Destiny 2 glitch lets players hide under the radar and move faster

Destiny 2, the sequel to Halo creators Bungie's wildly successful online shooter, has suffered through its fair share of glitches over its first few months. The latest is an exploit for the PC version of the game which allows players to stay invisible to the radar and also speeds their character up, according to an anonymous user on the game's reddit forum.

As detailed in a long report and video examples of the glitch in play, Reddit user "DICTATUSNORDIC" explained that some players had developed a macro that allowed them to crouch at a much higher speed than would be possible for most human users.

This automatically-triggered crouching benefited from a glitch that would remove quickly crouching-then-standing players from the radar, making them effectively invisible to enemies. It also meant that the glitch could only be exploited in the PC version of the game, as it required an external program to trigger it.

How does the glitch work?

Macros are not hacks that require in-game modding, which remains a persistent problem for online multiplayer games, and especially PC shooters like Destiny 2. They are separate programs which cause changes within the game, such as the macro described here which causes player characters to crouch repeatedly. With the macro activated it took advantage of an identified glitch — spamming the crouch button at that speed meant the player disappeared from the radar — and revealed a new one, which was that the player remained fully in control and could actually move faster.

These exploits are branded as such because they are unexpected elements of a game's mechanics that can only be discovered by exploiting the game in some way. In this case, it was through the use of macros, which in the game's PvP is generally frowned upon and considered bad sportsmanship or even cheating by a lot of players.

Comments in the /r/DestinyTheGame subreddit, where the glitch was reported, called for Bungie to fix the glitch and ban users who exploited it.

How did this happen?

Destiny 2 has proven vulnerable to any number of hacks, cheats, glitches and other exploits since it launched in September 2017 (the PC version launched a month later).

Just last month the first Iron Banner event saw players uncovering a bug that allowed Warlocks to fly. Last year there was controversy over Bungie's promotion of the Redeem team as world's first for the Leviathan Raid, despite reports that the team exploited a glitch that gave them infinite rocket launcher ammunition. Not long after launch, Xbox One and PS4 players identified a glitch that allowed their characters to travel through walls.

In almost all cases, Bungie has been swift to fix the bugs and ban any players that have been proven to have exploited them. However many PC players were found to have been banned by mistake in the first wave of such measures, causing the developer to rethink their strategy when dealing with such glitches. Most of those bannings targeted players using cheat tools and other external programs, such as the macro tool used in the latest exploit.