It was only last week that news of Bungie winning a lawsuit against a Destiny 2 player who threatened one of its staff members made clear the severity of the abuse that its team was often subject to.
While the developer has made efforts to reduce and anonymize its communication with the community in an effort to improve things, it’s become clear that the relationship is at an all-time low.
In response to a July 17 post on Reddit asking Bungie to use its Destiny 2 Team Twitter account more, the BNGHelp account explained that developers “who aren’t even CM’s are still being harassed just because they work at Bungie.” Due to how widespread the issue continues to be, they stressed that even using the CM account “will put a bigger target on all of the CM’s backs” and that the regular responses the community used to enjoy shouldn’t be expected to return for the foreseeable future.
Negativity in the Destiny 2 community has become all the more prevalent over the past few months. The overwhelmingly critical response to the game’s Lightfall expansion in February was a catalyst for community sentiment to further degrade when the game began to be inundated with numerous server issues and the state of the Eververse store became a topic of discussion.
Amidst the ebb and flow of discussion, bad actors clearly took things too far and caused Bungie to further reduce its communication outside of the weekly blog posts and occasional responses to specific controversies.
Related: Bungie wins $490,000 lawsuit against Destiny 2 player who threatened community dev
Bungie had already made strides toward prioritizing employee safety and limiting its direct communication on social media when it created the Destiny 2 Teams account on Twitter. However, activity even on this anonymized account has reduced over time.
“I completely understand the want to go back to how we used to respond all the time here, but that time has passed,” wrote the BNGHelp account. “Until everyone can feel safe again, I wouldn’t expect to see many responses from us here for the foreseeable future. However, just because we aren’t responding often doesn’t mean we aren’t still looking at feedback. So please, keep it coming.”
In response to one reply arguing that harassment is a common thing they should be used to, the account further stated that “we don’t accept that being harassed is ‘just part of life.’ This kind of mindset is unhealthy, and we aren’t going to put ourselves in danger for a video game, much less Reddit.”
As the months continue to go by, it’s difficult to imagine a time when the team at Bungie will feel safe again in the way that they would need in order to restore the communication that the Destiny 2 community used to enjoy. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs when considering how close the developers and fanbase once were, but it’s an understandable reality that employee safety takes priority in the face of a rising tide of direct harassment.
