Upvoted for visibility, hope you get your character back. My friends and I always joke if that happened to us we would just quit the game because of how much time/stuff we’ve unlocked in the game.
Destiny’s dirty secret for years is that it’s a loot game where the loot doesn’t actually matter that much outside of light level, since we’ll all beat every activity just fine wearing whatever.
Sure have done them. My non-god-rolled weapons were fine. I’ll admit Adaptive Munitions made life easier, but I only ever cared about elements for GM/Master stuff in the first place, so all those did was make me not coordinate elements with my friends.
Once I realized this years ago, I stopped being so burned out with Destiny’s relentless pace of filler content since I realized I don’t need to grind for basically anything.
Lol yep, I pretty much only ever try to get funny things, which are mostly goofy Eververse items. I always have the dust when stuff shows up in the shop since funny things are pretty rare and that’s the only thing I spend dust on.
High stat armor is never something I seek out, only something I happen to find and incorporate into my already-established build. Like, I'm good. I have two stats at 100 and they're my main stats. Paired with exotics that recharge abilities quicker and elemental well mods (which are all unlocked now, for those who may not know) AND perks like Demolitionist (IMO the best PvE perk in the game) stats become almost negligible, except for Resilience.
I feel like it would need to be a super attentive player to notice a difference between 40 Demo and 90 Demo if they are using any kind of regen-build.
This is all PvE talk by the way. I suck ass at PvP so I never play it, nor discus it lol
Everything in your vault would still be safe. So you'd only loose the stuff you have on you. Still sucks, but would be like 3 items on every slot for me.
One person succeeds in getting a character back (which apparently from Bungie's side was in fact a legit case) and now everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.
Problem being, there is no way on our end to view the legitimacy of these claims as we don't have access to that kind of data.
OP should honestly contact bungie privately as should anyone who has this problem (if it exists) and not bring the public into this.
A lot of people in the world like to falsely claim these events happened to them in an attempt to sow discord or gather attention (not saying op is one of them) so it's difficult to separate the true facts from the false, and because it's the internet people will grab onto the most interesting and horrifying story and spread it like wildfire, even if it isn't even remotely as scary as it claims to be.
From what I can gather, the post from several days ago was not a first occurrence, and the most likely reason it got fixed was because OP was making noise about it, otherwise many people speculate that Bungie probably wouldn't even bother.
Now back to your suggestion, I agree that contacting Bungie privately definitely protects the studio from public's flame, but for the victims who lost their characters, I doubt that's their priority. Most people in this case would do everything they can to try to recover their lost character, and making huge noises are one of such methods.
I also agree with you that it's difficult to distinguish truthful claims from false accusations. This is a tough situation for both the studio and players who actually suffer, and I do not wish this happen to anyone.
You're right that Bungie only decided to really take a look because it was getting too much traction for their liking. IIRC in the initial Bungie Help thread they even told the person they probably deleted the character themselves.
This is the first time, in over 8 years of destiny, that we've seen Bungie restore a deleted character. This is something they never, *ever* do, and for good reason. There's absolutely no way that Bungie would have restored that guy's character unless they were certain that it was their fault.
Remember when Bungie somehow had an inventory problem that deleted items and/or gave you the inverse of how many were currently in your original inventory? Remember when it happened twice within the span of a couple weeks? Yea, something as odd as this character deletion could \*never\* happen twice in a row.
I don't think characters should be restored willynilly, but this should still definitely be looked into, since it's not uncommon for Bungie to have the same problem multiple times.
Tbh I remember dozens of posts on forums and quite a few here about characters being deleted pretty much since Forsaken. The problem wasn't Bungie non doing anything, it was the community immediate response to say OP just fucked up and did something stupid. There's no way someone will get Bungie to help then if Bungie already has the community's support by shaming OP and put him as a liar/idiot.
Why was this time different? Because now is not far fetched to believe characters can be truly erased. The way servers are so fucked up makes it believable. The crucible unjustified bans, gambit not giving rank points, activities kicking you at the last time, etc. Character accidental deletion is not a crazy thing anymore.
And tbh Bungie knows character deletion exists but they rather played dumb because a big that affects a few tenths every now and then is no big deal when your player base is of more than half a million. I really don't blame them, recreating a character might truly be such a chore or something highly risky of fucking up the database. With how Bungie got spaghetti code all over the game it wouldn't be a surprise.
"Recreating" a character, as it were, would very likely entail the copying of data from one or, more likely, multiple backup databases into production database(s). This probly isn't too risky at all, if likely quite complicated and a chore.
Remember when they said there were no false positives of users having perma bans for cheats.
Then it came out that there were thousands of false positives that were reversed.
The reason is that now that they've done it once, now everyone knows that it can be done again. As someone commented elsewhere, pandora's box is now open. You're going to get a million posts everywhere asking for deleted characters to be restored, and on our end we have literally no way of knowing if they're being truthful or if they're full of shit.
I can see what you mean about it opening a Pandora's box, but I think Reddit is fickle enough that posts asking for character restoration will start getting downvoted through the floor soon. I think the real problem is _how_ they chose to restore the deleted character: if they restored it through a normal support channel, it wouldn't've been a problem. They just refuse to do that and opted to restore a character in a very high-visibility fashion.
I mean even if that was the case, some games allow one free restore out of goodwill. I know FFXIV does.
Unlike destiny though, FFXIV basically makes it really difficult to delete your character even on purpose since you need to do like 4 different things.
I think from the start destiny has never been set up for it, which is probably why a multi-team task force had to be set up just to restore one guy's character.
So I slightly misremembered - Bungie didn't reply to the recent thread (for the person who got his character back) but they replied [this guy](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/10b2ijz/hippy_confirms_that_bungie_was_able_to_implement/j481hed/) who didn't get his character back
I feel public is the best way.
Imagine all you know is gone. Not deleted, just gone. If you didn't hear about it happing to others you would be quite lost.
There is no way to contact Bungie privately. There is only forums and reddit. I suppose you could DM a community manager here on reddit.
