Destiny: Fixing Bugs In A Live Game Is Always About Managing Risk
Bungie has been doing a pretty good job of updating and patching the many various aspects of Destiny. Destiny power leveling offers all the help. However, with each update came the promise that one bug in particular would get fixed, yet it hasn’t happened until now.The bug, which has been present in Destiny since launch, is referred to as the Heavy Ammo Glitch. Essentially, it is where you lose all of the heavy ammo you are carrying whenever you die, return to orbit, or run into a cutscene in-game.
This meant that there was essentially no reason to ever purchase the ammo, or utilize the many upgrades that allowed you to carry more. Even if you maxed everything out, you’d just lose it all and have to go hunting for the ammo once again later on. Thankfully this bug seems to have been addressed by Bungie and a fix is incoming in a soon to be released update.
In the most recent Bungie Weekly Update the team goes in-depth on what exactly causes the bug and how they went about fixing it. The basic flaw here is an ordering problem,” said Destiny Sandbox Engineer Jon Cable. “Our inventory system creates your weapons when your characters spawn. When that happens, it tries to restore the same fraction of ammo that you had when you died. The bug occurred because the weapon is created before capacity modifiers from armor perks are applied, so the persisted fraction yields fewer rounds.”
Cable goes on to explain that while fixing bugs might seem simple, in a live game scenario it is much more difficult than you would imagine. Changing any one thing can have a cascading effect on other systems, resulting in patches that break more than they fix. “In the end, I came up with a surgical change that fixes the main issue and minimizes the chances that a new problem would be introduced” explained Cable. “I do not think I can overstate the complexity of these systems – it took me several tries to come up with a fix that did not cause other problems.”
No release date was given for when the Heavy Ammo Glitch update might be coming to Destiny, but it is good to know that Bungie is at least on track to get it fixed. Keep an eye out for further updates as they should give more information in the future.