perform.

Okay, we can confirm I am not a poet, but the Player Support team is super rad and this is their report.

Known Issues List  |  Help Forums  |  Bungie Help Twitter 

BANS AND RESTRICTIONS

Players who have received a ban or restriction are advised to review our Code of Conduct and Ban Policies article for more information. Players may use the contact form to appeal the decision. There are no guarantees that a ban or suspension will be overturned, nor that an email will be responded to.

KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help forum:

  • We are aware of an issue where the "Battle Rhythm" Seasonal challenge incorrectly instructs players to defeat targets anywhere in the system. This challenge can be successfully completed in Crucible, Gambit, or Vanguard Ops playlists.
  • The Strand Slayer Crucible bounty is not progressing from Strand Primary weapon kills.
  • Players can be eliminated by a finisher if the enemy is eliminated before the finisher animation completes.
  • The “Efficient Angler” Seasonal challenge is progressing inconsistently.
  • The Taken portal and heart at the end of the Last Wish raid can appear off to the side.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

Rolling in the Deep

Bruno: It took you all long enough to actually make a video about the first joke I thought about when I first heard about Season of the Deep. Totally worth the wait, though.

Movie of the Week: Rolling in the Deep

Timon: As a big Spider-Man fan I really, really enjoyed this one! Love the creativity the community comes up with week after week!

Movie of the Week: Destiny 2 x Spider-Man

Gorgeous, Guardians

Hippy: A little bit of spice and a splash of nice... that’s not the saying but phew is that accurate for this art pick! The aesthetic? Gorgeous. The first glance? Wholesome. The text? Brutal. I never knew cross-stitch could be so metal, but here we are. Nothing but slow claps, nothing but slow claps. Well done.

Art of the Week: Existential cross-stitch

Sam: There is just something about sitting in the H.E.L.M. and watching your fish friends swim around to really ground yourself (heh, get it? Because you’re in space) and take a break from the world for a minute (because you’re not on the world, you’re in space, lul).

Don’t forget to take care of yourselves, Guardians.

Art of the Week:

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Alright Guardians, that wraps it up for this week. Make sure you are signed up for your Prime Gaming rewards, go catch all the fish, get your #Emblematic emblems submitted, finish up your Final Dive quest if you haven’t already, and stay out of the water on Nessus, it’s spicy.

Stay crafty,

Sam

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