This Week in Destiny – 04/18/2024

This week in Destiny, we’re thinking about clans. Well, clans and fireteams. In other words, all the people that you join on your path to gear and glory. We’ve got a few related updates, so let's get into it!

List of topics for the week:

• The Final Shape raid on June 7.
• The Final Shape clan updates.
• Fireteam Finder out of beta.
• Destiny 2: Into the Light content in Year 10.
• Bungie Bounty for Good.
• Onslaught Legend challenge winners.
• Destiny 2: Into the Light launch day server fix.

Save the Date: The Final Shape Raid

After the launch of The Final Shape on June 4, Guardians won’t have to wait too long to tackle the raid. The new raid will launch on June 7 at 10 AM PT. So gather your fireteam, gear up, and get ready!

The Final Shape Clan Updates

We’re also delivering some new content and quality of life improvements to clans that we hope will breathe some life into the system and encourage players to play with their clanmates.

First up, Hawthorne will be receiving a vendor reputation track. Guardians can earn clan reputation by completing activities, with higher difficulty activities giving more progress and playing with clanmates giving a large bonus to progression.

Clan bounties are also getting some love, with the Nightfall bounty no longer requiring clan level 6 to claim. There will also be two new bounty types, one for Seasonal content and one for dungeons. All clan bounties will also grant some clan reputation.

The clan perks of yore had gotten a little stale, so they’re getting a full refresh. Check out the new perks below:

Lastly, clan XP is getting a rework on the backend to be more consistent along with some XP source tuning, so players should have an easier time consistently earning XP for their clans. If you’ve never been in a clan, now’s a great time to hop in and meet some new friends.

Fireteam Finder Moving Out Of Beta

Earlier this week, we removed the beta tag from Fireteam Finder. We’re thrilled to reach this important milestone, with the feature set and performance reaching a place where we are comfortable moving it into its full release.

We first introduced Fireteam Finder in November with our raid stress tests. During those tests, the community showed up in droves to help us see how far we could push the system. We were happy to see how well the system performed under heavy use, and the testing helped us confirm that Fireteam Finder was ready for beta.

When we released the beta in December, we were pleased to see players immediately connect, forming fireteams and tackling all types of content together. We continued to work hard to make improvements and iterate based on your feedback including:  

• Destiny Companion app and Bungie.net integration.
• Updated Roster tab to display 12 players on each per page.
• Improved screen-to-screen flow.
• Improved feedback when submitting applications.
• Legibility improvements on listing info.
• Clearer indication of new pending applications for leaders.
• Added emoji to listing titles.
• Onslaught and Zero Hour options.
• Over 60 additional bug fixes and other improvements.

But we aren’t done yet. We’re going to continue to develop and improve Fireteam Finder, just as we have these past few months. In the near term, we have new features like voice chat and lobby invites that you can look forward to. We wanted to give a big thank you to the community. We couldn’t have done it without you. From your participation during our testing phases to your feedback these past few months, your passion for helping us make this a great experience has been instrumental in getting us to this point. Please keep sharing your feedback.

Destiny 2: Into the Light in Year 10

With Destiny 2: Into the Light, we’ve introduced a variety of activities and rewards to celebrate the lead-up to The Final Shape. This includes a blend of limited-time content with activities and rewards that will continue to be available to players after the event ends. We’d like to give you a full breakdown of the content plan leading up to The Final Shape.

LIMITED-TIME ACTIVITIES AND REWARDS

To start, we want to highlight the content that will only be available during Destiny 2: Into the Light.

Pantheon activity and emblems

Pantheon is our raid boss gauntlet that will be available from April 30 to June 3. With Pantheon, we wanted to create a unique and challenging event that players could test their mettle against, prior to our big battle in The Final Shape. Pantheon will offer a chance to earn a variety of emblems, and similar to the limited-time emblems we’ve made available in past Contest Raids, we expect the exclusivity of these emblems will make them highly sought after.

