It has been a difficult year for Destiny 2competitive mode of high stakes. Trials of Osiris was plagued by cheating, flaws and unbalanced combinations. It is now a focus on result manipulation, as players try to manipulate the system to get their coveted rewards without actually working, and Bungie decided to take everything offline for the third consecutive week to resolve this.
Problems with match-fixing surfaced around February 28. Trials Report, a third-party website that analyzes player data, noted that of the 23.66 players who were perfect so far that weekend (meaning they achieved seven wins and no losses) 16,300 had five deaths or less. 11,281 had none. The only way to record these types of numbers is if opponents are killing themselves. Bungie continued to take Osiris Challenges offline. Then canceled the following weekend Testing event too. On March 11, the studio wrote on Twitter that it had “solved this problem, ”And the tests would return the next day. And so it was. And so did the combination of results. And now it’s offline again.
How, exactly, does result manipulation work in the Osiris Challenge? YouTuber Lunarated we exposed in detail in a video a few weeks ago, but essentially revolves around teams that signal their willingness to negotiate wins by equipping a particular piece of banner art (Hakke) to your characters. When two of these teams are pitted against each other at random, they play virtual dice to see which side will win and continue from there with the fixed match. The whole process is made easier by the fact that Steam has a virtual data function built into the messaging app, making it much easier for random PC players to coordinate.
A complicating factor are tickets, cards that record wins and losses and that are a prerequisite for playing Trials. Get three losses and you will have to return or restart your ticket, erasing all the victories you may have won. To work around this problem, players who lost a dice roll and were forced to lose simply gave up on the games, logged in as a “fictional” character and recorded the loss there, saving all wins for their main character. The ability to give up on a match and return is now at the heart of the controversy surrounding match-fixing, and the thing that Bungie seems to be focusing on to try to contain it.
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“Due to an issue with the Fireteam Rejoin feature, Trials of Osiris was disabled for the rest of the weekend,” wrote Bungie on Twitter on the weekend. “We will provide updates when available.” The studio did not respond to a request for comment on what remains the problem or whether the manipulation of results is considered cheating.
Initial reports at the time it was these match-handling rings that first gained popularity among Steam users in China. But result manipulation quickly seemed to become more widespread than that. After all, a big part of playing Destiny 2 is taking advantage of all available means to get the best loot as quickly as possible. Trials Adept weapons, which are reserved exclusively for those who manage to accumulate perfect winning streaks, are some of the best in the game, so it’s not surprising that result manipulation has fallen into the category of SGA (Super Good Advice) on the game subreddit.
It also led to a deep inner search in the Destiny community about whether match-fixing is hurting the game and whether Bungie was too quick and severe to try to resolve it. Although aimed at high level end players, Trials of Osiris is not a sport and is not connected to any major competition. Your rewards cannot be traded or sold, and there is an endless supply of them. Someone who gets them by manipulating results is not taking them away from those who are competing normally.
The counterargument, of course, is that the players involved in the manipulation of results are undermining the integrity of the mode, and the larger serve grind, and devaluing the meaning of the exclusive weapons earned there by allowing each player with some patience to acquire they. And then there is long strands in the game’s subreddit discussing whether the manipulation of results in Trials is a scourge or a clever workaround, and what Bungie should or should not do about it. The studio has already pledged to testing review before the end of the year to “improve overall health” in the way.
In the meantime, many players (including me) will lose another week of Trial equipment. Having acknowledged testing failures last fall, Bungie implemented a new engram that would guarantee a weekly portion of the mod’s loot, whether you win, lose, or jump off a cliff to avoid playing completely. I hope that this is also not prohibited.