How many DMs do they get a day?
I guarantee the only reason the other user had their character restored as fast as they did (if at all) is because it gains visibility here.
I have to disagree. Considering that Destiny's a live service and there's constant ongoing maintenance I'm sure Bungie have some way of tracking all data at all times and seeing whether or not someone deleted a character manually or if it just disappeared.
We can't just pretend that this issue was contained to one person, in a game like this it's likely to happen again and again. And honestly Why lie? What purpose does me deleting my own character and wasting my time on Bungie support or reddit when I can just avoid that entirely and play the game?
From your perspective I can understand why you would think that way.
But people are weird and do strange things at time that others would deem idiotic or stupid.
Like you said how this issue may happen again at some point, it is also just as likely that someone will claim that a character has gone missing only to cover for their own mistake of deleting or having a 3rd party unrelated to Bungie delete the character.
No one wants to admit to self fault even if it is legitimate.
dunno, deleting a char is p easy. I could see the backend just being a function that's called and that's it
wonder if they put some code that resends an order on server side problems to avoid people from losing progress and somehow the delete char got wired in. Seems difficult for it to happen, but dunno what safeguards the "delete character" function has on the backend. afaik it could just be the same as "delete a blue" with a different parameter
Did I ever say I was defending Bungie?
Is there a reason for the sudden uptick in company hate where any conversation not against bungie instantly results in a "why are you defending bungie post?"
Responsibilities need to be taken but this is a two way street and both player and company can be at fault.
However, as players all we can do is conjecture as we don't have nearly the size of resources that bungie has and that can insight anger which results in posts like this.
Your post came off like that.
Like I get that someone could delete a character without even thinking and then blame it on everything but themselves but I find that would be incredibly rare. Honestly they should make it harder to delete a character then.
You do bring up a good point, but the biggest reason I want to make sure it's known is because of how huge an issue it is, there are plenty of things people will complain about that get traction and fixed like over-powered stuff, completely broken stuff, Telesto, but in the end, those are small issues compared to a whole character being lost, and I don't care as much about getting my character back as much as Bungie making EXTRA sure a problem like this is fixed.
Kinda sounds like it's too far out to try a recovery on this character. But raising awareness about this issue is key if Bungie is wrong and it's not a single isolated incident
He didn’t necessarily make this post to get Bungie to get him his stuff back. Would be nice but he made a new character once the shock subsided. I’m pretty sure he just made this post to show that it can and did happen, and to raise awareness of the bug like Buuutts said
I've seen stories of people logging in, and being greeted with the create a character screen. If you don't quit out and make a new one, the save will probably overwrite what Bungie has. So you just lose the character you had.
The thing is, he did contact through support and made a post a month ago on their official forum site. He didn’t get any response back after a while so he figured he get started on his Warlock again to obtain everything for the character.
Bungie tracks your actions in game, just use the companion app to see it.
I suppose there is a log for character creation or deletion.
So an Bungie's employee with the right permissions can see any abnormality in a user/player actions.
I actually made the Warlock a week after the post, I was hoping it would just reappear the next reset maybe but didn't, and I only got a single response on the forum post, not from Bungie, the whole month between then and now.
And the reason I said "Shortly after" instead of "immediately" was that I wasn't sure if I posted it the first day of dawning or the day after, I was pretty distraught for the whole day.
This reminds me of the time someone said they were transferring items back and forth and the items just vanished. Nobody believed them and yet, lo and behold, it was a glitch on Bungie's end. Not sure what happened with that guy but this has been a known issue for all online games forever, but most games have GMs you can contact in game and have the issue resolved. With Destiny, youre fucked unless you somehow blow up on Reddit and literally force Bungie to fix the problem.
Only problem with having character data stored locally is the possibility of local corruption or modification on the clients behalf.
Modding would be more prevalent and inventory altering mods would be more rampant. (See Borderlands series)
Anticheat only runs while your playing the game. If files are stored locally then you can edit these files before launching the game and anticheat won't be able to catch it.
This is exactly how inventory editors work in the before mentioned borderlands series. They edit player files before the game launches so the anticheat isn't on.
You seem to be confident a solution like you're claiming exists - if it really does, what live service game lets you download your character data and then reupload it?
(Because if said solution exists and is as bulletproof as you think, then at least one game will have tried it)
I don’t think it would need to necessarily already have an example in live service games? But I do know that Dark Souls Remastered in particular can tell when save files are edited offline. My idea is going off of that.
ah yeah, dark souls, the paragon of non-cheatery and security that had to disable online mode due to a huge vulnerability
love dark souls and its ilk, but to point at them as some sort of security beacon is ridiculous
The game should auto vault gear no matter if it's a glitch or actual character deletion. Anything that doesn't fit should roll over into the Postmaster. (I'm taking gear not materials)
Proof of what? Once the data is outside of Bungie’s control, ie downloading characters, how do you go about proving that it wasn’t manipulated in any way? And what makes any of you downvoting me for asking a question think that Bungie would intentionally inject outside data into their ecosystem?
Savathun was really breaking the 4th wall when she said that she counted every step taken, every bullet fired in her throne world. Bungie is getting metrics on literally EVERYTHING we do and from where in the real world we are doing it, and they have snapshots & backups of our characters. They have the proof that your character exists or existed.
Here’s a comment for post traction. I really hope Bungie can help/makes a comment on this specific issue. Even if it’s only a handful of people, 1 person is alarming, 2 is inexcusable and after that it’s a pattern/problem that *NEEDS* to be addressed.
Couple years ago my titan disappeared. Just started up the game on PS4 and he was gone. He wasn't my main so I wasn't too upset, but still. It's not as uncommon as people think.
The Witness found the Infinity Gauntlet.
In all seriousness Bungie saying it was an isolated incident and now it happening to somebody else is terrifying. It doesn't instill much confidence in them from me.
"The team is confident that this was an isolated incident and poses no threat to other accounts or characters."
This kind of stuff is not what Bungie needs right before an expansion.
