While the majority of Destiny 2 players enjoy a dive into Warlord’s Ruin, the new dungeon that dropped on Dec. 1, those partaking in the game’s Trials of Osiris weekend are facing a crisis. That’s because, according to one creator, cheaters are “everywhere” in the playlist.
“The 3v3 Trials playlist is borderline unplayable at the moment,” wrote content creator GernaderJake in a frustrated post on Dec. 2, a sentiment that only grew more pained as the weekend continued. On Dec. 3, he said that, of the eight matches of Trials of Osiris he played that morning, cheaters were on the opposing team in five of them. “How can you charge us every few months for a new season and allow this to happen? You can’t justify this.”
Trials of Osiris has already undergone a plethora of changes over the years in an attempt to curb the issue of cheating. Access to the mode was locked behind the expansion paywall back in Season of the Lost, and more recently, Bungie has been going after cheat-makers in court directly. Unfortunately for players, the fight against cheaters is a neverending one, and in Season of the Wish, it seems like it’s a battle Bungie is currently losing.
Liana Ruppert, one of Destiny 2’s community managers who was laid off on Oct. 30 along with roughly 100 other employees, has a pretty good idea of what the root cause might be. In a response to one of GernaderJake’s posts, she pointed directly at the fact Bungie laid off “a significant portion” of its security team as one of the reasons the current wave of cheaters are slipping past the net. When one player replied there were plenty of cheaters even before the layoffs, Ruppert emphasized she “never said to the contrary,” but that it’s “not going to get better with less people.”
“They needed more people, not less, that’s all my point is and was,” she said in a follow-up post. “The layoffs will and have already had a negative impact on several processes across disciplines.”
The cheating issue is undoubtedly exacerbated by a few factors this weekend specifically too. The dungeon’s release is the most obvious one; there are going to be less players in Trials of Osiris than normal because a portion of the community is grinding out the new endgame activity.
The population then takes another hit due to The Messenger being the Flawless reward this weekend instead of one of the new weapons added to the loot pool in Season of the Wish. A lower population is going to bring a greater spotlight onto the minority of cheaters infesting the playlist, especially for players like GernaderJake in the upper echelons of the matchmaking brackets.
Whether it’s an issue Bungie can easily address isn’t clear, but the fear remains that the longer cheaters are able to run rampant in these Crucible lobbies, the more difficulties Destiny 2 will face with retaining a healthy PvP population.
