Valve and Bungie collaborate to fix "Destiny 2" beaver error

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Valve and Bungie collaborate to fix "Destiny 2" beaver error

Good news for Destiny 2 players who have been plagued by beavers lately: Bungie, with some strong help from Valve, has finally killed the gnawing little beasts.

The beaver in question is a Destiny 2 error code; Bungie uses nicknames like Buffalo, Saxophone, Chive, Zebra, and Beaver rather than the more mundane terms that would suggest the identity of the problem. Beaver's error, along with Flatworm and Leopard, "is due to a failure to connect your console to another player's console via the Internet," Bungie's help page states.

But figuring out exactly what was causing the spike in beaver errors was indeed a tedious task, as Valve software developer Fletcher Dunn detailed on Twitter. He became involved in this process because "Destiny 2" utilizes Steam's peer-to-peer networking technology, which he is working on.

The resistance to DDoS attacks, which Dan describes in the tweet above, obviously sounds like a big plus, but Dan added that the post-launch disconnect rate (those pesky beavers) was higher than expected.

"Some players were disconnected frequently, while others had never been disconnected. Restarting the game often eliminated them," he wrote. 'We were never able to reproduce it. (It works on my machine!)."

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A few months after fixing the bug, working with Bungie, and bonding with his sons over playing Destiny 2 a lot, this happened:

To get technical, the short version is that from the discovery of "strange" relays, a bug was found that under very specific circumstances, communication disruption, which led to another bug that was no longer logged.

Bungie has confirmed that the fix is in place and functioning, although beavers may still appear from time to time.

"Last week, Valve identified hardware configuration issues with four relays located in our Chicago, Virginia, Stockholm, and Dubai data centers. In each case, the affected relay was unable to send traffic to one other relay in the same data center. When a connection to a peer went through both of these relays, the connection was dropped...Valve has fixed the configuration issue and confirmed that the percentage of dropped connections in the affected areas has been significantly reduced," noted the latest update on This Week at Bungie.

"The percentage of disconnections in these areas has decreased significantly.

"These changes have resulted in a significant decrease in beaver error codes, with players in the central and eastern United States most affected. Beaver error codes are an indication of a connection failure and can be caused by a variety of issues. Some beaver error codes are caused by problems with the local Internet connection. If you experience frequent beaver errors, please refer to the Network Troubleshooting Guide and report them in the Help Forum.

Dan sums up nicely why it took months to figure all this out:

May Mother Beaver watch over us all.

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