UPDATE: They seem to have removed the ban for a lot of people. This process is still crazy as one still has no way to contact bungie. I'm worried that i could be randomly banned again for no reason. Something seems wrong in general that they didn't ban anyone for cheating, but instead for having "tools" - whatever that means.

that said, everyone i was playing with already hit 20.. and the fun in the game was playing with friends (not really the game itself) - but that is a different problem....

----

I've been playing the game most of the day with a buddy of mine (about level 13-14)

then *poof* my account was banned. Was I cheating? hell no.. why would i cheat the game is super ez anyway.

Nothing funky was running. It was a clean install of the new windows (1709 - fall update), MS office was running (outlook, skype4b), remote desktop, steam, Afterburner, core temp, Logitech gaming keyboard stuff. That is it.

The game did crash like 30min before, but i reconnected. Maybe that saw something thier monitor as something wacky (yeah, it is wacky.. it crashed!) But this is real dumb. Banned and there isn't anyway for me to even contact bungie. I'll see if I can get just get a refund from blizzard (that seems unlikely), If not i'll have my bank to pull back the charge from buying the game ($100!!)

It seems a lot of people are getting banned, but it is the internet and who know what people are really doing. There seems to no pattern. Some people say they have nothing odd running. Some people say it is app with OSD (like afterburner - which i was running), but that isn't a legit reason to ban someone nor is anything written about OSD being thing that will get you banned.

This is kinda crazy, playing games for over 35 years and (i don't think) i never cheated on an online game.. and clearly was never banned.

Anyone else bump in the bungie's random ban hammer?

UPDATE: Bungie is saying it isn't because of OSD software. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-10-25-bungie-insists-its-not-banning-destiny-2-pc-players-for-using-third-party-applications

Thread on Bungie about banned for no reason (there are bunch of them)

https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/236628824

UPDATE TWO: Just note, Bungie isn't even saying people cheated. Just that people have "tools that pose a threat to the shared ecosystem" - WTF are they talking about. That is like me saying playing video games is a threat to my health because i might not go to the gym...

I think in some cases the OSD of afterburner modifies the .exe file, which might cause anticheat stuff to treat it as something bad and issue a ban. You even have a stealth mode in afterburner's OSD to supposedly minimize the risk but It's not a guarantee.

There's a reddit thread with a bunch of people talking about getting banned due to third-party software that uses overlays (like Geforce Experience, Afterburner, etc.).
Apparently this is a known issue that also happened in the Beta, but I guess Bungie didn't see as a problem? Thank god I just reinstalled my pc and was being too lazy to setup my overlays or I would be so pissed if I got banned.

It might have been afterburner, but they know about afterburner. It was one of the programs they posted about that they said wouldn't work and might make the game "slow" (which is silly)

but look at bungies own forums and reddit. It seems like tons of people are getting banned, even ones not using programs with OSD. Hey, stuff happens.. systems break. But for Bungie to say they don't even review bans is crazy. I guess i have a good reason to head back to dishonored 2 DLC, south park, and shadow of war. :)

I kinda didn't like destiny 2. But the shooting was fun and it had been some time that i had a mindless shooter story mode i could play with some friends.

Wow this is kind of insane. So many people are getting banned wholesale, some before they can even get past character creation. I haven't seen such a launch mess in a long time. And there is still no real response from Bungie. They need to respond to the incoming shitstorm and fast. Keep in mind a lot of people have no option to roll back a payment charge depending on method.

Thankfully i saw this thread and checked the grapevine so haven't launched D2 yet.

Just .... how do you fuck up this badly?

I feel bad for the people getting banned. I am glad I did not get it. I hope they resolve it quickly.

Afterburner, or more accurately RTSS, doesn't modify anything. It injects into the viewport (or framebuffer) before the frames go out to show you their overlay. It's harmless. I'm baffled why it's disallowed to run in D2.

The internet is lighting up with stories like this. It's really pretty baffling. Like people have been saying, the current speculation is that having programs that run overlays can trigger their (arguably garbage) anti-cheat and ban you. Has this been confirmed? No, but we don't really have a way to do that for sure. So, if you use incredibly common programs that pc gamers use like Discord or Mumble or EVGA Precision XOC etc. don't allow them to run overlays.

