The Destiny series has finally made the leap to PC, and you know what that means: cheaters. It’s not that difficult to use tools to “hack” PC games to get an advantage, and that could ruin Bungie’s new sci-fi shooter. The studio is trying to stay on top of that problem by banning players, but some people are claiming the studio banned them for no reason.
On forums like Reddit, Destiny 2 players are claiming that Bungie banned them for using harmless programs like the OBS recording software or the Discord communications service. These are supplemental PC apps that inject code into games to enable special features. That’s similar to how hacking apps work, but they don’t offer any material advantage toward playing the game. Of course, it’s tough for these players to prove the reason for their ban because Bungie doesn’t say “Discord” or something like that when it bans people. Instead, players are working backward from information on Bungie’s help site.
“Some features from third-party applications which rely on the use of screen overlays are generally not compatible with Destiny 2,” reads Bungie’s website.
The studio notes that certain features of Discord, Mumble, OBS, and Xsplit are “not compatible,” but it doesn’t say anything about banning people for using these tools.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
I’ve reached out to Bungie for more information, and I’ll add anything new to this story.
It’s possible that people really are cheating, and they are lashing out because they just wasted $60. But Activision Blizzard, the publisher of Destiny 2, has inadvertently banned a large number of players before. In 2015, Blizzard’s Warden anticheat service locked out many Heroes of the Storm players that weren’t cheating. The community found that an audio driver was injecting itself into Blizzard’s software in a way that would flag Warden, and it took players a while to gather evidence to prove to the publisher they weren’t cheating.
I use Discord and XSplit a lot, so I guess I’ll find out the hard way if these bans are false positives.
