This Week At Bungie, we’re streaming… for the kids!

Hello there. If you’re reading this right at the moment of publication, then congratulations. You’ve just hit the $100k benchmark for our slot on the GCX stream! If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let’s break it down.



Between 9 AM and 1 PM PDT today, we’re live on the GCX Marathon Charity Stream, raising funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to help support children in need. Your donations help families around the world by contributing to the research and treatment of cancer. While you can take pride in helping by donating a few dollars, we also have a variety of incentives to provide some additional motivations.



If you haven’t donated, this is your chance! And if you missed our live stream, no worries – this initiative is being supported by many in the gaming community. Jump in and check it out.

We have some information regarding known issues and upcoming hotfixes in the full TWAB. Head over to Bungie.net for more!

This week at Bungie, we launched a whole bunch of missiles.

It’s been an action packed week. Over the weekend, we watched as Rasputin sent literal ordnance into the sky to take down the Almighty in Destiny 2’s first live in-game event. We followed that up with a mighty salvo of virtual launches in the form of media, articles, and a stream to showcase the future of Destiny. Season of Arrivals has started building a bridge to this fall, when Guardians will wield the Darkness for the first time in Destiny 2: Beyond Light.

Here’s the full stream in case you haven’t had a chance to watch yet.



Don’t have time to watch the full stream? Here are a couple of the first looks at Destiny 2: Beyond Light.





We’re excited about the future of Destiny. To lay the groundwork, we have to make some changes to the core game. Several less-explored locations and activities will be going into the Destiny Content Vault (DCV) to pave the way for new hotness like Europa coming this fall. We lay out a lot of information on what to expect in our Building a Viable Future in Destiny 2 article. We know you have a lot more questions and we’ll have answers to share throughout the summer.

Since Season of Arrivals acts as a prelude to Beyond Light, we have held our plans for the Season close to our chest until the reveal this week. The Pyramid ships have begun to arrive on Io and Eris is hard at work trying to decipher their intentions. She needs your help.



Oh, and did we mention there is a brand new dungeon? Prophecy is free to all players and transports you into a strange dimension to seek out the IX. It’s got some real Rainbow Road vibes too. Here’s a peek.



The future is bright and full of new challenges to tackle. We hope to see you out there.

Make sure you check out the full TWAB for more info on Matchmaking changes, Bungie Rewards and more.

June 9 was host to a bunch of announcements and conversations about Destiny 2. We have new content you can play right now and we’re looking out years into the future at where our journey will lead us. All of this has been informed by where we’ve been on this adventure in years past. If you missed any of it, here’s a full rundown of everything we've shown off and talked about today.

Building a Viable Future In Destiny 2

Beyond Light Article

Season of Arrivals Article

Beyond Light Support

Season of Arrivals Support

The Almighty hangs in the sky above the Last City, for now. Make your way to the Tower and await Rasputin's countermeasures.

This Week At Bungie, Season of the Worthy is ready for departure.

We've got a lot to cover this week. Black Lives Matter, Pride, a June 9 tune in, patch note previews, and more.

Head on over to Bungie.net for all the details.

This week at Bungie, we look to the sky.

Ever since this Season began, the Almighty has been hurtling through space on its collision course with Earth. The Cabal are not known for their graceful defeats. Every day we spend preparing our long lost Seraph to mount a response, that derelict destroyer rockets ever closer to our home, spelling certain doom for the City.

Rasputin is at full power. We're as ready as we'll ever be. Now, eclipsing our own sun is a stark reminder that a great threat approaches. Eyes up!

Destiny has been a shared pastime for long enough now to have established some strong traditions. Each year we spend in service of the Guardians, we can mark our calendars by the next development milestone we’ll reach or the next event we’ll attend to spread the news. Some of us have had the remarkable privilege to travel the world and meet some of you fine people to talk about what comes next.

This year finds us all in a scenario that puts us all very far away from business as usual. Basically, all flights originating from our Tower are grounded. Development of Destiny 2 continues, only we are all working from the safety of our homes. We have exciting news to share with you about our plans, but it won’t happen at some fancy convention under hot lights. Instead, we'll use the Internet.

If you are familiar with the rituals and cycles that mark a year in the life of a Guardian, you must be curious as to when we'll begin a conversation about what is next. We can't put a date on that just yet, but we will very soon. That's a promise. We know you're hungry for that news and we're just as eager to deliver it.

Keep your eyes trained on @Bungie for updates. We’ll stream our announcements in the usual places. You’ll learn about the next Season of Destiny 2 at the same time that we talk about the next chapter in this story that has been unfolding all year long.

Check out the full TWAB for more!

This week at Bungie, something unexpected happened on the way to the Moon Bunker.

Many of you have been chasing a Lie. Last week, you began your hunt with Ana, successfully defending Seraph Towers in the Winding Cove, Anchor of Light, and the Rupture (or watched as your fellow Guardians carried the weight…). You burned through a thousand enemies with your trusty Shotgun. Sadly, your quest for answers came to a halt on Sunday evening, all thanks to a faulty door on the Moon’s bunker.

Earlier this morning, Destiny 2 Hotfix 2.8.1.3 was released, unblocking your journey in finding truth behind The Lie. While we hate to see a bug ship, we’re excited to right the ship as quickly as possible.