We will have to wait and see how Bungie responds to this because if it isn't handled well then this is going to be an explosive PR disaster. I mean, it already is but depending on how they try to fix things (or not) they could make it even worse.

Edit: Also, @zurv I'm sure you already know this but in the off chance that you don't, just know that issuing a chargeback very likely puts the account at risk for being locked. I don't know if it would extend to Blizzard games as well but it's certainly something to consider.

This isn't bungie though, its shitty battle.net. Bnet has always been a joke. They are the worst, and will continue to be the worst. My entire account with them was deleted back when Diablo III came out, because I was "cheating". I asked them to clarify why my account was deleted or how I was cheating, and they refused to give me an answer. I still have no idea what the hell happened. I never cheated, but they cheated me out of a $60. So none of this surprises me in the least.

So, I have discord on in the background and nvidia geforce is installed on my system, and because of this I could end up getting banned?! That's about as bad as I could imagine. And the fact there's no way to reverse it is crazy. I'm kind of afraid to load the game up again now.

Edit: Oh wait, so it's if you have game capture stuff turned on? After experiencing weird hitchiness in game (something I've seen other people complaining about), I exited the game and launched nvidia geforce to install the new drivers hoping that would fix it. Afterwards I went back in game and played a bit till the hitchiness came back. Now I'm afraid, given the info in this thread, I'll get banned because the geforce overlay was set to on. This sucks.

These are from what I understand literally Bungie account level bans. They are from within Destiny 2 and only lock you out of that game. They do not affect your Battlenet account. And Blizzard support (who actually have large customer service farms) can do nothing with them only Bungie can. And the ban directs you to Bungie themselves, as useless as those support pages are.

@themanwithnoplan: Some people with fresh stock PC installations have reported bans, suspecting that even the lovely Windows games capture overlay can cause this, which is nutso. But it's all speculation atm since I've seen certain streamers doing just fine and they are obviously recording footage.

This has been a known issue since the PC beta. As GameSpot reported back in August 3rd, most overlays would trigger the anti-cheat. Even fullscreen captures from OBS and Xsplit would cause it be flagged as cheating. Using Discord overlays for voice chat will also trigger the cheat detection.

This is the fault of Bungie or Vicarious Visions (the developer who did the PC port), not Blizzard or the Battle.net client. Because you can freely use fullscreen captures and overlays with Blizzard games.

What Bungie thinks of this is probably that this anti-cheat behavior is working as intended. Bungie has an entire support tutorial about how to avoid getting banned from the anti-cheat.

At this point, I wouldn't risk using any overlays or fullscreen captures at all until there's enough outcry for Bungie to roll back on this overly strict cheat detection.

I'd like to point out this is Blizzard anti-cheat software, not Bungie's. I'd also like to point out issues with Blizzard assuming you are cheating when you aren't have been well documented at this point. It happened in Overwatch and Diablo as far as I know, wouldn't be surprised if it happened in other games as well.

So just about any installed apps that come with modern gaming rigs or video cards are triggering bans.

This is absolutely insane. I'm glad I read this before buying.

You're right. We only need to look at the decade of examples of people getting banned for using basic PC tools... Oh, wait!

Well this is what i can say for sure, i use MSI Afterburner and use the OSD rivatuner, (it doesn't work with Destiny 2) i also use discord for all voice chat with my friends, (i don't use overlays) and i am running the fall update for windows 10, and i streamed about 15 mins using windows mixer today. So with that said i have been using OSD in overwatch for a least a year so it might not be just a blizzard anti cheat issue, also i have played at least 12 hours of destiny 2 today and no ban. So this might not mean anything but it does add to the data pool of what could be going on.

I personally think my issue was because i crashed, because the ban happen right after that. But no place in any bungie docs say one can't run OSD, they just say OSD apps/hooks won't work.

It is just crazy that I can support for cheap house hold items but i can't get any $100 software. Just because it is software doesn't mean a company can get away with zero support and random unexplained removal of the product.