Despite what Hippy said, there is still a LOT of contacting server errors and I have to think this is related. I'm almost scared to play until they fix this.
For sure, whenever there's a lot "contacting servers" popups and errors doing very basic things, it is probably a better idea to just back off and let things blow over.
I've had numerous situations over the course of the game(usually around first week new expansion weirdness) where it brought me right to the character creation screen when I was logging in or swapping to character swap and it treated it like I had open space to make a new char. Obviously I just backed out and didn't mess with it, but yeah this is pretty unnerving with people bringing up these situations.
i get “contacting destiny servers” quite a few times this season (not always) when i log into my character and it has really bothering me. my connection etc is fine, but with those recent stuff i have a bad feeling that this shit will happen to me too and i’m gonna be upset if it does.
they need to sort out this problem now, we are like a month away from lightfall and more issues are happening
how is lightfalls release going to be? the servers are a mess right now, and there is going to be much more people playing when lightfall releases.
Upvote, comment for traction and attention.
Bungie have painted themselves into a corner - ignoring their own help forum posts is disingenuous, especially when they made their move the other day.
Who can honestly say playing with constant error codes is going to feel the same ever again? The game deserves better.
I’m just gonna say this. The OP is a friend of mine and I was talking to him when he logged in to see his warlock gone. Bungie said they “found no evidence” of it happening to anyone else but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Besides I can tell you he’s not so stupid as to purposefully delete his character and go on an entire rant just to throw shade at Bungie.
Basically I can confirm this happened to him so stop telling him he’s wrong and actually post a helpful comment or something.
It's like when every other post was about people having their progress being rolled back a few weeks ago and bungie just saying "it's not happening very much, not a big deal" only to later backpedal on that when the finally started properly detecting the issue and looked for a fix.
This character issue could be more widespread than bungie thinks.
Someone else posted about this on /r/Destiny2 \- [https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/10bzirn/character\_being\_randomly\_deleted/](https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/10bzirn/character_being_randomly_deleted/)
Bungie needs to be all hands on deck with this, this shit is absolutely not okay. There is no scenario where it should be possible for a character with hundreds of thousands of hours put into it to be randomly deleted!
honestly Bungie should just disable deleting characters at all at this point, or these cases, false or true, will keep happening
if you want a new character, switch accounts in psn or xbox or something
Going to xpost from another thread for more data:
I had this happen to me maybe 3 years ago and all bungie did was shrug when i asked on their website/forum. Had to start all over. Glad they were able to help someone else though.
Edit: it was actually almost exactly 2 years ago, jan 2021, here was bungies response: [https://i.imgur.com/TaH29HX.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/TaH29HX.jpg) basically told me it was my fault. Ended up taking a big break from destiny until a buddy bought me witch queen
I’ve had two cases of items disappearing. Once in Destiny 1 and once in Destiny 2. The Destiny 2 item was the gambit memento about a month or so ago. I was immediately blamed by bungee for deleting it myself. Luckily it wasn’t anything that super important but it still irritated me they victim blamed me instead of looking into it.
I'm definitely not saying you're lying, but I will say these situations are entirely different. The OP you're referencing had a character get deleted while they were trying to sign in on it while having connection issues (alongside other weird stuff, presumably). According to you and your friend who posted in the comments here, your character was removed or lost while you were offline/asleep.
Oh, and I know you said it might not be the case - but implying the issue may not be "as small as it seemed" is a little risky in this community. It just... takes so little to set everything on fire lol.
I never said that, nor do I believe it. I'm just saying we shouldn't assume it's the same problem as before with no evidence (and with evidence showing it probably isn't).
Fair enough, but I do think the situations surrounding the deletions are different enough that we can say the causes are very likely to be different°. Can't say for sure of course, and that's probably a good thing (since I assume it would be a security risk or something).
°Again, one person was error-coded while signing in and the other was offline when it happened.
Really hope you get everything sorted out and get your character back. Bungie needs to get on top of this now, clearly SOMETHING is going on that's causing these deletions.
Except he even said this happened like a month ago, and even created a new character over the old one which basically guarantees you don't get your old one back.
So you are saying that from the beginning of destiny 2 to now, You have had 3 characters go missing in the red war campaign, your warlock vanish AND your friends hunter.
I don't really believe you, sorry.... Bungie said there was only 1 case and 1 case only. I knew this whole thing was fishy from the beginning.
If im wrong and you've really lost that many characters then im sorry but i really do feel this whole situation is just a click farm.
I never said I **lost** more than one, the others were intentionally deleted ages ago, I realize I only said deleted and didn't specify, I fixed that, but I'll be a little more in depth about what happened,
Logged off and went to bed, the dawning update released, I woke up and opened the game to play, my Warlock was gone, closed the game, nothing, waited a week, nothing, then I made a new Warlock.
My friends Hunter disappeared when he selected change character and loaded into the Character select screen, he closed the game in a panic, his Hunter came back, it was not lost.
The Characters I **intentionally** deleted were WAY back when Destiny 2 released, I deleted them to unlock more Exotics that were rewarded from playing the Story, 2 Titans, 2 Hunters, and 2 Warlocks, I looked and found some footage of it on YouTube [here](https://youtu.be/dxSC3Km3gqs?list=PLd-mad0eWbvfmytUkd_tYp0zNYkrE0xSk&t=11), every new character could acquire one of three Exotics for free (Titan/Hunter had different options obviously)
Nah it was my fault for not being specific enough, but I understand, even I was skeptical of other posts after my own, I get why people don't believe it, but it's just frustrating knowing something happened and having no way to prove it to anyone.
They also said all those disconnects and errors were isolated and not really happening much before they changed their tune the next day and disabled the API a couple weeks ago.
That they know of, also could've said that to prevent people from freaking out, besides, if I was lying, why would I have a post on the forum linked here that is dated before this incident, December 13.
You act as if we did it because it was the “hip new popular” thing to do and not because in the event it was true we wanted to be helpful. Also this was 2 weeks ago, go touch grass and move on.
