Bungie has good news and bad news for Destiny 2 players: The good news is that the studio has figured out what caused a "high number" of player names to be randomly changed by its automated moderation tool, but the bad news is that it's going to take a while to fix.
The problem first came to light when players began reporting that their names had been changed for no apparent reason. Bungie will do that to player names that violate its naming policies: Names are run through a "character filtration and offensive term moderation system," and any that are found to break the rules "will be changed to 'Guardian[Random Number]'."
Some players whose names were changed said on Reddit that they were initially told by moderators that their handles must have violated the policies somehow, but the sheer scale and randomness of the problem seemed to make that unlikely. Then yesterday, Bungie acknowledged that something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong.
"We are tracking an issue where a high number of account names have been changed by our Bungie name moderation tool," the Destiny 2 Team wrote. "We are actively investigating and expect to have more information tomorrow, including details on an additional name change token for all players."
Bungie didn't say how many players, but admitting it was a "high number" indicates that it was probably quite a lot: PC Gamer brand director and inveterate Destiny 2 junkie Tim Clark was one of the victims of the glitch, discovering to his dismay that instead of Clarkinator#0576, he is now Guardian3592#1280.
Changing your name back isn't as simple as, well, changing your name back, for a couple reasons. One, Destiny 2 doesn't allow players to change their names at will: You need a token to do so, and they're very rare. The release of the Into the Light expansion earlier this year gave players an additional opportunity to change their names—the "name change token" Bungie referenced in the message above—but if you've already used it, or if you don't have Into the Light, you're probably out of luck. And even if you do have a name change token kicking around, you're hosed anyway: Numerous redditors say they're unable to change their names even with a token, because the moderation system won't let it happen.
Community site D2Checkpoint, which normally spends its time holding boss checkpoints from raids and dungeons for players to nab, posted a semi-workaround to the problem on Twitter. Simplistically, close the game instead of selecting the "continue" button at the message warning of the name change, then wait five minutes and try again—but it's very situational, and obviously doesn't do any good for people who are already past that point.
Bungie says it's identified the problem and rolled out a fix to prevent the glitch from happening any more, but as for players who have already had their names swapped, there's still some waiting ahead.
"We are continuing to investigate options to address player accounts that were impacted," the Destiny 2 Team tweeted. "This will take some time as our path forward will be dependent on fixing the underlying issue.
"As noted yesterday, we are still planning to distribute name change tokens to all players at a later date to assist. As we have more information, we'll be sure to share it with you."
It's not the biggest problem in the world: Everyone can still play the game and will get their proper handles back eventually, and for anyone who wanted to change their name prior to the blowup but couldn't, it's really a blessing in disguise. But it doesn't look good. It's been just over a week since Bungie's last Destiny 2 botch—an attempted buff of exotic item drop rates ended up nerfing them into oblivion instead—and just two weeks since the studio laid off 220 employees (but not CEO Pete Parsons).
That deep cut came less than a year after a previous round of layoffs that put numerous high-profile employees out of work and outraged Destiny 2 fans—fans who are growing increasingly unhappy with Bungie's seeming freefall. "It turns out that if you fire a bunch of your QA staff, the game you're making will tend to run into quality issues," Clark wrote last week, and while these problems may not be a direct outcome of the cuts, it's a sentiment that's being increasingly felt among the Destiny community.
In a bid to throw players some sort of bone, the studio has just announced that the game's alien travelling salesman Xûr will begin selling those coveted exotic class items from this weekend: "Exotic Class Items on Xûr will cost 41 Strange Coins and will have random rolls. The only requirement to get them is to have unlocked the regular acquisition path through the Dual Destiny mission for each character. If not offered, the alternative is an Exotic Cipher, which will cost 79 Strange Coins and will be limited to one per account."
But Bungie being Bungie, this is where the monkey paw curls again.
"Xûr will be guaranteed to sell Exotic Class items the first week this category is available on August 23, but every week afterwards he will return to his RNG ways, as his will is not his own." Quite why ol' squid face can't sell them every week is baffling, and I would humbly suggest now is not the time to prod the community with another RNG stick, particularly if your justification for it is some hokey lore, but who are any of us to argue?
