70% Of Destiny 2’s Top Contest Mode Clearing Raid Teams Cheated

As if Bungie needs to deal with any more Destiny 2 drama, player investigations have now revealed that among the limited number of Contest clears for the insanely difficult Desert Perpetual raid last week, as many as 70% of the top 100 list appear to have cheated.

It seems too early to list dozens of specific teams here, as I’ve already seen at least a couple false positives, but the provable ones? Many are very, very obvious.

These cheater clears are marked by certain, publicly available data points, namely (via @aquativityy):

• One person carrying with a lot of kills while the rest of the team barely has any.
• Incredibly fast clear times, 10-20 minutes, for these insanely hard sections that took legitimate teams hours.
• Certainly weapons like Lorentz Driver or Duality to help with rate limiting, some specific armor, blue rockets are among a few telltale signs.
• Endless heavy kills
• New accounts that barely have any raid clears

This is a mess. We have not seen anything at this level with a Contest raid clear…ever. The only piece of good news it that it does not seem to involve well-known, high profile teams including World’s First Team Nuts, their livestreamed clear being obviously legitimate.

All of this blew up yesterday and is currently the talk of the entire Destiny community, (which outside this, is already struggling to accept the Edge of Fate expansion on its own merit). Bungie has said nothing, as of yet. At this point I would at least put out a “we’re investigating” tweet today, but this is yet another thing they’re going to have to explain in terms of how this happened regarding this Contest Mode raid, as they’re already looking into bugged enemy health and deltas.

But we may know how this happened, at least to a certain extent. In its latest round of mass layoffs at Bungie, one of the teams affected heavily was player security which, as you might be able to guess, are the ones who work toward catching and preventing cheaters like this. Not to say that division doesn’t exist at all now, but if you’re wondering why this is happening at this moment, it certainly seems to fall in line with the timing of that.

It seems likely that there will be a large purge of these cheaters at some point given how obvious it is. But there’s an additional layer on top of this, as it’s not mandatory that everyone in a party is cheating, they are just playing with a cheater in order to get the clear. All of them should be banned as well, but that’s not a guarantee.

If you completed the Contest Mode raid, stay in line. You may now find yourself moving way, way up the legitimate clears list or shooting into the top 100 or top 50. We are awaiting Bungie to say anything about this.

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