Oh, great. I forgot this was a thing. As if I didn't have enough shit about this game to be worried about. Hopefully someone on Blizzard's or Bungie's end gets their shit together about this.

Are you sure about that? Tens of Thousands of people have been using the programs that are rumored to cause the bans for years and I haven't heard a thing.

Not that it really helps, but i think destiny had a built in fps counter if the issue is actually an osd. I just think its safe to stay away from this one as it doesn't seem worth the hassle of dealing with poor service.

Bungie has said they are probably unintended bans and are looking into it but so far they have said that third party software isn’t the cause of the ban. Which makes sense considering we had posts here saying they didn’t have any extra third party software installed, let alone running.

They are looking into it, just sit tight to see how they handle it. Hey specifically say on their support pages what various programs will work well with D2, such as what you’ll need to do to capture footage (OBS and ShadowPlay are both listed as working, OBS just requires a few particular configuration tweaks.) and they say that some things like afterburner (which you don’t need to leave running btw) may cause performance issues.

Blizzard's proprietary anti-cheat is Warden, and as far I can tell, there is no trace of Warden in Destiny 2 for PC. Where are the numerous well documented cases of Blizzard banning people due to them using OSDs or fullscreen capturing software? False positives from Blizzard games does not correlate to triggering potentially intentional anti-cheat behavior in Destiny 2. Especially when cases of using overlays and captures hasn't gotten a decent amount of people banned by Warden in the 13 years its been in use.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/78lkad/pc_bans_are_not_being_caused_by_third_party/

I would just like to point to the fact that these issues are indeed completely random and have no bearing whatsoever on utilizing 3rd Party software. This is from Rise of Bacon on Reddit as well and lists the most vital information at the moment. It really sucks for you duders that it's happened to. And while on a normal case Bungie does not review Ban's, I'm pretty sure they will figure out a way to both fix this and reverse these decisions soon. It just sucks for those wanting to play now, because it may be a few days before they resolve this.

"Hey there guys, we got a quick update coming from the B.net Forums:

https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/236577699?sort=0&page=0&path=1

Cozmo23 reports that: Third-party applications that aren’t compatible with Destiny 2 may cause the game to not run but won't result in a ban.

https://www.bungie.net/en/Help/Article/46101 Still unclear what's causing these bans, but it's not third party applications!"

People aren't getting banned from using PC Tools. People are just making assumptions and others believe them without evidence. The official responses are just getting lost in the noise.

Third-party applications that aren’t compatible with Destiny 2 may cause the game to not run but won't result in a ban.

https://www.bungie.net/en/Help/Article/46101

The bans are most certainly happening, but it is not caused by what people are assuming to be the case. I'll admit I made the connection myself that it is Blizzard, not Bungie, since they both stated Bungie is using Blizzard's infrastructure for cheating and such on PC.

Edit: @hestilllives19 Crap, you beat me to it. I guess there is still 'some' merit in following Reddit.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-10-25-bungie-insists-its-not-banning-destiny-2-pc-players-for-using-third-party-applications

So god only know what the hell the problem is. Oddly, there seems to be a few users (including myself) that all had clean installs of 1709 (fall update). MS added the new anti-cheat system into windows - maybe that is triggering the problem. Also a lot of people had their game crash before getting banned. (but then other only played for 5 mins and got banned..)

I'm pretty sure it is Dan's fault some how :D

Phew, glad to hear the third party stuff isn't the problem. I seem to be fine anyways. They need to figure this stuff out; quick. People don't take too kindly to getting reprimanded for no reason, especially when they paid money for something and get it taken away.

