Destiny 2 and Bungie's disconnect regarding the ongoing server issues seems to have finally ended, as the company's new official blog post addresses this. However, actions do speak louder than words in most cases, and the community is hoping for the error codes to subside. Players can expect fixes to drop over the next two seasons.
In the recent TWID (this week in Destiny 2), the engineering team shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes so that players at least understand why they're getting constant error codes followed by the server shutdown. Bungie also announced a fix with a mid-season patch in Season of the Deep, which will be implemented alongside Hotfix 7.1.5.
Disclaimer: Notes mentioned in this article are based on Bungie's official website.
The Destiny 2 community now has some clarity regarding the recent situation with error codes
The recent TWID blog post covers the story behind the server instability and constant shutdowns. Getting kicked out from core activities isn't a great experience to have in live service games, and Bungie ensured its player base that they would be working hard to stabilize the servers for the next two seasons.
The primary topic here is a key service called "Claims," as stated by the company. It is responsible for sending gameplay messages to the server that handles the player data. Hence, anything from a kill to generating an orb is handled by Claims. However, with recent updates to the service, the company also found issues around Claims' error recovery functionality.
Bungie stated the following regarding the recent server shutdowns and error codes:
"Normally, if Claims has its communication channels disrupted to other services, it is designed to automatically restore these connections. These disruptions can happen for a wide variety of reasons, including hardware failures, network hitches, or problems with other services. However, despite rigorous testing, the updated system is not always recovering as expected in our live game environment."
They also mentioned that they would have to carry out a full restart of the servers to solve the issues:
"If these channels are permanently disrupted, this can be one of the causes behind Weasel, Baboon, or other error codes for a large subset of the player base. In these cases, even a rolling restart of our Claims service is not always enough to restore the service. Instead, a full restart of our Destiny 2 services must be performed to restore the Claims system, which we are rapidly working to correct."
Here are the changes that the community can expect with the upcoming mid-season patch alongside the next two seasons:
- Hotfix 7.1.5 Destiny 2 Season 21: Improvements to logging and alerting systems, allowing engineers to diagnose issues more quickly.
- Season 22: Improvements to Claims systems for faster detection of unhealthy services.
- Hotfix 7.3.0 Destiny 2 Season 23: Deeper architectural improvements to improve server stability.
It is worth noting that all aforementioned changes to the system are meant for later dates. Players can still expect to receive error codes, as there won't be any implementations until 7.1.5 in Season 21 mid-season.