A prominent Destiny 2 speedrunner has found themselves in a conundrum after being banned and unbanned by Bungie. The studio officially reported on Twitter that a few bans were issued to suspicious accounts earlier this week to combat the growing number of cheaters in-game. However, several players in the speedrunning community have also reportedly fallen victim to the recent ban wave, prompting the larger player base to express concern over Bungie's inability to foster healthy relations with the Destiny 2 community.Speedrunners take advantage of glitches in level design or sequence breaking to significantly shorten the time required to complete an activity, often cutting down hours of gameplay to a few minutes. Destiny 2, since its launch, has been a favorite among the speedrunning community owing to its naturally lengthy encounters and activities. Advanced movement techniques such as Well skating and Sword skating have become the norm in Destiny 2, allowing players to blitz through jumping puzzles and open spaces without slowing their pace. Speedrunning is often considered a grey area in gaming, as players exploit glitches or unintended interactions to achieve fast speeds, leading to frustrations when the developers inevitably crack down on the glitches. Bungie has been quite lenient on speedrunners and even introduced the Exotic Sword Worldline Zero to let players legitimately skip through activities. However, a prominent Destiny 2 speedrunner named faldo tweeted about their inexplicable ban in the latest ban wave issued by Bungie. Merely nine hours later, faldo again posted on the social media site, reporting that Bungie had unbanned their account, again without any explanation.
The unban comes after several prominent Destiny 2 community members and content creators supported faldo on Twitter, using their popularity as a vector to vouch for the innocence of the affected speedrunner. While unexplained, the unban has been viewed positively by a large section of the community but also raised concerns over other banned speedrunners who do not have such a support system to back their claims of innocence. Previously, bugs and glitches have caused unintentional bans in Destiny 2, which have been promptly addressed. The latest ban wave and Bungie's subsequent silence over the issue have prompted many to speculate whether this heralds the end of speedrunning in Destiny 2.
Recent incidents of Bungie being accused of stealing art for a Destiny 2 trailer and aggressively pushing microtransactions have created a divide between the studio and the community, much to the disappointment of many fans of the franchise. Players are undoubtedly looking forward to detailed and logical explanations from Bungie over the mismanaged bans and other issues.
Destiny 2 is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.