@darkjohnny477: I got it on PC last night too and boy if I didn't use my code from Best Buy's "Physical Copy" (got it for $47), I would have asked Blizzard for my money back. I spent 3 hours just trying to get the Blizzard App to download because my first download of it was corrupted, it took me a long time of pouring through really old Blizzard posts on their forum to find someone with the same issue. When I deleted their Blizzard App cache it downloaded in like 10 seconds. Then I had the game installed in like 10 minutes. It's funny because I asked people on Discord if anyone was having any issues, they all kept saying it was my internet and when I showed them my Speedtest of 779/798 Mbps they finally decided it probably wasn't me. Then lucky me, I get on around 10pm CST and Bungie decides it time to just start handing out error codes. I got random error codes for the next hour, sometimes loading into Homecoming with no enemies to kill before being booted. Add to that the weird Memory Leak issue I also experienced last night that many are having that causes the entire Screen to jitter on occasion... I didn't have a very good time until about 11pm when I started all that mess at 6:30. I played till about 12:30, got to Level 7 and the 3rd Planet, but wishing I could have played that extra 3 1/2 hours last night rather than all that mess, I could have easily finished the Campaign and started working on Power Level (for those first time Destiny 2 players I'm also a PS4 player so I very familiar with how the game systems work for D2, so don't be worried if it take you much longer than that, I'm also skipping every cutscene). Restarting on PC will be easy and fun they say... When it works the PC does look very good and feel great though.

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/46426

The following is true:

• Destiny 2 cannot automatically ban you, only Bungie can ban a player after a manual investigation
• Yesterday, we banned approximately 400 players on PC
• Bans were applied to players who were using tools that pose a threat to the shared ecosystem of the game
• We did not (and will not) issue any bans for the use of overlays or performance tools, including Discord, Xsplit, OBS, RTSS, etc.
• Information on using third-party applications can be found here: https://www.bungie.net/en/Help/Article/46101
• We are overturning 4 of the bans that were issued during the PC Beta

We are committed to providing an experience that is fun and fair for the millions of players who have joined us in this community.

Wish the game could go long enough without crashing for me to get banned.

Bungie is full of it. They have no idea what is going on because they don't allow anyone to contact them. But i guess I'm special. 400 isn't a lot of users. blah.

Also, Bliz won't refund my game because i played too long. It was the day of launch man! how is that too long!

@glots: Thank you for sharing that. Definitely interesting information. I've read claims of "thousands" of players being banned but Bungie says it was 400. Also it's a manual process, not automatic. In addition it has nothing at all to do with overlays even though so many people believed so for whatever reason. So everyone banned "were using tools that pose a threat to the shared ecosystem of the game." I wonder what kind of tools that entails and if there are any people that really were unfairly banned or if they all deserved it, including OP.

@brittinius: There is no way Zurv cheats at games, he is way too bad at them for that to be the case. Especially shooters! He'll be the first one to admit that.

Some more anecdotal evidence, earlier this year I built a PC for a friend of mine who is largely computer illiterate. He doesn't even know what OBS is, let alone how to cheat or anything else. I have to help him with the most basic of tasks like installing updates, getting his mic working in Discord, stuff like that. He was banned from Destiny 2 last night after less than 2 hours of campaign co-op with his brother.

@mike: I have to take your word for it, but this whole situation is so weird. I legitimately can't tell if it's a small vocal crowd blowing this up or if there is a larger issue here. I'm hearing on one side that people are unfairly being banned for no reason whatsoever, and then on the other hand Bungie is saying that they reviewed each situation and found them to be legitimate bans. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think they are flat out lying? Incompetence?

How many people do they have on staff doing this to ban 400 people manually in a day?? Smells like bullshit to me...

@brittinius: I really don't know. I think Bungie may be missing something here, though.

The thing I'm curious about is this - what magical cheat did all of these people find that was available within hours of the game's launch yesterday? I checked out a couple of cheat/hack forums that I'm aware of and the common providers have nothing, so if there is a cheat package or a trainer out there it isn't publicly available. There might be a private, paid cheat already somehow but that seems extremely unlikely.

@mike: I appreciate your feedback. I pre-ordered the game so I already have it and sincerely hope it gets worked out for everyone. I'll be looking forward to how this shakes out over the next few days.

It can still be a false-positive. It happens.

The fact that they don't disclose the tools they deem a threat, tells me they don't know what's causing this yet. There's no downside to warning people of these specific tools, cheaters will still get banned and unknowing players might save themselves a lot of frustrations. Also I agree, 400 bans manually in like a day? Sounds really sketchy to me.

