Bungie smacks down frauds, confirms Destiny 2 characters are not being deleted

A few days ago, Bungie sounded the alarm to help restore one – count 'em, one – Destiny 2 player's character after it was deleted through a freak error. Ever since, the game's Reddit and forum communities have seen a curious uptick in reports of deleted characters, to the point that some folks grew understandably worried there was some kind of character-eating bug going around. Well, put on your surprised face, because it turns out people on the internet were lying. 

"Maintaining your characters and progress is our top priority," Bungie Help said in a tweet, presumably lacing up its boots as it prepared to curb-stomp some fraudsters. "After kicking off a deep dive investigation of a very low number of reports of missing characters out of an abundance of caution, we are confident that no characters or progress were incorrectly lost by our systems."

This always seemed like the logical assumption given how isolated the one genuine problem was, but it's nice to have confirmation here. Randomly deleting characters with potentially thousands of hours of progress tied to them would indeed be quite the problem for an MMO. Phew. 

This does raise the question of what people hoped to accomplish by lying about having their characters deleted. Throwing a smokescreen over account sharing? Scaring other Destiny players? Making Bungie look bad? Hitting that attention quota which some people seem to find essential to their existence? Whatever it was, all they've earned is a big-old L to add to their no-doubt sizable collection. 

This has actually been a great week for Bungie's MMO, largely thanks to "Buildcrafting Evolved," some game-changing mod updates coming in Destiny 2 Lightfall.