'We made one big mistake': Destiny 2 developer reveals how a small team dedicated to player retention led to a 20 hour server outage and character rollback

Destiny 2 has had a turbulent history—it's a game that, since its release in 2017, has seen many ups, downs, and outright blunders. So a GDC talk from one of Bungie's developers titled "Rescuing a Playerbase from the Doldrums" could apply to any number of periods throughout the game's life.

At this talk specifically, though, Destiny 2 principle designer Alan Blaine addresses the state of the game back in late 2022. This was the period in the months after the release of The Witch Queen—itself an exceptional expansion—where the playerbase finally snapped and declared it had had enough of the seasonal model.

Things came to a head during Season of the Plunder—at the time I wrote about growing player burnout with the seasonal release model and the shadow it was casting over the game.

"Starting in September 2022 and continuing through November, our weekly active users dropped lower and faster than we've seen since 2018 with no known cause," Blaine tells the GDC crowd, summarising the problem. "Similarly, player sentiment was also falling lower and faster than we'd seen."

Player surveys were showing that fewer people would recommend the game to their friends, and pre-orders for the game's next expansion, Lightfall, were down. Things were looking bleak.

In response, Bungie launched a player retention team—a specialised strikeforce of developers, including Blaine and other designers from different disciplines within the studio, who could rapidly identify and address player pain points independently of other departments.

Much of the talk concerns how to create and organise such a team—this is GDC after all; the primary audience is other developers.

A surprising amount of the team's workflow centred around the trusty Post-it note. But as for what the team actually achieved, you can see the results throughout the early months of 2023. Blaine's team were responsible for the removal of blue gear drops for players at the soft power cap, for changes to the crafting system that made unlocking new weapons less time consuming, and for finally letting players customise their character—among other things.

Overall, Blaine naturally sees the team as a success. Certainly from the outside, the community sentiment for Season of the Seraph, which was running at the time, was a marked improvement. But Blaine does highlight one major problem that can result from such an agile team making rapid changes.

"In our haste to ship quickly and vigorously, as was our mandate, we accidentally shipped a nasty character corruption bug that caused us to take the game down for 24 hours and issue only our second rollback of a character database in Destiny history," says Blaine.

"There were a lot of causes for this bug: A misconfigured tool, out of date documentation, not enough time digging in to understand the risks of the solution. A test pass actually caught the symptoms of the bug, but none of us took it seriously enough or understood the root cause."

The rollback was detailed at the time on Bungie's blog—a result of moving some incompletable achievements into the archived section of the game's Triumphs menu. "It was a decent bit of quality of life, but really wasn't going to have as big an impact as we thought. It certainly wasn't worth the risk," says Blaine.

"What we should have done is just killed it at the sticky note phase, going 'this isn't going to be a huge sentiment win,' but at the time we were riding high off some of our early wins."

Ultimately, the retention strike team disbanded in April of 2023, returning to their various departments. "While we made one big mistake and we could have tightened up a few other things overall, it was a really good success," says Blaine.

It's an interesting look at a specific period of the game's history, although the elephant in the room here is that Destiny 2's community is still no stranger to the "doldrums"—to put it mildly. After all, the player retention team was active during the Lightfall launch, one of the biggest missteps in Destiny 2's history for reasons that were well beyond the scope of Blaine's team. Even recently, player sentiment—and concurrent Steam users—were at an all time low during the recent Revenant episode, only recovering somewhat with the launch of the genuinely quite good Heresy.

Clearly player retention is still a major problem, with a lot now riding on the big swings Bungie is planning to make in how it makes and releases new expansions as part of Destiny 2's Codename Frontiers project. It again remains to be seen if Bungie can pull back player sentiment, and—if it can—just how long those good vibes will last.