A new exploit has turned up in competitive Destiny, and it sucks.
Update 7:15 PM: Bungie has addressed the cheat in their latest Weekly Update, saying that they’re working on disabling the bug. They’ve delayed Trials of Osiris until they’ve got it cleared up.
Earlier this week, someone figured out a way for people playing the Hunter Nightstalker class to greatly extend the length of their Shadowshot super. The cheat is apparently simple—as long as the player is wearing a certain exotic helmet, they can reset their super by entering their options menu while the timer is active. (I’d debated whether or not to actually share how to do the cheat in this post, but considering how simple it is (and how easy it is to find instructions online) I don’t see the point in dancing around it.) Update: It sounds like you need to have the exotic helmet Graviton Forfeit to activate the cheat, which explains why I’ve been unable to replicate it myself. I’ve made that clearer in the preceding paragraph.
Last night as I was playing Iron Banner, I ran into a player using the cheat:
As you can see, dude fires off three arrows at me and two other players, killing us all. I then spawn in directly behind him (an unrelated issue, but also annoying) and he somehow still has his super going. He misses me with one arrow, then hits me with another, bringing his total arrow count up to five… which should be impossible for a Nightstalker. Notice the […] that appears by his name after he’s killed me—that means that he’s in his options menu, which is how you trigger the cheat.
I reported the player for cheating—who even knows if that accomplishes anything—but the bigger question remains: How long until Bungie fixes this? As I mentioned yesterday, supers have become the defining aspect of a given match of Destiny PvP, so a simple cheat that gives a player a potentially infinite super is a really big problem.
The issue is all the more pressing, seeing as how the intense Trials of Osiris tournament launches tomorrow. Exploitative fuckery is bad enough in Iron Banner; imagine losing out on a trip to Mercury because you came up against a team where all three players just used this exploit to win. In a thread on the Destiny subreddit, players are calling on Bungie to either address the exploit before tomorrow or delay Trials until it’s fixed. Bungie’s David “DeeJ” Dague briefly responded in that thread, saying he’s “investigating on a few fronts right now,” and that a more substantive response was coming.
I’ve asked Bungie what the deal is and if they’re planning a fix; I’ll update this post when I’ve heard more. My guess is they’ll fix it sooner rather than later. It’s a big enough problem to completely derail PvP matches, and those kinds of problems don’t usually linger for long. Here’s hoping, anyway.
To contact the author of this post, write to kirk@kotaku.com.