MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Update: 26/10: Blizzard continue to claim the bans aren’t the fault of third party software, although have unbanned several users, claiming that some bans were overturned upon “further review” of their PC security measures.
Upon further review of our PC security measures, some bans have been overturned.https://t.co/LuCCZ3BN6M
— Bungie (@Bungie) October 26, 2017
This raises the important question of exactly what is throwing up false positives for Bungie’s big ol’ ban machine.
We spoke to one player who was banned by Bungie and unbanned this morning. He said that he was banned without an error message. “The game crashed to Windows when I was loading into Titan, and completely hard locked the PC. I rebooted and tried to log back in, and got the ban message.”
Similarly, when he was unbanned he said that he received no prompt or email to suggest it was lifted. “I only found out I was unbanned because a bunch of people tweeted me about the update, and quite a few pinged me on Reddit after the read my post yesterday.”
So, what was running on his PC?
“Absolutely nothing aside from Windows 10, the Battle.net launcher and Destiny 2.
"I bought an SSD at the weekend and instead of faffing around I decided to just wipe everything and start from scratch. Essentially it’s a completely fresh OS install and there’s not a single other thing on it apart from Destiny. No other games, programs, MP3s, movies, pictures, anything.”
It paints a confusing picture for the Destiny 2 ban problem, which again, Bungie insist isn’t due to third party software. We’ll release more as we find it.
Original Story: PC players for Destiny 2 are claiming to have received bans for running multiple chat and screen capture programs.
Reports are flooding into Destiny 2’s subreddit that players are being banned for using numerous third party applications that include Discord, OBS and Xsplit in addition to several others. However, Cozmo, a community manager working for Bungie has claimed that while “Third-party applications that aren’t compatible with Destiny 2 may cause the game to not run but won’t result in a ban.”
These problems seem to be occurring nearly at random. From personal anecdotal evidence, 10-15 friends played all night on Destiny 2 using Discord, Shadowplay, OBS and other programs running and didn’t experience any issues, although any game overlays didn’t work. Meanwhile, players are reporting permanent bans running the game on brand new PCs, so there’s inconsistency to the reports. This follows complaints of similar problems in the PC beta for the game.
According to the primary reddit thread, running OBS, Xsplit, Fraps, Mumble, Discord, MSI Afterburner, EVGA Precision XOC will get you bans, but whether or not you will actually pick up a ban is in doubt. Bungie’s help forum and the subreddit are currently inundated with complaints from players that claim to have picked up bans, but there’s been no official statement yet beyond a couple of answers on the forums from community managers and this tweet from the PC project lead saying the claims of bans are "internet BS"
We do block programs from pushing their code into our game. Most overlays work like that. We don't ban for that tho. That's internet BS.
— Shaw (@ShockAndShaw) October 25, 2017
There’s always the possibility that a few of these ban reports are players banned for illicit activities, as players banned for trying to break the rules often will not own up to breaking the rules. However, the reports on Reddit are widespread, so it might be worth turning off a few programs until Bungie release further information.