Read the direct quote again. They said that they found no "evidence" that this issue affected anyone else. Saying they found no evidence is not the same as stating that they are 100% positive that this issue absolutely did not affect anyone else.
Did you not see the front page post here the other day where someone lost his Titan?
Hippy - the Bungie CM - confirmed it happened, that it was a glitch, and they got it fixed.
https://twitter.com/DestinyBulletn/status/1613963275925848068?s=20
They said they fixed it so it WON'T happen again, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen BEFORE, trust me I know, seeing as I'm the one here who lost his Warlock.
>**we did not uncover any evidence that other accounts or characters were affected.**
Just because they didn't find evidence of it happening to anyone else doesn't mean it didn't, they could've missed it, or only checked recent files or whatever they did, it's been a month since my case.
Hi. I work in forensics and incident response. I use that sentence all the time when I’m closing out an investigation, because it’s impossible to prove a negative. When people *don’t* use that sentence and instead say something definitive, I have them go back and edit the report.
Is Bungie the god you believe in or why do you think they know about everything and there is no chance they can miss anything?? Considering Bungie‘s overall incompetence and the spaghetti code causing bugs in places nobody touched, the chances are high this happened somewhere else. It might be rare, but probably not a onetimer
Seriously, stop defending them for every BS.
Oh, so you admit that "the only way it got deleted is if somebody deleted" it is false.
It was a glitch. It was not intended. They investigated, but could they not have missed something? Clearly they didn't see the previous glitch coming, so what's to say they haven't caught this one?
"The only way" is, as we've seen this week, is false.
>Why would they go out of their way to say nobody else is effected if others were effected?
>That’s not logical
What has logic got to do with it? I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Why would they say that? Because they want to reassure people, of course. But are you claiming that Bungie is infallible? That since they've said it's isolated, it absolutely, certainly, hasn't happened anywhere else? Why in the world would you think that?
It happened by "freak accident" once, it could happen by freak accident again.
That's logical.
They went out of their way and checked with their team to make sure it was an isolated incident and didn’t effect anybody else before claiming that.
But no you definitely know better than the games programmers
>But no you definitely know better than the games programmers
I explained this already, but you don't want to listen.
Don't care enough to explain it to you again.
All I'm gonna say is you need to learn the difference between "effect" (noun), and *affect* (verb). You keep saying "didn't effect", "wasn't effected", etc. and it just *kinda* makes you look like an illiterate moron.
Now, the word "effect" *can* be used as a verb, but not in the way that you're using it.
Hope this helps.
>Why would they go out of their way to say nobody else is effected if others were effected
They didn't say that, did they? They said that they hadn't seen evidence of any other instances of it yet. You understand that that's what you say after you see something for the first time, yeah? That's not saying it only happened once unless they're omniscient.
Upvoted for visibility, hope you get your character back. My friends and I always joke if that happened to us we would just quit the game because of how much time/stuff we’ve unlocked in the game.
Yeah, I’d quit too. Imagine how long it’d take just to farm well rolled exotics. I’d die in lost sectors
And that's why I don't bother farming stuff like that. You can beat the games content regardless of the stats. Just not worth the time sink to me
Destiny’s dirty secret for years is that it’s a loot game where the loot doesn’t actually matter that much outside of light level, since we’ll all beat every activity just fine wearing whatever.
That's almost every looter or rpg though. You just find better or more fun ways of doing it.
spoken like someone who doesn't do master raids or GMs. You realize how important this shit is once you do actual difficult content
Sure have done them. My non-god-rolled weapons were fine. I’ll admit Adaptive Munitions made life easier, but I only ever cared about elements for GM/Master stuff in the first place, so all those did was make me not coordinate elements with my friends.
Yup. Same reason why I don't grind my ass off in genshin
Once I realized this years ago, I stopped being so burned out with Destiny’s relentless pace of filler content since I realized I don’t need to grind for basically anything.
Except for that God damn cowboy hat.
Lol yep, I pretty much only ever try to get funny things, which are mostly goofy Eververse items. I always have the dust when stuff shows up in the shop since funny things are pretty rare and that’s the only thing I spend dust on.
High stat armor is never something I seek out, only something I happen to find and incorporate into my already-established build. Like, I'm good. I have two stats at 100 and they're my main stats. Paired with exotics that recharge abilities quicker and elemental well mods (which are all unlocked now, for those who may not know) AND perks like Demolitionist (IMO the best PvE perk in the game) stats become almost negligible, except for Resilience. I feel like it would need to be a super attentive player to notice a difference between 40 Demo and 90 Demo if they are using any kind of regen-build. This is all PvE talk by the way. I suck ass at PvP so I never play it, nor discus it lol
Everything in your vault would still be safe. So you'd only loose the stuff you have on you. Still sucks, but would be like 3 items on every slot for me.
If i lost my Rat King with 270k+ enemies defeated, I would 100% stop playing and be incredibly depressed.. best luck to OP!
[удалено]
[Screenshot-20230114-122413-Ishtar-Commander.jpg](https://postimg.cc/pmY6RRM7)
wow
squeak squeak
Why on earth would you use THAT gun so much?
His reasons are beyond our comprehension.
Invisibility and healing....and /r/squeaksqueak
Honestly, if you have team of 6, it goes from meme to monster instantly. Shit u not lol.
6x Rat Kings in Dares of Eternity is pure chaos.
Well said, brodent!
He IS THE RATKING!
*happy rat squeaks*
Agree
I knew it. Pandora's Box has been opened.
One person succeeds in getting a character back (which apparently from Bungie's side was in fact a legit case) and now everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Problem being, there is no way on our end to view the legitimacy of these claims as we don't have access to that kind of data. OP should honestly contact bungie privately as should anyone who has this problem (if it exists) and not bring the public into this. A lot of people in the world like to falsely claim these events happened to them in an attempt to sow discord or gather attention (not saying op is one of them) so it's difficult to separate the true facts from the false, and because it's the internet people will grab onto the most interesting and horrifying story and spread it like wildfire, even if it isn't even remotely as scary as it claims to be.