At first I was thinking this could be like that huge ban wave for Modern Warfare 2 a number of years ago, that turned out to be because the physical PC version of the game shipped with some corrupted file on the disc, so if you installed the game from the DVD instead of just typing in the key and downloading it through Steam, you'd get a version of the game with files that VAC considered modified and banned the affected players.

Then I remembered that someone called in to Ben & Jeff's New Thing yesterday and said that the physical version of Destiny 2 doesn't come with a disc, just a cardboard cutout of a disc with the game key printed on it.

Wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be because of something similar though, like how Windows 10 in different countries have slightly different folder naming conventions (Program vs Program Files etc.) that trips up some integrity check.

This is such a weird situation. I didn't get a chance to play last night, so I plan on playing tonight. I keep seeing the post from Bungie saying they won't ban you for using Discord or OBS while the game is running, but I am still nervous to boot it up. I played about three hours of the beta, and used Discord for team chat, and everything worked fine.

I totally believed Bungie when their statement came out, but I know I see @mike saying they know someone who was banned, and wouldn't know how to install a program to cheat, and now it seems really fishy.

false positives happen with all systems, the problem is bungie doesn't allow for anyone to contact them.

@mike, you don't know!? maybe my shooting skills are so gwed (yeah.. gwed) that they assumed i must be using an aimbot :)

I'd like to assume some people that got banned did something bad, but all the stuff i'm reading (of course i'm looking for others that got banned for no reason) everyone seems to super confused about what happened.

Also, for the people that are thinking "well.. you must have done something.." - well... no, i didn't. Why would I (and all the others) bitch then? (i'm also not sure what there is to gain from cheating while leveling up? i'd think one would want to cheat to skip that stuff. Is there even PvP before max level?)

Looks like most people got banned after a crash.

@zurv: Yes, you can play PvP as soon as you get back from the first Subclass level before going to the Church on the EDZ.

@mike: Yeah, this whole thing seems super weird. I'm pretty sure I've read more than 400 people complain that they've been banned. So I'm not sure I'm buying this totally. Though them doing 400 manual bans does seem about right. They've done this in the past for Trials for DDoSers and such. They wait an awful long time and then swing the banhammer in a big way. They also don't catch everyone (didn't ever even temp ban the guys who DOS'd me in Trials) either. So if there is something from the Beta, that is considered cheating, 400 makes sense. But I don't think there is anything like that as far as I've heard yet anyways like you said, so where this comes from is a mystery, and it does seem far more extensive than 400 players.

@oursin_360: when they have access to stuff like game history, potentially code, are able to monitor a player or have tools in place to automatically send suspicious data to their support team, it may only take a few guys. Especially if they can figure out a few common indicators and say “hey this is what it looks like when someone does something against our TOS,when you see this it means they are breaking the rules.” It’s not a criminal trial and if hey are messing with the game it should be fairly easy to trace that back to the player. It may only take 5 minutes for them to do that in some cases, which would require about 5 guys working full time with breaks to do that and I’m willing to bet they have more dudes than that they can put towards the PC release. Bungie has a ton of experience with the Banhammer thanks to Halo and I imagine their tech team has a lot of very handy tools for that stuff.

400 seems reasonable if they have tools to report bad behavior but still require someone to press the button after reviewing that data. A team of 10 could hand out bans pretty easily.

@opusofthemagnum: other than the fact that some (maybe a lot of them) weren't doing anything to hack, mod, spy, etc game data. (me being one of them) :(

"tools that pose a threat to the shared ecosystem"

Bungie must have some of those Minority Report pre-cogs working there. :D

@opusofthemagnum: It would make more sense to apply whatever detection method they're using to a percentage of players (start with 10%?). That way swaths of players aren't being banned at once and they can easily inspect the results and make changes without blowing up a huge chunk of potentially innocent users.

@zurv: You should try getting back in .

Update: As part of our ban review process, we have identified a group of players who were banned in error. Those players have been unbanned. The bans were not related to the third-party applications listed above. We will continue to review the process we use to ensure a fun and fair game.