We've been thrilled to see the response to our reveal of Pantheon and know players are eager to jump in and play. While our initial stab at a boss gauntlet was always intended to be a time-limited event, we are eager to see player feedback about the mode to inform future plans.

Destiny 2: Into the Light and Pantheon Seal and title

The Godslayer title, earned through the Pantheon event, and the Brave title, earned through Destiny 2: Into the Light Triumphs, will also be limited-time rewards. As is the case with Moments of Triumph, these titles are meant to commemorate a unique moment of time and show others players your accomplishments during Destiny 2: Into the Light. When you see these in the future, you’ll know these are the Guardians that stood tall as we prepared to battle the Witness.

BRAVE arsenal limited-edition variants

As we’ve previously mentioned, the limited-edition variants of the BRAVE arsenal weapons will only be available until June 3.

Hall of Champions and associated quests

The Hall of Champions and associated content, such as the Arcite 99-40 quests, armor chests, and weapon attunement, will no longer be available after June 3. While the Hall of Champions will have served its purpose as a base of operations as we defend against the Witness’s forces before The Final Shape, some of the content associated with the Hall of Champions, like the Parade armor sets, will still be available in the future. Based on the reaction to Destiny 2: Into the Light, we’ve decided that the Superblack shader will return later on as well, but the best time to grab these rewards is before The Final Shape, while they have a deterministic path.

We really like the attunement experience so far, and while it won't be available right at the launch of The Final Shape, we’re already working on bringing back a new attunement experience for BRAVE weapons sometime during Echoes.

CONTENT CONTINUING AFTER JUNE 3

There are new features and rewards in Destiny 2: Into the Light that we plan to keep around after the event ends.

Onslaught Activity and BRAVE Arsenal Weapons

The Onslaught activity and its BRAVE arsenal weapon rewards will move to Vanguard Ops as a dedicated playlist when The Final Shape releases. We are planning for weapon attunement to return in a new form sometime during Echoes.

PvP Maps

All three of the new PvP maps arriving on May 7 will be sticking around after Destiny 2: Into the Light concludes.

The Whisper and Zero Hour Exotic Missions and Rewards

These reprised Exotic missions will continue to be available and move to the Legends tab after June 3. The Exotic weapons and catalyst rewards from these missions will also still be available to earn from Eris Morn and Ada-1.

Parade Armor and Shaders

Finally, as mentioned above, the armor and shaders added in Destiny 2: Into the Light will be available to earn after June 3. We’ll have more details in the future on the new ways you can earn these rewards, but for items that take a good deal of time to earn like Superblack, we want to make sure we honor that commitment when we bring it back.

We’re hoping the full details of these activities will help you prioritize where you want to spend your time and what rewards you’d like to prioritize.

Bungie Bounty For Good

The Bungie Bounty For Good returns, as promised, for its second livestream. Join the Bungie Foundation today, April 18, as we join the community in the Crucible and put some good out into the world.

Today’s Bounty will be supporting Ronald McDonald House and their Kilts For Kids campaign. This is the thirteenth edition of the annual event, and supporters will have a chance to earn the all-new Heart of a Highlander emblem and the Kilted Out shader. For every point the Bungie fireteam scores during the stream, we will be donating $2 to Ronald McDonald House.

Joining us on the Bungie fireteam today will be Benny and PureChill. Below are a few important details for the stream:

• Playing 6v6 Crucible matches.
• Matching to UK host (since we used a US host last time).
• The Bungie fireteam will be 4 to 5 players. The community will be able to match both against us or with us.
• The winning teams will earn the Light Lotus emblem. If the Bungie team wins, any fireteam members that joined us will earn the emblem.

Head to https://www.twitch.tv/bungiefoundation now to tune in!

Light Lotus

Onslaught Legends Winners

To celebrate the release of Onslaught, we put out a challenge, offering a reward to the first three fireteams that completed Onslaught on Legend difficulty. Today we wanted to share the teams that met this challenge.

