Destiny 2 Trials of the Nine cancellation explained: "Not something we wanted to do, but we felt it was necessary"

It's good to take exploits seriously in a competitive game like Destiny 2, but Bungie's reaction to the looming specter of wall-glitching Silly Walkers in Trials of the Nine left many Guardians scratching their helmeted heads. The studio announced in its latest blog post that it has decided to postpone (read: cancel) the Trials of the Nine event until at least Friday, November 3 to prevent exploiters from ruining the competitive fun. Usually, Trials runs every weekend.

Abusing the Silly Walk-inspired "Bureaucratic Walk" emote to clip into a hidden part of The Leviathan Raid was cool, but it was inevitable that people would also use it to cheat at PvP. Bungie recognized that and took action (after already removing the emote from individual sale at the Eververse store). But the way it handled the issue left the player community befuddled.

What the hell, right? Why is Bungie's response not to just disable the offending emote, or all emotes entirely? Surely it's preferable to give up ironic killcam salutes than to nix the entire event for two whole weeks. But according to Bungie, that's a lot more difficult than it sounds.

"The first thing we looked at was temporarily disabling the emote," Bungie community manager Chris "Cozmo" Spencer wrote on Reddit's Destiny forum. "This was not an option or we would have taken it. We were able to remove it from the Eververse store to keep it from being more widely available while we work on a fix. Postponing trials was not something we wanted to do, but we felt it was necessary until we can sort out this issue."

Destiny 2 is a towering mass of systems feeding into systems feeding into yet more systems; retrofitting the game to do this one thing in this specific scenario without breaking anything else could take weeks of work by itself, weeks that could otherwise be spent just fixing the damn emote. But the game was built with regularly cycling through events like Trials of the Nine or Iron Banner in mind, sooo. Yeah. Unfortunately, that still isn't a very satisfying answer for anyone. This person had a pretty good idea, though. 

Hopefully Bungie's work in fixing the Silly Walk exploit goes faster than expected and Trials can resume next week. It'd be a real bummer if Destiny 2 on PC had to lose the inaugural PvP event for its launch week.