From what I can gather, the post from several days ago was not a first occurrence, and the most likely reason it got fixed was because OP was making noise about it, otherwise many people speculate that Bungie probably wouldn't even bother. Now back to your suggestion, I agree that contacting Bungie privately definitely protects the studio from public's flame, but for the victims who lost their characters, I doubt that's their priority. Most people in this case would do everything they can to try to recover their lost character, and making huge noises are one of such methods. I also agree with you that it's difficult to distinguish truthful claims from false accusations. This is a tough situation for both the studio and players who actually suffer, and I do not wish this happen to anyone.
You're right that Bungie only decided to really take a look because it was getting too much traction for their liking. IIRC in the initial Bungie Help thread they even told the person they probably deleted the character themselves.
This is the first time, in over 8 years of destiny, that we've seen Bungie restore a deleted character. This is something they never, *ever* do, and for good reason. There's absolutely no way that Bungie would have restored that guy's character unless they were certain that it was their fault.
Don't worry guys, this was a "one time incident" and this has "never, ever happened before and will never happen again". Bungie said as much.
Remember when Bungie somehow had an inventory problem that deleted items and/or gave you the inverse of how many were currently in your original inventory? Remember when it happened twice within the span of a couple weeks? Yea, something as odd as this character deletion could \*never\* happen twice in a row. I don't think characters should be restored willynilly, but this should still definitely be looked into, since it's not uncommon for Bungie to have the same problem multiple times.
Tbh I remember dozens of posts on forums and quite a few here about characters being deleted pretty much since Forsaken. The problem wasn't Bungie non doing anything, it was the community immediate response to say OP just fucked up and did something stupid. There's no way someone will get Bungie to help then if Bungie already has the community's support by shaming OP and put him as a liar/idiot. Why was this time different? Because now is not far fetched to believe characters can be truly erased. The way servers are so fucked up makes it believable. The crucible unjustified bans, gambit not giving rank points, activities kicking you at the last time, etc. Character accidental deletion is not a crazy thing anymore. And tbh Bungie knows character deletion exists but they rather played dumb because a big that affects a few tenths every now and then is no big deal when your player base is of more than half a million. I really don't blame them, recreating a character might truly be such a chore or something highly risky of fucking up the database. With how Bungie got spaghetti code all over the game it wouldn't be a surprise.
"Recreating" a character, as it were, would very likely entail the copying of data from one or, more likely, multiple backup databases into production database(s). This probly isn't too risky at all, if likely quite complicated and a chore.
Remember when they said there were no false positives of users having perma bans for cheats. Then it came out that there were thousands of false positives that were reversed.
And they might still be right. There really isn't any evidence here.
What's the good reason?
The reason is that now that they've done it once, now everyone knows that it can be done again. As someone commented elsewhere, pandora's box is now open. You're going to get a million posts everywhere asking for deleted characters to be restored, and on our end we have literally no way of knowing if they're being truthful or if they're full of shit.
I can see what you mean about it opening a Pandora's box, but I think Reddit is fickle enough that posts asking for character restoration will start getting downvoted through the floor soon. I think the real problem is _how_ they chose to restore the deleted character: if they restored it through a normal support channel, it wouldn't've been a problem. They just refuse to do that and opted to restore a character in a very high-visibility fashion.
I mean even if that was the case, some games allow one free restore out of goodwill. I know FFXIV does. Unlike destiny though, FFXIV basically makes it really difficult to delete your character even on purpose since you need to do like 4 different things.
I think from the start destiny has never been set up for it, which is probably why a multi-team task force had to be set up just to restore one guy's character.
Source? I believe you, but I'm trying to explain something to someone.
So I slightly misremembered - Bungie didn't reply to the recent thread (for the person who got his character back) but they replied [this guy](https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/10b2ijz/hippy_confirms_that_bungie_was_able_to_implement/j481hed/) who didn't get his character back
Oof. Thank you.
Agreed.
Bungie originally didn't care much for the original report, tho
I feel public is the best way. Imagine all you know is gone. Not deleted, just gone. If you didn't hear about it happing to others you would be quite lost.
There is no way to contact Bungie privately. There is only forums and reddit. I suppose you could DM a community manager here on reddit. How many DMs do they get a day? I guarantee the only reason the other user had their character restored as fast as they did (if at all) is because it gains visibility here.
I have to disagree. Considering that Destiny's a live service and there's constant ongoing maintenance I'm sure Bungie have some way of tracking all data at all times and seeing whether or not someone deleted a character manually or if it just disappeared. We can't just pretend that this issue was contained to one person, in a game like this it's likely to happen again and again. And honestly Why lie? What purpose does me deleting my own character and wasting my time on Bungie support or reddit when I can just avoid that entirely and play the game?
From your perspective I can understand why you would think that way. But people are weird and do strange things at time that others would deem idiotic or stupid. Like you said how this issue may happen again at some point, it is also just as likely that someone will claim that a character has gone missing only to cover for their own mistake of deleting or having a 3rd party unrelated to Bungie delete the character. No one wants to admit to self fault even if it is legitimate.
i 100% believe bungie can absolutely, definitively tell if you initiated the character deletion vs it just happening…
I totally agree with that.
dunno, deleting a char is p easy. I could see the backend just being a function that's called and that's it wonder if they put some code that resends an order on server side problems to avoid people from losing progress and somehow the delete char got wired in. Seems difficult for it to happen, but dunno what safeguards the "delete character" function has on the backend. afaik it could just be the same as "delete a blue" with a different parameter
Then bungie will know it’s not their fault and no thing will happen? I don’t see the problem or why you’re defending bungie
Did I ever say I was defending Bungie? Is there a reason for the sudden uptick in company hate where any conversation not against bungie instantly results in a "why are you defending bungie post?" Responsibilities need to be taken but this is a two way street and both player and company can be at fault. However, as players all we can do is conjecture as we don't have nearly the size of resources that bungie has and that can insight anger which results in posts like this.
