Nothing’s more of a drag than when you try to hop online for some fun in your favorite game and the servers are down.
Destiny 2’s developer Bungie knows this, but its solution for recent issues causing extended server downtime is actually just more downtime. In today’s This Week at Bungie blog post, the developer revealed how exactly it plans on dealing with and preventing lengthy periods of the servers going down.
“As part of the work to prepare for Lightfall, we embarked on a large technical upgrade to improve our Destiny 2 services and hardware,” Bungie said. That work, according to Bungie, meant updates for “new technologies” and looking forward to hardware upgrades that would mean a better game experience and less overall downtime and maintenance periods where Destiny 2 players couldn’t play the game.
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Bungie said that Lightfall’s launch was an example of this method working well, considering server issues were almost nonexistent on launch day and for the launch of the Root of Nightmares raid. But it’s not perfect, and the team “discovered some issues” that it needs to address.
“A prime example of this is our background service update system,” Bungie said. “Typically, several days before one of our Tuesday updates, we will ‘stage’ the update on our servers. This upgrades our backend services to the new version and means that during the Tuesday patch, we only take a brief amount of downtime before letting players back into the game. However, with our new libraries and code, we’ve discovered cases where the background update has put our services into a bad state, forcing us to bring Destiny 2 offline for extended maintenance.”
Several times throughout Destiny 2’s lifespan, update roll-outs have caused issues that forced extended server downtime during hours normally reserved for the Guardian grind. Now, Bungie says it is moving to a “scheduled downtime model” and will bring Destiny 2 offline for 90 minutes every update day to prevent repeat issues.
“This will allow us to do our ‘staging’ and rollout on the same day and should make the experience more stable and reliable,” Bungie said. The blog concludes with a promise to continue monitoring the game’s performance and to upgrade the systems in the backend of the game.
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Bungie did not specify at which time of day the downtime will occur, but it will likely take place in very early morning hours when most players are offline. So while server downtime may now be a guarantee, it will hopefully be quick and concise and prevent repeats of periods where servers stayed offline for several hours while the team scrambled for a fix.
Destiny 2’s new season, Season of the Deep, begins next week on May 23.