Now, we look to what comes next. Season of the Worthy is winding down, which means it’s time for a round of previews from the team. This week, we’re hyper focused on Legendary Engrams and weapon tuning.

Hit the jump for more.

This week at Bungie, a new quest was discovered.

Guardian Games has come to a close. Hunters won the first day, but Titans showed up in force to completely dominate the rest of the event. Warlocks took home the silver, and Hunters still look frabjous.

The final Iron Banner of the Season is also live this week and, along with it, players have discovered a new quest. The community has been tasked with helping Rasputin by completing Seraph Tower events and are currently working to complete the objectives on EDZ, the Moon, and Io.

We’ve seen feedback that the Tower events are too difficult and that it’s hard to wrangle up enough people to join the cause. We have made some server-side changes to lower the difficulty of the event to help alleviate frustrations and increase your success rate.

We made an error when we calculated how many completions were required, so yesterday we introduced bonus multipliers to help the community’s progress and get you all on your way to the next step. You can read more details on the changes we made here.

We also some important info on future changes to Legendary gear infusion, some reward changes next season, and more in the full TWAB here.

This week at Bungie, Guardian Games nears the finish line. But before we dive into our weekly update, here’s a word from Luke Smith about a topic on many players’ mind these days: Eververse.

Hit the jump for more.

This week at Bungie, Titan domination continues.

Guardian Games continues into its second week and, after a good showing by Hunters on Day 1, it’s been all Titans all day every day. The book readers haven’t scored a win yet, but are optimistic they can rally.

After Day 1, we saw a lot of players asking about score weighting since the results seemed to play out like the population of classes predicted. Since Titans have been relentlessly destroying the other classes, we have seen players asking if there may be some other issue going on. As a Hunter, I too am in disbelief as I watch our flag try to bury itself into the ground. We’ve been double checking behind the scenes and digging into the data to get a better picture of what’s going on. Here is Senior Designer Peter Sarrett to share some of our findings.

Peter Sarrett: When we first started planning Guardian Games, we knew there were more Hunters than other classes in the population and we’d have to do something to account for that so that the competition would be fair. “Fair” can mean different things. Our goal was that each class should have an equal chance to win regardless of its size, and that participating in the event should never hurt your team.

That last part is important, because it ruled out the simplest approach of basing results on the average contribution per class. While this would effectively normalize the classes based on how many people participate, it would also create a situation where participating at anything but a maximal level could actually HARM your team by bringing its average down. Dipping your toe into the event by depositing a single bronze medal per day would be worse for your team than just staying home.

So instead of normalizing based on participating players, we decided to normalize based on the pool of potential players. For each class, we counted every character who played at least one activity over the 30 days prior to the event and then divided that result by the total across all three classes. The result is the scaling factor that we apply to each medal deposited. This method means that medals from Warlocks and Titans count more, counteracting Hunters’ population advantage, and ensures that even a minimal level of participation helps your team. The more members of your class that show up to play, the better your class will do. It also means we don’t have to worry about players creating tons of dummy alt accounts once the event begins to try to tank a team’s chances.

On Day 1 of the event, Hunters won not because there are more of them, but because a greater percentage of them showed up and contributed. On Day 2 Titans arrived and began outperforming the Hunters. Warlocks are, no doubt, considering all the angles and planning for the right moment to strike.

This graph shows how many of each class actually participated, relative to how many characters each class had active during the prior 30 days of the event beginning. You can see the tight correlation between more bodies in the game and the outcome of the competition:



But that’s not the whole story. Titans haven’t just been overwhelming the competition with a flood of muscle mass. They’ve also been out-depositing the other classes on an individual basis. On average, each Titan has contributed more medals to their cause than each Hunter or Warlock. This was even true on Day 1 but, on that day, there were enough Hunters participating that they made up in bodies what they lacked in output.



So we can see that Titans are outperforming on two fronts: a higher percentage of their ranks are showing up to participate, and when they do, each of them is depositing more medals than their competitors. If Hunters or Warlocks up their game and get more of their compatriots to pitch in, there’s still time to steal the momentum.

We’ve seen the reports of shenanigans with players finding glitches to turn in more medals, or even be dedicated enough to delete characters to be able to put in extra medals for their team. We dug into the data to see if this was something to be concerned about and found neither case was having any impact on the results.

It’s also worth mentioning how the flags in the Tower work. At the start of the day, all the teams are even and so the flags begin at the midpoint of their poles. This represents equilibrium, where all teams have an even 33.33 percent of all accumulated points for the day. As medals get deposited and teams move away from equilibrium, the flags adjust. We expected that teams would stay fairly close to each other, and that all the action would occur in a narrow band around the equilibrium point. If a team ever pulls 5 percent ahead (with a total of 38.33 percent or more of all points), their flag will hit the top of their pole. Likewise, a team dropping 5 percent behind (at 28.33 percent or less) will hit the bottom of their pole. If a team goes beyond these values, their flag will just stay pegged at the top or bottom until the values come back into that +/- 5 percent window.

We don’t plan on making any changes that will affect the results in any way. Our goal has always been to create a competition that is decided by how much each class engages with the event, and not which class has the largest roster. Titans are currently engaging the most, but we will see if they keep it up.

Check out the full TWAB for more information on future changes to Bounties and our Seasonal Model as well as an update on charity initiatives.