Bungie Responds to Destiny Cheaters with Bans
By Weston Albert 30 October 2016
After a string of DDoS attacks in Trials of Osiris, Bungie assures fans that the developer takes cheating in Destiny very seriously and will ban offenders.
After Destiny‘s weekly Trials of Osiris PvP event this weekend, many fans took to the Destiny subreddit, the Bungie.net forums, and to social media with reports that they had been the victims of DDoS attacks by opposing teams. Bungie has responded to the complaints and says that the developer is on the case and that cheating will not be tolerated:
“We take DDoS attacks very seriously. We have automated systems in place to detect them and take action against offenders, up to and including permanent bans from Destiny. 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.”
Bungie has been active in the past in banning players detected of cheating, especially in the endgame PvP mode, Trials of Osiris. Those bans can range from a temporary ban from the activity that the player was cheating within to a ban from that activity – to even a ban to all of Destiny.
Whereas in the past, cheaters have used different methods such as being able to log out of the game and preserve a loss-free Trials Passage, this recent DDoS attack is new to Destiny. A DDoS (or Denial-of-Service) attack involves flooding a targeted machine with requests and causing that user to disconnect. With Destiny‘s lack of dedicated servers, and its use of peer-to-peer networking system, it allows for this kind of attack between players.
As Bungie said in its weekly blog, the systems the developer uses to detect cheaters is not public knowledge so cheaters can’t learn how to evade the safeguards that are in place. A big part of that system, however, is helped along by player reports.
Players can report fellow players they suspect of cheating by using the in-game report function, which Bungie says its security team monitors and examines all top-rated offenders from that reporting tool. If for some reason the in-game reporting system cannot be used, Bungie also set up another way to report any suspected cheaters here.
Bungie urges, much like if a fan discovers a glitch that could potentially cause serious issues to the game, that these tools be used to report straight to Bungie instead of posting on social media, forums, or go after that user through a console’s messaging system:
“Sending reports directly to Bungie ensures that we will see them, and we don’t want players receiving threats and hate mail. The Banhammer’s message is strong, and doesn’t risk innocent players being publicly attacked for false claims.”
Bungie assured fans that “the Banhammer is swung often” even if fans at large don’t know about it.
Trials of Osiris will continue this weekend, and hopefully with less interference than last week.
Destiny: Rise of Iron is available now on Xbox One and PS4.
Source: Bungie
