THIS WEEK AT RAID SECRETS - 8/5/2021 (2024)

This week at Raid Secrets, we prepare for the end.

I'll be honest, I'm a bit anxious. I'm both writing the first everTWARS, and because we're approaching the end of the season with a blisteringly long-paced speed. Solstice is over, Epilogue is next week, TWAB is later today, and the Bungie Showcase is looming around the corner. We're in that weird hazy limbo between content that everyone dreads - but hey, we're excited.

This week's Bungie news should be pretty intense based on what we've been told and have been seeing on twitter, and we know everyone is eagerly awaiting it to go live. Until Cozmo hits the button, looks like you'll have to settle for this post, and maybe some fresh reddit posts.

SOLSTICE SUN-DOWN

The solstice has come to and end, and it seems like this one was another case of "oh that's happening." We entered and left the EAZ feeling about the same this year as last, maybe with a bit of extra shiny stuff thanks to the updated chest indicators.

There were some fun memes that came out of the last month, like 1-phasing most raid bosses using nothing but chaos reach and the inevitable Levant-athun accusations, and the activity gave us something to grind out and focus on for at least a little while. I'm not sure what the fastest time was for fully upgrading all of this year's armor, but I'm pretty sure it was in the 6-8 hour neighborhood at least.

As DMG said a few weeks ago - now's the time for a break if you need it. Don't burn yourself out, there's plenty to do and there will be even more upon your return. Especially if you're more on the PvP side of things, although your return might be sooner than anticipated.

PLAYERS VS PROGRAMMERS

Yesterday, Assistant Game Director Joe Blackburn decided to open up a thread about what's coming down the pipe for PvP in destiny. You can check it out here if you didn't already see it. If you want a recap, there won't be one here since that's something inside of Bungie's wheelhouse while we just go over the community side of things here.

In short, the community seems split. In long, there seem to be two emerging camps on either side of Joe's announcement. On one side, people are happy to finally get some sort of update from the PvP side of the game, with sandbox changes being the only thing to land on their plates in a long time. With Season 15, we should be seeing a few (hopefully welcome) changes to Trials of Osiris as well as a solution to 3-peeking (it's EE not EA). The Bungie team has been hard at work revamping their tools and re-learning the engine thanks to the changes that were introduced with Beyond Light, like the overhaul to the activity scripting system. More modes are coming, with Rift being specifically name-dropped as a possibility, and maps are going to consistently release to give us an actual predictable schedule. The other side of the argument is that Bungie isn't doing enough. Many are upset about only one brand-new map in an entire year, with two 'unvaulted' D2 maps and one remastered D1 map.

We won't be getting into my personal opinions on this, but there has definitely been lots of discussion around it in the last day. "Bungie" and "Destiny" are even still trending on twitter, over 20 hours later - although some of that is going to be "where twab" traffic falling into the same bucket. All that we are going to say is to please keep your conversations and discussions civil, and don't let yourself become ammunition for people who want to say Destiny has a toxic community.

BREAKING THE MOLD

This week, while not super busy elsewhere, has seen an unusually high concentration of Escape Artists and their shenanigans. The new-to-some "Drop Box Glitch" has been taking the map-breakers by storm, and there are some very interesting results coming to light.

The Shattered Throne has finally been breached using the IRB method, and Froggy has a good write-up here that you can catch up on if you're not familiar with it. If you're not interested in the full story, here's a super quick summary: IRB, or Interdimension Rez Breach, tricks the game into moving your respawn point back across load boundaries, leading to some unexpected behavior if you respawn into a technically impossible area. IRB then paired with Drop Box, using sparrows in places that you really shouldn't be able to use them. In the case of Shattered Throne, Mad and Corolla used their sparrows to infinitely fly for 40 minutes to reach their destination. Yes, you read that right.

From here, we can only go up... or down in the case of Drop Box? Either way, get your fun in now since these glitches will probably be patched soon.

SPREADSHEET-WORTHY

Here are some of the key metrics and milestones we've seen over the last week!

Week of July 26

Discord

• 246 new members
• 58% of those are from the Vanity URL! New record!
• 33,867 total members
• 3,140 visitors
• 458 of those people communicated in the server
• Over 27 thousand messages sent (pretty high for this time of the season!)
• Over 7 thousand voice minutes, mostly from map-breakers
• Sweeperbot's Wrath
• 90 mutes were handed out and subsequently revoked
• 9 of these were from Cakes alone
• 12 warnings were handed out
• 2 were from people asking to raid another discord server
• Manual mod actions
• 30 warnings were handed out
• 2 people were banned

Subreddit