In the company's This Week at Bungie (opens in new tab) or TWAB update, Destiny's developers revealed that many players lost their titles in the game (opens in new tab), a bug requiring players to roll back their progress, and popular loot Shooter/MMO/Guardian-Mupgame revealed a series of events that led to 20 hours of downtime (credit for spot goes to Massively Overpowered (open in new tab))

On January 24, many Destiny players logged in to find the unthinkable had happened! Those achievements and their precious "chee-bosses" had vanished into the stream of time like tears in the rain. All joking aside, some triumphs and seals in this game require extreme difficulty to acquire, while others are tied to legacy content and cannot be acquired.

The bug eventually required players to roll back their accounts on the morning of January 24, causing players to lose all progress made in the three-hour window following Destiny's regular weekly update. However, someone on Reddit (open in new tab) was able to get their hands on the coveted "Hierarchy of Needs" exotic combat bow during the Destiny window.

"We found this issue occurred when some of the currently unfinished Arc of Triumphs in EDZ and Nessus were moved from Forsaken to the Arc of Triumphs section of the archive," Bungie explained on TWAB. To make this change, we used a tool that allows us to move a player's state from one location in their account to another." This tool is very powerful, but must be handled with care and caution."

That forbidden and powerful development tool was apparently still set up for when Bungie seriously reworked the game for the 2020 expansion, Beyond Light. The team accidentally took data from before "Beyond Light" and overwrote it in conflict with players' progress since then.

This is an interesting reminder of how vulnerable the back end of a huge and popular game can sometimes be, especially as it relates to Beyond Light. That expansion made major changes to the engine and content, seriously reworking Destiny 2, and I hope Destiny is just removing some of the glitz from its system in advance of the big expansion, Lightfall, which will be released on February 28.