For many players of Destiny 2, the Year of Lightfall has felt more like the Year of Disconnect Errors, with the game’s stability feeling generally rocky. In the studio’s weekly newsletter, Bungie finally explained the problem and also discussed what it’s doing to fix it.
While the post opens by crowing proudly about the stability during the launch of the Lightfall expansion and the world first race for its raid, it does acknowledge that things have been otherwise bumpy – and it’s primarily thanks to infrastructure improvements applied to make those events go off without a hitch. Upgrades made to a claims service that grant it extra resources during moments of high concurrency have not been recovering as expected.
This has forced Bungie’s engineering team to attack the problem through updates over the course of multiple patches and seasons: A mid-season patch will make targeted improvements to the backend’s logging and alerting systems, Season 22 will bring additional improvements to help the claims service’s “self-healing” along with extra testing features, and Season 23 plans to add more architectural improvements to help service stability and rapid recovery depending on how Season 22’s backend updates work out. These are on top of ongoing plans to improve the team’s production and deployment processes as well as refinements to incident response times.
“Fixing these claims issues is the very top priority of our services organization right now, but we must do it very carefully,” the post warns. “This is not a process that can happen overnight, and we must make sure that as we make these fixes, we guarantee that your gameplay messages get routed reliably so that your Destiny 2 experience remains smooth and stable.”