Congratulations to the winning teams! We’ll be reaching out to the winners on Bungie.net with more details on prizing.

Destiny 2: Into The Light Launch Day Server Fix

We wanted to give a brief explanation of what caused the launch-day issues and how we plan to avoid similar issues for the launch of The Final Shape.

In preparation for The Final Shape, our datacenter underwent a full upgrade late last year. In the past, we’ve run our servers with a combination of configurations which made understanding performance and load balancing tricky. This time we preferred a single setup that was much more powerful than the previous versions.

In our early load testing, we didn’t fully saturate our server CPU usage. Because the testing showed that we were able to achieve our target concurrency numbers at this range of CPU usage, we concluded the testing.

But when we shipped Destiny2: Into the Light, we quickly realized something was wrong. As people started joining the game and our concurrency numbers grew, our performance metrics weren’t scaling as expected. Some servers were getting close to 100% usage while others were effectively at 0%. Correspondingly, some users were having a normal experience, and some were having consistent problems—rewards showing up late, getting kicked from the game, and so on.

We realized that the servers were not fully utilizing the available hardware resources. Additionally, an operating system misconfiguration and reporting problem was causing our load balancer to stress the servers even further.

Once we understood the root cause, we mitigated the immediate problem on launch day by adding additional servers. This gave us enough breathing room to prepare the real fix. The next morning, we deployed the fix that allowed the servers to be able to use all the machine resources.

In preparation for The Final Shape, we are:

• Validating the settings for every service that could have this kind of problem.
• Improving reporting so that we can monitor the behavior of load balancing.
• Running additional stress scenarios and adding more test coverage for our servers.
• Running performance comparisons for servers running under different configurations.
• Re-evaluating our capacity estimates, to ensure we have the right hardware in place for launch.

Player Support Report

*Mountaintop bounces straight to the stratosphere.*

Known Issues List  |  Help Forums  |  Bungie Help Twitter

THE FINAL SHAPE PRE-ORDER ITEMS

Players looking to claim the reward items from pre-ordering The Final Shape need to visit the Special Deliveries Kiosk in the Tower to receive anything that has not yet been claimed.

Anyone unable to claim items that they are expecting should double check the status of their pre-orders with the platform where their pre-order was purchased.

KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help forum:

• Claiming a New Light Kit can override existing loadouts on the selected subclass.
• One of the prison cells in the Warlord’s Ruin dungeon has an additional door blocking solo completion.
• The Laser Cutter ship’s wings and translucent parts of the Afterglow Sparrow disappear when equipping certain shaders.
• The Gilded Cage ornament for the Whisper of the Worm Exotic is missing some details when viewed from specific angles.
• Players who have text chat disabled via settings or age gating will have text chat UI disappear entirely instead of displaying a disabled message.
• Players experiencing issues with no game audio since Update 7.3.6 should attempt to set their in-game Voice Chat setting to Off.

For a full list of emergent issues in Destiny 2, players can review our Known Issues article. Players who observe other issues should report them to our #Help forum.

NO TASK TOO SMALL

Oh, so if Mr. Miyagi teaches karate by making you apply wax, he is a genius. But if Shaxx asks you to go fishing in preparation to fight the Witness, he is a madman? Shame on you, Guardian.

Vanade via Twitter/X

RETURN OF THE WORM

When you whisper to the void worm, does it whisper back? Well, sometimes it bounces back.

Movie of the Week: 

And that’s everything we have for this week. With Destiny 2: Into the Light in full swing, we’ve seen some pretty impressive god rolls on those BRAVE arsenal weapons. But don’t let up, Pantheon is only a few weeks away. Make sure you are geared up and ready to go.

We’ll be back next week with another TWID. Until then, be good to each other, and thanks for hanging out with us.

Destiny 2 Community Team