Cheats on the Rise in Destiny 2: Bungie said in its latest This Week at Bungie update that the incidence of cheats has increased by roughly 50% since January, with "significant increases at the highest skill tiers." Bans and restrictions have also increased significantly, with Season of the Worthy, from an average of 656 per week before its launch to an average of 2,133 per week in the following four weeks. Still, Bungie is not satisfied with the status quo, and more measures are on the way.

According to David Aldridge, Destiny's engineering director, the majority of cheats in Destiny 2 occur on PC, where PC players can use "memory poke attacks" to allow for things like unlimited ammo and energy consumption. This is "unique to Destiny," Aldridge said. This is a particularly difficult type of cheat to counter, due to the nature of "Destiny's unique hosting model."

"Destiny's model is designed to optimize the feel and consistency of a high complexity, high action, high fidelity PvE experience while allowing for a seamless blend of PvE and PvP. Unfortunately, this model comes with some unique challenges in providing PvP security assurance," he explained.

"That said, we continue to invest in prevention and detection in this area by utilizing servers that host and monitor all matches. This is a subtle point we have struggled to communicate for years. We have servers that host all of our matches, but in our hosting model, these servers do not have full privileges to the game simulation and cannot naturally prevent all of these types of attacks. This makes it more difficult (but not impossible) to mitigate these attacks.

Bungie also plans to crack down harder on aimbots and wallhacks, but did not give details to avoid making it easier for cheaters to circumvent them. Lag switching, which intentionally slows down the Internet connection to induce lag and make it harder to attack you, will also be targeted, but developers are being more cautious because they do not want to legitimately drop the Bungie hammer on players with bad connections.

Bungie is dedicating more manpower to support anti-cheat efforts, including analyzing reports, developing new anti-cheat systems, and testing ban rules.

"We now have the right to restrict or ban players who benefit from cheating, even if they are not cheating themselves. This includes scenarios where a player groups with a guide or provides account information to a guide or carry service, which then cheats on the player's behalf," Aldridge said.

"We want you to find new friends, but before you go, make sure those friends have your trust; if you get into a cheetah and fireteam at LFG, get off and report it. If you ride them perfectly, the Banhammer will come for you."

On the other side of the coin, Bungie is also considering increasing the amount of play time required to access Trials in the first place. He says, "Increasing the time it takes for a new account to be able to join Trials would increase Banhammer's power (since cheaters can create new dummy accounts at any time), and it would also increase the amount of time it takes for a new account to join Trials.

He also noted that despite what some players apparently think, Bungie does indeed have a robust anti-cheat system in place, that most of the penalties are based on automated systems rather than player reports, and that Destiny 2 is not using Valve's anti-cheat security features and took the opportunity to highlight that they plan to add more features in the future.

"We are also re-evaluating some decisions along the way - for example, we may have made the mistake of not having the trial behind a season pass paywall. We will not change this in the Season of the Worth, but we will re-evaluate the terms of access in future seasons."

Bungie said that next week's TWAB will focus on changes coming to Destiny 2's season model.