Destiny 2's "Season of the Worthy" started this week and brought a nasty surprise. The emblem status tracker has been redesigned without warning. The change eliminated some special trackers who had succeeded in Destiny 2's toughest challenges.

This change seems aimed at upsetting Destiny 2's most dedicated players. Players who have spent their time trying to earn back-to-back wins at the Crucible, gold medals, and huge donations for the restoration of Empyrean will no longer be able to show off their accomplishments.

At first it seemed like a bug, but Bungie confirmed that this was a deliberate decision; Reddit community manager dmg04 responded to criticism of the update by saying, "To reset for a brighter future, some bones to the emblem We had to break it. Some trackers could not start at the beginning of your journey, but will be tracking from this day forward"

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The new system allows one to enter the emblem's menu and choose from several common trackers. Arbitrarily, some emblems may display more types of trackers than others. In the new setup, one can also choose not to display trackers.

However, this is not the implementation everyone was expecting. In the latest This Week at Bungie update, the developer explains the thinking behind this change.

"When designing this system, our overall goal was to provide more ways and options for players to show off their achievements. Our initial selection of stats was determined in favor of stats that represented skills that could be improved across weeks or across seasons, and stats that were meaningful to other players and represented achievements that players would want to display. Thus, some stats that could no longer be completed or improved upon were not included.

Not all was lost; Bungie still has all player data and will return some trackers in the future. 16 lost stats will be reintroduced in an update later in Season of the Worthy, and the team is seeking feedback on which trackers should be prioritized in the future.

Emblems may not seem like a big deal to some, but it is always heartbreaking to see an update take away something earned without warning. Emblems give players a way to stand out and publicize their best achievements. The key misreading is the focus on statistics that reflect ongoing seasonal progress, which seems to fail to acknowledge that players are still proud of what they have accomplished in overdue activities that shape Destiny 2's history. Hopefully, those veterans will regain their badges of honor in future updates.