It’s been great finally having Destiny’s top-tier competitive activity Trials of Osiris back in the game, but the mode’s return has been marred by stingy prizes and thousands of cheaters. Bungie now says it’s working on addressing both of these shortcomings.
“Cheating in Destiny 2 is up roughly 50 percent since January, and significantly more in the highest skill echelons,” wrote engineering director David Aldridge in Bungie’s weekly blog post. While DDOS attacks are nearly non-existent on PC, problems like aimbotting and wall glitches persist. “Before Season of the Worthy launched, we were averaging 656 bans or restrictions per week,” Aldridge wrote. “In the first four weeks after launch, that rate more than tripled to 2133 punishments per week.”
To fix the uptick in cheating, Bungie is going to shift more people to working its anti-cheat systems and analyzing cheater reports. The studio is also looking at punishing not just those who are caught cheating but anyone who plays alongside them. “If you LFG your way into a fireteam with a cheater, get out and report them,” wrote Aldridge. “If you ride them to a flawless, the Banhammer will come for you as well.”
Trials of Osiris has some deeper structural issues outside of the cheating problem, though. Bungie acknowledged those in the post, laying out a number of changes to how loot gets awarded that will change when Season 11 arrives in June. Here’s a quick overview:
- Trials passages will pay out tokens at five and seven wins, not just after the first three.
- There will be a new weekly bounty players can complete to unlock Trials gear even if they can’t get to the three win milestone.
- Players will get awarded random Masterworking materials at three, five, and seven wins
One question that remains is whether players who finish the weekly Trials bounty will be able to start trading in tokens. Currently, players need to get to three wins before they can spend the tokens they’ve earned, many of which come from bounties that don’t require winning at all. It’s always frustrating every week when your 100 or so tokens expire and you get nothing from Trials despite playing for hours and amassing individual wins. One piece of gear from a single weekly bounty won’t change that.
Early on in Season of the Worthy I was hopeful Trials might be a bright spot in an otherwise disappointing and tedious time in Destiny 2. In a lot of ways it ended up being just as frustrating. June can’t come soon enough.