Destiny 2 Launches On PC, Players Banned For Using Discord & Other Overlays

Bungie's highly anticipated Sci-Fi MMO Destiny 2 finally launched on PC via the Blizzard Launcher on October 24, 2017. The game had previous launched on consoles last month, but the PC version promised support for 4K resolutions and uncapped framerates. It is also the first game in the series to see a PC release.

Despite an extra month to prepare for the PC release, things did not go smoothly. Many people using overlays were flagged as hackers and banned within hours. While anti cheat is a neccessity for PC Shooters, Activision and Bungie clearly took things too far. People have reported being banned for using such innocuous overlay programs as Discord, Twitch, and even GeForce Experience despite the latter being an official program by Bungie's graphics partner Nvidia. Players using hardware monitoring programs (typically part of overclocking software) were also banned.

While Destiny 2 saw strong pre-orders and first week sales, the playerbase has fallen off considerably over the past month. Daily concurrent players fell from a peak of around 3.6 million to 1.9 million. The swell of PC gamers who purchased the game today will spike those numbers back up, but for how long? Destiny 2 tracking website destinytracker.com stopped reporting daily active numbers today and replaced the usual graph with this message:

We've removed this chart because people are using it to spread a false narrative of the Destiny 2 player population. Daily Unique users is a misleading statistics to use as basis for the active population of the game, any game in that matter. Not everyone plays video games 24/7, besides maybe at launch. We hoped our article would've cleared this up a bit but it seems it hasn't. To halt people from making false narratives based on the numbers we provide we decided to stop showing them in this chart.

I look forward to playing Destiny 2 myself once I am sure I won't be banned for keeping Discord running as I do so.