It is in Destiny 2 and beyond the nightmare for every gamer: the deletion of your own character in the game. Normally something like this doesn’t happen without active involvement. But what if, like what happened with the custodian CyanSolar? He reported a mysterious error that led to his character being deleted, causing a great deal of excitement in the community.
What exactly happened? The keeper CyanSolar has already spent over 2000 hours in Destiny 2 and accumulated a lot of progress. A few days ago he then tried to log back into the game with his Titan. When he selected it at startup, all he saw was a black screen and the message “Contacting Destiny 2 servers”.
The game then returned him to the character select screen. However, there was now no trace of his previously selected character, the Titan.
Not only was his Titan irretrievably gone, but also all individual items that he owned at the time of deletion. Including most of his handcrafted god roll weapons. And he’s not the only player with this problem either.
The affected player then turned to the official Bungie forum and the Destiny reddit.
At first, however, he only received the standard information in such an incident. The Ninja moderators responded to the “help post” on the forums with reference to the guidelines.
Deleted characters are gone forever: Bungie’s official policy is that characters or items manually deleted due to accidental deletion or unauthorized account access will not be restored. It will also not replace in-game items that are lost or dismantled.
Normally, this marks a deletion and thus the irretrievable end of a character. Mainly because the characters in the game can only really be deleted after a long press of a button, and it often doesn’t happen “accidentally”. Surprisingly, however, things turned out differently this time.
Bungie responded on reddit and, after an audit, arranged for the character to be officially rescued. Apparently, this uninitiated player data loss was real and something the developer takes very seriously.
Bungie restores deleted character
A one-time solution: In this one particular case, Destiny 2 Community Manager Liana Ruppert came to the rescue of player CyanSolar. She provided a rare and complicated developer exception that involved multiple Bungie teams and emphasized that it was also “a one-time solution.”
The community manager announced via reddit:
[…] Several teams have been investigating this issue and we have found no evidence that other accounts or characters have been affected.
Since it was a one-time situation, we were able to find a one-time solution to restore the character. While we understand that players may want to restore deleted characters at any time, this was an extremely complicated process that required multiple teams and numerous hours to implement for a single account, but the feedback for this feature was noted. […]
Bungie announced via reddit
If Bungie hadn’t stepped in, the player would have had to redo and re-unlock much of the game’s content just to get their Titan back to where they were before.
Character loss has not been a fear of the Guardians so far: Actually, no player should have to fear permanent data loss in Destiny 2. But the many error codes and crashes of the past few weeks have left their doubtful traces on the guardians.
The described scenario of the affected keeper therefore seemed all too familiar to most players. So it was no wonder that this active intervention by the developer, contrary to the guidelines, led to a lot of room for speculation.
Do players now have to fear for their characters?
What is behind the fears? In the last few weeks, the keepers have had to endure a number of bugs in Destiny 2. The deletion of a character without any action and the fact that a server error also happened in the game beforehand therefore worried many players who had read the post.
They fear for their own characters and that this could possibly be a bug that Bungie is already aware of.
Although Bungie stated in its statement that this case was nothing more than a one-time thing, new player reports with the same issue may indicate that this may not be the case after all.
MeinMMO wanted to know exactly and asked Bungie directly whether and to what extent this error could also affect other accounts. As soon as we should receive a statement on this, we will immediately add it to the article for you.
Account gone? You should then do this: If something like this happens to you, the recommendation is to exit Destiny 2 immediately and also exit Steam if you are playing on the PC. It is also important that you avoid creating a new character for it or clicking on this option.
Then restart the PC or the console directly and try the login again. If the character still does not appear after logging in again, the only option is to contact Bungie Support in confidence.
However, as you saw in the special case of CyanSolar, it can also be helpful to involve the community and create an additional posting in the Destiny 2 Reddit.
Do you also find this error troubling and do you now fear for your own characters? Or do you think deleting a character can’t happen that easily? Let us know what you think of the developer’s reaction in the comments.