Destiny 2 dataminers admit to faking leaks

Destiny 2 dataminers with a long history of providing accurate information about the game have admitted to faking a recent leak.

The Destiny 2 community has been in an uproar of late over a seemingly credible leak that suggested the game would be getting a monthly subscription plan, but it turned out to be fake.

The leak came courtesy of a Discord server called D2 Datamines, which has a long and accurate history of leaking upcoming content for the game. The leakers would typically datamine the content from game files, meaning they’d extract relevant files from the game’s install or through access to the game’s server and make those files public.

The latest leak, posted last week in the Discord server, suggested that Destiny 2 would be getting a premium monthly subscription plan. According to the apparent leak, subscribers would be given access to a host of content, including exclusive weapons, cosmetics, and playable content.

The apparent leak was reported on by a number of gaming news outlets, and spread quite quickly throughout the community. Some players complained about what it saw as another move towards aggressive monetisation, which has been somewhat of a sticking point among players since the game went free-to-play.

Destiny 2 was initially a paid title, but went free-to-play in 2019. Picture: Bungie

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on who you ask, the leak turned out to be entirely fake. One of the dataminers from the Discord, Elliot, admitted that the whole thing was a joke.

“Was gonna just let this keep on going,” Elliot said in a post on Discord, “But since it grew really large and people are actually worried outside the server we just wanted to formally apologize and admit that we trolled everyone. This will probably make a lot of people angry, but it was all meant to be done non maliciously”.

DTR never reported on this news because it seemed highly fake.

Apology from Dataminer: pic.twitter.com/i9VXDjyer9

— DestinyTracker (@destinytrack) January 2, 2023

Elliot, alongside fellow dataminer “bruders”, said that future “joke posts” like this one will be clearly labelled going forward, and clarified that nothing outside of the current season can be datamined. Many have suggested that this has caused a significant drop in credibility for the leakers.

A recent Destiny 2 glitch jump-scared players late last year, after a new raid boss was introduced that let loose a horrifyingly loud scream. Bungie, the developer of the game, was quick to act on the bug, and it was patched out shortly after.

It’s not the only game to experience bugs lately; Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, the latest Pokemon games, are the lowest-rated ever on review score aggregation website Metacritic. That’s largely because of a host of bugs, glitches, and performance issues with the game, most of which have not yet been fixed.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.