January 19, 2023 Bungie responded to fears involving mysterious character deletions, its statement is included below.
Over the past few weeks, several players have reported they suddenly found themselves without access to specific Destiny 2 characters, prompting fears across the player community that their Guardian personas were being deleted. However, Bungie has said that it has investigated the claims, and that it is confident no characters or progress in the popular FPS game were lost – at least, not by Destiny’s systems.
In the most recent case, a Destiny 2 player posted to Reddit that upon logging in after several days of inactivity, they experienced connection issues before the game “deleted” their Warlock character. The Guardian even says they went on the Bungie Help forums to explain the situation but was met with general advice that didn’t directly address the issue. Via Twitter, a Bungie representative shared that they have the reports involving the player’s account, though it does not appear to have been recovered yet.
Several days ago, another Redditor shared an update that their own Warlock character was also suddenly gone. As of the player’s most recent update, they have not recovered their character.
Last week, another player shared on Reddit that their Titan character had disappeared after an in-game server notice. While the Titan player eventually reported a successful recovery, they said their character, which previously had about 1500 hours in the game, now only showed as having 200 hours of play. While the hours spent on the character should not impact gameplay, it can be a matter of pride for players to show off their level of commitment through the hours put into a specific character.
Apparently, someone had one of their characters deleted after getting a "Contacting Destiny Servers" notice.
This is getting out of hand. pic.twitter.com/2Kub1Yjwop
— Destiny Bulletin (@DestinyBulletn) January 12, 2023
Destiny 2 is shutting down on Stadia on January 18, prompting many to ask if the issue could be related to Stadia-related account issues. Bungie advises players who have characters on Stadia accounts to save them on other platforms via cross-save to avoid losing them. However, at least one of the players claims Stadia cross-save could not be the issue in this case because the player does not have a Stadia account.
The deletions come on the tail of complaints that the Destiny 2 game architecture needs serious upgrades, piggybacking on a recent increase in issues such as ANTEATER error codes impacting players’ attempts to connect to the game.
“Maintaining your characters and progress is our top priority,” Bungie said in a statement addressing players’ fears of unexpected character deletion. “After kicking off a deep dive investigation of a very low number of reports of missing characters out of an abundance of caution, we are confident that no characters or progress were incorrectly lost by our systems.”
In any case, players can now look forward to the Destiny 2 Lightfall release date and the introduction of the Destiny 2 Strand subclass. In the meantime, you can check out our list of the best free PC games to see a list of other games to play until Bungie resolves the issues.