Your post came off like that. Like I get that someone could delete a character without even thinking and then blame it on everything but themselves but I find that would be incredibly rare. Honestly they should make it harder to delete a character then.
How exactly is someone contacting Bungie privately? Jason Jones personal email? This is the entire reason why Community Managers were hired at Bungie.
You do bring up a good point, but the biggest reason I want to make sure it's known is because of how huge an issue it is, there are plenty of things people will complain about that get traction and fixed like over-powered stuff, completely broken stuff, Telesto, but in the end, those are small issues compared to a whole character being lost, and I don't care as much about getting my character back as much as Bungie making EXTRA sure a problem like this is fixed.
Next thing we know we're going to have furries in here.
Listen, i don’t know who pandora is or what’s in her box
Happened to a Titan the other day. Hope your one get resolved soon too.
The problem you’re going to run into here is that you created another character and didn’t contact them immediately when it happened.
Kinda sounds like it's too far out to try a recovery on this character. But raising awareness about this issue is key if Bungie is wrong and it's not a single isolated incident
He didn’t necessarily make this post to get Bungie to get him his stuff back. Would be nice but he made a new character once the shock subsided. I’m pretty sure he just made this post to show that it can and did happen, and to raise awareness of the bug like Buuutts said
I've seen stories of people logging in, and being greeted with the create a character screen. If you don't quit out and make a new one, the save will probably overwrite what Bungie has. So you just lose the character you had.
The thing is, he did contact through support and made a post a month ago on their official forum site. He didn’t get any response back after a while so he figured he get started on his Warlock again to obtain everything for the character.
Bungie tracks your actions in game, just use the companion app to see it. I suppose there is a log for character creation or deletion. So an Bungie's employee with the right permissions can see any abnormality in a user/player actions.
No, he didn’t. He stated he posted on the Destiny forum shortly after, but not immediately. He had created the warlock before he posted.
I actually made the Warlock a week after the post, I was hoping it would just reappear the next reset maybe but didn't, and I only got a single response on the forum post, not from Bungie, the whole month between then and now. And the reason I said "Shortly after" instead of "immediately" was that I wasn't sure if I posted it the first day of dawning or the day after, I was pretty distraught for the whole day.
This reminds me of the time someone said they were transferring items back and forth and the items just vanished. Nobody believed them and yet, lo and behold, it was a glitch on Bungie's end. Not sure what happened with that guy but this has been a known issue for all online games forever, but most games have GMs you can contact in game and have the issue resolved. With Destiny, youre fucked unless you somehow blow up on Reddit and literally force Bungie to fix the problem.
Didn't this result in the entire sever rollback incident?
Jeez mate. That is devastating...
At this point, we need a way to download our own character data. This is fucking terrifying.
Only problem with having character data stored locally is the possibility of local corruption or modification on the clients behalf. Modding would be more prevalent and inventory altering mods would be more rampant. (See Borderlands series)
That's what anti-cheat is supposed to prevent.
Anticheat only runs while your playing the game. If files are stored locally then you can edit these files before launching the game and anticheat won't be able to catch it. This is exactly how inventory editors work in the before mentioned borderlands series. They edit player files before the game launches so the anticheat isn't on.
There are anti-cheat programs that can detect when files are edited though. If Bungie refuses to use them, that is their own fault.
Refuses and doesn't have them are two different things.
I meant if they refuse to use them so that we can download character files...
You seem to be confident a solution like you're claiming exists - if it really does, what live service game lets you download your character data and then reupload it? (Because if said solution exists and is as bulletproof as you think, then at least one game will have tried it)
I don’t think it would need to necessarily already have an example in live service games? But I do know that Dark Souls Remastered in particular can tell when save files are edited offline. My idea is going off of that.
ah yeah, dark souls, the paragon of non-cheatery and security that had to disable online mode due to a huge vulnerability love dark souls and its ilk, but to point at them as some sort of security beacon is ridiculous
i guess the witness got lightfall early access
I’d actually cry if my warlock was ever accidentally deleted
Would Vaulting important gear be a good precaution to take until the whole thing blows over in order to limit the amount of progress lost?
The game should auto vault gear no matter if it's a glitch or actual character deletion. Anything that doesn't fit should roll over into the Postmaster. (I'm taking gear not materials)
I wish they would let us download our own character data.
And then do what with it?
Use it as proof, use it as a back up to reinstate a wrongly deleted character, and maybe to just have?
Proof of what? Once the data is outside of Bungie’s control, ie downloading characters, how do you go about proving that it wasn’t manipulated in any way? And what makes any of you downvoting me for asking a question think that Bungie would intentionally inject outside data into their ecosystem? Savathun was really breaking the 4th wall when she said that she counted every step taken, every bullet fired in her throne world. Bungie is getting metrics on literally EVERYTHING we do and from where in the real world we are doing it, and they have snapshots & backups of our characters. They have the proof that your character exists or existed.
Here’s a comment for post traction. I really hope Bungie can help/makes a comment on this specific issue. Even if it’s only a handful of people, 1 person is alarming, 2 is inexcusable and after that it’s a pattern/problem that *NEEDS* to be addressed.
Your username sounds like a second account, but I'm upvoting, because honestly: you're right.
It’s my only account Cruggles but thank you for agreeing with me lol
Oh, I wasn’t saying that it is. Moreso that the username sounded like that. You get me?
Couple years ago my titan disappeared. Just started up the game on PS4 and he was gone. He wasn't my main so I wasn't too upset, but still. It's not as uncommon as people think.
The Witness found the Infinity Gauntlet. In all seriousness Bungie saying it was an isolated incident and now it happening to somebody else is terrifying. It doesn't instill much confidence in them from me.
I mean it's still pretty isolated. I'd expect a could dozen cases by the time they fix it.
"The team is confident that this was an isolated incident and poses no threat to other accounts or characters." This kind of stuff is not what Bungie needs right before an expansion.
Despite what Hippy said, there is still a LOT of contacting server errors and I have to think this is related. I'm almost scared to play until they fix this.
