What To Do If ‘Destiny 2’ Deletes Your Character

(his character was not deleted)

@Benjjjyy

Something akin to a digital serial killer is circulating in Destiny 2 right now. It’s not affecting all that many people in the grand scheme of the player population, but it’s just about the most terrifying thing that can happen to you in the game. Entire characters are being deleted, and no one seems to know why.

This has been documented via reddit and Twitter a handful of times, and in the first and most high profile case, Bungie acknowledged the issue and tasked a specific team to help restore the character. But they also said they found no evidence it was happening to others. That…does not seem to be the case.

I woke up once again to yet another post on reddit about this, bringing the total to close to half a dozen, from what I’ve seen. Again, a tiny number, but it’s gotten a lot of people spooked, saying they do not want to log in until it’s confirmed this is fixed. I’m not scared enough to stop playing, but I’ve been checking every day to see if my characters are there, just in case.

If this does somehow happen to you, however, I’d advise one particular course of action.

Destiny 2

Bungie

The main thing you need to do is not make a new character. This would eliminate the potential for your character to be restored on its own. In the past, sometimes there has been a bug where due to server issues, a character appears deleted, or the game will start up and put you in the new player/create a character screen. But usually after a reset that goes away, and nothing was lost. This happened to me once, and it ended up being fine.

In these new instances, restarting the game does not seem to be fixing the issue. But one thing that will certainly not help is remaking your character.

For now, it does not appear the Bungie Help forums are going to be productive here. In today’s case, the person who lost their character posted their plea on the forum that was met with an automated response about Bungie not restoring characters that were either accidentally deleted or deleted if someone took over your account. But in these recent cases, neither appears to be happening. Your best bet is to contact a CM like Liana so she can forward this along, along with all the proof you can show. You can reach out to me, also, and I’ll try to spread the word.

I cannot verify all the current reports of character deletions, but I will say the original person this happened to was accused of faking it, right up until the point it was revealed Bungie stepped in with a fix to help them. Bungie did not, however, explain what had happened, and I think it’s time we started hearing more about exactly what’s going on. Even if it’s only affected a half dozen people out of a million players, these cases have bene high profile enough to worry some people.

One preventive step you can take is swapping to a disposable loadout when you log out of your character. In essence, a bunch of garbage gear so if you log in next time and you’re character’s gone, at least you didn’t lose your god rolls, which are instead stored in your vault. There have been no reports of any vault content going missing, only individual characters. That said, I still the chance of this happening to any specific player remains incredibly remote, and this may be overkill. Still, I know people that are doing it.

Hopefully we hear more from Bungie soon about this, as it’s probably time to figure out what is or is not going on here.

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