Anyone playing Destiny 2 over the last couple of days has likely run into what is arguably the biggest bug in the existence of the game, as players ran wild with game-breaking weapons. In a nutshell, Destiny 2 players discovered that they could craft custom legendary weapons with Exotic perks that they weren’t meant to have. Imagine auto rifles delivering long-range shotgun damage or overpowered SMGs and you have the perfect recipe for a weekend that was dubbed Laser Tag 2.0, a reference to the infamous launch of Prometheus Lens.
This made for a fun experience in PvE as players were wrecking their way through high-level strikes and raids, and absolute hell in PvP as other players began to demolish the competition. With Trials of Osiris offering the sought-after Igneous Hammer and the Grandmaster Nightfall giving out extra rewards upon completion, these activities were hammered by players looking to easily melt their way through bosses and players.
The way that this exploit worked involved players opening up the crafting menu, selecting a weapon, and then quickly tabbing to another weapon. This would result in that frame receiving perks not meant for it, like grenade launchers that operated with shotgun characteristics. This did require incredibly fast fingers to pull off, and as PC players demonstrated, lowering the game’s frame rate to 30fps while running intensive programs in the background to slow Destiny 2’s performance as much as possible seemed to do the trick.
Bungie allowed this chaos to continue for the weekend while it worked on a multi-part fix to this exploit, which it labeled as a “complex issue” to solve. The first fix, which went live on the night of September 17, is a server-side update that disables all crafted weapons from being equipped. A subsequent update will allow crafted weapons to be re-equipped but the trouble-making weapons with “illegal” components will be reset to a default state.
“In the first of multiple updates, which is going live shortly, a selection of Exotic and Legendary frames and perks on crafted weapons will be temporarily disabled,” Bungie posted. Osteo Striga, Revision Zero, Dead Man’s Tale, Dead Messenger, Vexcalibur, and all three Exotic class glaives have been disabled, but non-crafted versions of these weapons can still be used.
The silver lining here is that Bungie won’t have to take Destiny 2 offline to perform this maintenance or roll back its servers, costing players valuable progress. Bungie also confirmed that it wouldn’t take action against anyone using the exploit, although the use of external scripting and network manipulation tools are still bannable offenses under its ban policy.
In other Destiny 2 news, Legendary Shards are being phased out of the game from Season 23 and one Destiny 2 cheater has been legally banned from ever being allowed to play the game again.
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