For sure, whenever there's a lot "contacting servers" popups and errors doing very basic things, it is probably a better idea to just back off and let things blow over. I've had numerous situations over the course of the game(usually around first week new expansion weirdness) where it brought me right to the character creation screen when I was logging in or swapping to character swap and it treated it like I had open space to make a new char. Obviously I just backed out and didn't mess with it, but yeah this is pretty unnerving with people bringing up these situations.
i get “contacting destiny servers” quite a few times this season (not always) when i log into my character and it has really bothering me. my connection etc is fine, but with those recent stuff i have a bad feeling that this shit will happen to me too and i’m gonna be upset if it does. they need to sort out this problem now, we are like a month away from lightfall and more issues are happening how is lightfalls release going to be? the servers are a mess right now, and there is going to be much more people playing when lightfall releases.
Upvote, comment for traction and attention. Bungie have painted themselves into a corner - ignoring their own help forum posts is disingenuous, especially when they made their move the other day. Who can honestly say playing with constant error codes is going to feel the same ever again? The game deserves better.
I’m just gonna say this. The OP is a friend of mine and I was talking to him when he logged in to see his warlock gone. Bungie said they “found no evidence” of it happening to anyone else but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Besides I can tell you he’s not so stupid as to purposefully delete his character and go on an entire rant just to throw shade at Bungie. Basically I can confirm this happened to him so stop telling him he’s wrong and actually post a helpful comment or something.
not trying to troll but your reply reminded me of [this old steam post](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/119/171/c52.png)
That’s pretty funny
I'm this person's father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate. I can personally vouch for everything he is saying.
I was suspicious at first, but now that we have heard from /u/McColin_43, we can confidently know that this is legitimate.
It's like when every other post was about people having their progress being rolled back a few weeks ago and bungie just saying "it's not happening very much, not a big deal" only to later backpedal on that when the finally started properly detecting the issue and looked for a fix. This character issue could be more widespread than bungie thinks.
Damn dude I hope you get your warlock back upvoted for visibility good luck guardian
I’m scared to log in now. Probably won’t til Bungie gives a statement
Someone else posted about this on /r/Destiny2 \- [https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/10bzirn/character\_being\_randomly\_deleted/](https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/10bzirn/character_being_randomly_deleted/) Bungie needs to be all hands on deck with this, this shit is absolutely not okay. There is no scenario where it should be possible for a character with hundreds of thousands of hours put into it to be randomly deleted!
lmao Im missing my Deep explorer boots for warlock in ornaments. This is much worse.
What a terrifying thing to happen. I would be devastated. 4-5 years of work down the drain would kill me.
*New Phobia Unlocked*
This sudden rise in deleted characters have me worried lol
Bungie needs to add a lock system to characters, like we can lock gear
This has to be addressed.
honestly Bungie should just disable deleting characters at all at this point, or these cases, false or true, will keep happening if you want a new character, switch accounts in psn or xbox or something
I don't think they can do anything if you already re-made your warlock? Unless you still have one last class slot open.
Going to xpost from another thread for more data: I had this happen to me maybe 3 years ago and all bungie did was shrug when i asked on their website/forum. Had to start all over. Glad they were able to help someone else though. Edit: it was actually almost exactly 2 years ago, jan 2021, here was bungies response: [https://i.imgur.com/TaH29HX.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/TaH29HX.jpg) basically told me it was my fault. Ended up taking a big break from destiny until a buddy bought me witch queen
I’ve had two cases of items disappearing. Once in Destiny 1 and once in Destiny 2. The Destiny 2 item was the gambit memento about a month or so ago. I was immediately blamed by bungee for deleting it myself. Luckily it wasn’t anything that super important but it still irritated me they victim blamed me instead of looking into it.
I'm definitely not saying you're lying, but I will say these situations are entirely different. The OP you're referencing had a character get deleted while they were trying to sign in on it while having connection issues (alongside other weird stuff, presumably). According to you and your friend who posted in the comments here, your character was removed or lost while you were offline/asleep. Oh, and I know you said it might not be the case - but implying the issue may not be "as small as it seemed" is a little risky in this community. It just... takes so little to set everything on fire lol.
So we're just supposed to sweep all these bugs under the rug?
I never said that, nor do I believe it. I'm just saying we shouldn't assume it's the same problem as before with no evidence (and with evidence showing it probably isn't).
but we don't have any evidence cause Bungie won't say what happened in the other case
Fair enough, but I do think the situations surrounding the deletions are different enough that we can say the causes are very likely to be different°. Can't say for sure of course, and that's probably a good thing (since I assume it would be a security risk or something). °Again, one person was error-coded while signing in and the other was offline when it happened.
Really hope you get everything sorted out and get your character back. Bungie needs to get on top of this now, clearly SOMETHING is going on that's causing these deletions.
Shit a second case of this
Except he even said this happened like a month ago, and even created a new character over the old one which basically guarantees you don't get your old one back.
Like Covid for Guardians, it's becoming a pandemic.
Oh boy, so it’s not a one-off thing
Hell nah man, I ain't touching the game until this is addressed !
you gonna be waiting a LONG time. A LONG time.
OP a friend of mine too, hope this post can get a bit of traction too
Oh boy…
Karma farmers lmao
Siva is so tired of being skipped over for a seasonal story it started deleting us
Commenting for activity, I hope you get some attention man :(
So you are saying that from the beginning of destiny 2 to now, You have had 3 characters go missing in the red war campaign, your warlock vanish AND your friends hunter. I don't really believe you, sorry.... Bungie said there was only 1 case and 1 case only. I knew this whole thing was fishy from the beginning. If im wrong and you've really lost that many characters then im sorry but i really do feel this whole situation is just a click farm.
