Following a depressing flood of harmful invective directed at one of its developers during a Destiny 2 livestream, Bungie has announced that it has issued permanent bans to several of the people involved and is taking steps to prevent this from happening again.

The trouble began during a Destiny 2: Into the Light livestream, when Noah Lee, the developer's associate activity designer, was demonstrating gameplay in Onslaught, a horde mode that will be added in the April 9 update The game screen was minimized during the stream. During the stream, the game screen was minimized and the Steam menu was displayed, but just long enough for viewers to see the profile names.

It did not take long for hateful and racist messages to begin arriving in the form of Steam friend requests from accounts whose names had been changed to abusive messages. What the officials apparently did not take into account, however, was that these friend requests might provide Bungie with their Steam IDs, and Bungie might take action. And Bungie did just that.

"We are sorry to see these notices, but we know they were sent by a few terrible individuals and do not reflect the community as a whole. We were able to track down the accounts of several individuals who sent the harmful notices and have banned them from Destiny 2."

"We are taking extra steps to ensure that this does not happen again and look forward to sharing this information with you in next week's stream.

In a separate post, Lee thanked fans for their support and revealed that his account information was exposed by a bug in Windows 11. He also stated that he did not see the incoming friend requests during the stream: "There was so much going on, I wasn't paying attention."

He also stated that despite the abuse he is eager to do it again. 'I wanted to be there! I wanted to talk to everyone, I've been watching the Destiny developer livestream since I was 13 and I couldn't not do it because of some trolls. Hopefully we can do more in the future! Have a great week!" [And his post has garnered support from Destiny 2 players on Reddit, who praise his skills in the onslaught demo, his funny "yeah, great" line that has already become its own meme, and his overall grace in dealing with such an ugly situation. And as for the recent troubles, I think Bungie deserves credit too: it's never a wrong decision to bring the hammer down on racist perpetrators, but it doesn't happen often enough that it's necessary.