TOKYO: Bungie, makers of the immensely popular video game “Destiny”, has always been fairly good at listening to the needs and concerns of its players of its games, and one thing they’ve been constantly complaining about is the issue of lag in the competitive multiplayer modes of the game. And today the company has taken an unusual step towards addressing the issue: The banhammer.
Fortunately, we do know what that means, so for those who don’t play games, it comes down to this: Sometimes a player’s connection to the internet (and thus the game itself) can momentarily drop out, meaning that they’re able to run around and shoot other players on their local system while the other players are “frozen” on their screen. When the connection reinstates then the “lagging” player scores several impossible hits as the game syncs the players’ consoles.
Here’s an in-game example of how a player experiences a loss when another player lags (attack is at the 30 second mark):
While it’s a natural-but-annoying aspect of online gaming — most head-to-head games suffer from some form of lag or another — some players have found ways to create lag on purpose to give them an unfair advantage. Or, in other words, they were cheating.
There are various ways to do this – from downloading a large file during a game to slow one’s connection to a trickle to modifying the hardware with a “lag switch – and companies like Bungie keep track of these occurrences. One or two lags aren’t a problem, but as it happens it can tend to form a pattern. Those patterns, combined with feedback from other users, make it easy to see whose taking advantage of the system.
And thus came the dropping of the proverbial ban hammer. Right now both Bungie’s user forums and several posts on the /r/destiny the game subreddit are full of players complaining about being banned unfairly. And while it’s possible that there were a few false-positives, Bungie doesn’t seem to be budging, noting on its Twitter account that the bans are temporary, though the company hasn’t said when they’ll be lifted.
That doesn’t soothe the ire of banned players, though, as this week also brings the Iron Banner, a multiplayer event that honors high risk with high reward. It’s popular, and the cheaters are missing it, which many in the community applaud.
This is a fine way to deal with the problem, as a temporary ban works as a sort of warning that Bungie can both monitor the problem and respond to it. It gives those who cheat a chance to think twice about doing it in the future. Hopefully it does the trick and “Destiny” – a game Bungie hopes has at least another nine years in it – will be cheater-free from now on.