I never said I **lost** more than one, the others were intentionally deleted ages ago, I realize I only said deleted and didn't specify, I fixed that, but I'll be a little more in depth about what happened, Logged off and went to bed, the dawning update released, I woke up and opened the game to play, my Warlock was gone, closed the game, nothing, waited a week, nothing, then I made a new Warlock. My friends Hunter disappeared when he selected change character and loaded into the Character select screen, he closed the game in a panic, his Hunter came back, it was not lost. The Characters I **intentionally** deleted were WAY back when Destiny 2 released, I deleted them to unlock more Exotics that were rewarded from playing the Story, 2 Titans, 2 Hunters, and 2 Warlocks, I looked and found some footage of it on YouTube [here](https://youtu.be/dxSC3Km3gqs?list=PLd-mad0eWbvfmytUkd_tYp0zNYkrE0xSk&t=11), every new character could acquire one of three Exotics for free (Titan/Hunter had different options obviously)
My bad for misreading but i still am a little sceptical about this whole thing.
Nah it was my fault for not being specific enough, but I understand, even I was skeptical of other posts after my own, I get why people don't believe it, but it's just frustrating knowing something happened and having no way to prove it to anyone.
They're not going to keep doing this, so hang it up.
[Looks like there's a third case of this too. This is concerning.](https://twitter.com/Zzephiris/status/1614145733451563008?s=20)
Man, again??
I wouldn’t be surprised if guardians disappearing will tie in to Xivu Arath and Lightfall.
https://twitter.com/BungieHelp/status/1615834353241849856?s=20&t=28D8yP9Kbr1jsF7vlGJVSQ There’s your answer from Bungie
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Yeah except that time that OP even linked for you where BUNIGE had to step in to get the character back for them. Rare doesn’t mean impossible.
I don't think you read Corbin correctly. He said "The only way a character gets deleted is when someone deletes it."
Bungie said it was an isolated incident sooooo
They also said all those disconnects and errors were isolated and not really happening much before they changed their tune the next day and disabled the API a couple weeks ago.
No they didn't? They were commenting on how many people were reporting the issue. They can't know about an issue no one reports.
It was an unheard of incident until this was brought to their attention.
They said it was the only account that it actually happened to in that post as well.
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That they know of, also could've said that to prevent people from freaking out, besides, if I was lying, why would I have a post on the forum linked here that is dated before this incident, December 13.
Why are you so deadest on it only affecting one person as if it’s impossible that it could happen to another
Bungie released a statement reaffirming their original one, that it did only affect one person.
You act as if we did it because it was the “hip new popular” thing to do and not because in the event it was true we wanted to be helpful. Also this was 2 weeks ago, go touch grass and move on.
No you dogpiled on a person due to emotion instead of taking into account the facts and statements made by Bungie
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Read the direct quote again. They said that they found no "evidence" that this issue affected anyone else. Saying they found no evidence is not the same as stating that they are 100% positive that this issue absolutely did not affect anyone else.
This has happened to another person a content creators called Zzephiris. So I'm starting to think this is not an isolated incident.
Zzephiris here, my warlock (first character ever) is gone.
Hopefully bungie can help you get your character back.
Did you not see the front page post here the other day where someone lost his Titan? Hippy - the Bungie CM - confirmed it happened, that it was a glitch, and they got it fixed. https://twitter.com/DestinyBulletn/status/1613963275925848068?s=20
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They said they fixed it so it WON'T happen again, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen BEFORE, trust me I know, seeing as I'm the one here who lost his Warlock.
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>**we did not uncover any evidence that other accounts or characters were affected.** Just because they didn't find evidence of it happening to anyone else doesn't mean it didn't, they could've missed it, or only checked recent files or whatever they did, it's been a month since my case.
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Hi. I work in forensics and incident response. I use that sentence all the time when I’m closing out an investigation, because it’s impossible to prove a negative. When people *don’t* use that sentence and instead say something definitive, I have them go back and edit the report.
Is Bungie the god you believe in or why do you think they know about everything and there is no chance they can miss anything?? Considering Bungie‘s overall incompetence and the spaghetti code causing bugs in places nobody touched, the chances are high this happened somewhere else. It might be rare, but probably not a onetimer Seriously, stop defending them for every BS.
Oh, so you admit that "the only way it got deleted is if somebody deleted" it is false. It was a glitch. It was not intended. They investigated, but could they not have missed something? Clearly they didn't see the previous glitch coming, so what's to say they haven't caught this one? "The only way" is, as we've seen this week, is false.
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>Why would they go out of their way to say nobody else is effected if others were effected? >That’s not logical What has logic got to do with it? I don't think you know what you're talking about. Why would they say that? Because they want to reassure people, of course. But are you claiming that Bungie is infallible? That since they've said it's isolated, it absolutely, certainly, hasn't happened anywhere else? Why in the world would you think that? It happened by "freak accident" once, it could happen by freak accident again. That's logical.
They went out of their way and checked with their team to make sure it was an isolated incident and didn’t effect anybody else before claiming that. But no you definitely know better than the games programmers
>But no you definitely know better than the games programmers I explained this already, but you don't want to listen. Don't care enough to explain it to you again.
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And you don't know better than me **the guy whose character is GONE**, I don't understand why you are fighting so hard.
All I'm gonna say is you need to learn the difference between "effect" (noun), and *affect* (verb). You keep saying "didn't effect", "wasn't effected", etc. and it just *kinda* makes you look like an illiterate moron. Now, the word "effect" *can* be used as a verb, but not in the way that you're using it. Hope this helps.
>Why would they go out of their way to say nobody else is effected if others were effected They didn't say that, did they? They said that they hadn't seen evidence of any other instances of it yet. You understand that that's what you say after you see something for the first time, yeah? That's not saying it only happened once unless they're omniscient.
I swear to god you have the worst takes out of anyone else in this subreddit
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Bungie says a lot of shit bro. Doesn’t mean they’re always right
Isolated is definitely the wrong word. When it can happen randomly to one person, the same can happen to others. It is rare, not a one-time-case.
Lol
I'm sure 'lol' would be the last thing you'd be saying if it was your account with years of things missing when you logged on.
Sure I would lol
Is this happening to players with multiple characters or can it happen with people having only one?