Wednesday, October 25th 2017
"Not So Fast": Bungie Automatically Bans Destiny 2 PC Players With Overlays
Urgent message to all would-be Destiny 2 PC players: Bungie has enabled an extremely strict, no holds-barred permanent account-banning system with Destiny 2, which activates so long as you have any kind of application with process hooks / overlay features. This is true for Twitch, Discord, MSI Afterburner, OBS, XSplit, Skype, TeamSpeak, HWMon, AIDA, as well as some hardware vendor overlays such as ASUS Tweak and Corsair Link software, GeForce Experience's FPS counter... The message screen, "Not so Fast", indicates that players have been banned, without forewarning or any further explanation.
There's a meltdown going on in Bungie's official PC Support forums, where most of the threads have been started - and then added to - by banned users. In some cases, users are banned even before entering the character creation screen; some more fortunate ones can even get to thew first three minutes of the intro video. A post from a Bungie Forum moderator didn't do much to instill confidence: "In Destiny there are account restriction and bans,", Bungie moderator "Kellogs" writes. "Restrictions are only temporary but must be waiting out while bans are permanent. Please note that Bungie will not discuss or overturn account restrictions or bans."It's interesting to note that the same moderator indicated that some apps that might be incompatible with Destiny 2 - read, all of the above - would result in the game not launching, but not on a ban. This seems to be in line with Bungies' terms and conditions on PC overlay support, but nevertheless, hasn't stopped many, many users from calling that claim an outright lie. Apparently, a not insignificant number of users have seen themselves banned, instead of a game application fail to run instance.If you've bought a digital Battle.Net key for the game, and have been banned due to this inexcusable usage of blind banning, you may have some luck in requesting a refund directly from Blizzard support. Users who have bought a physical version fo the game, however, will see their refunds be much less likely.
There's a meltdown going on in Bungie's official PC Support forums, where most of the threads have been started - and then added to - by banned users. In some cases, users are banned even before entering the character creation screen; some more fortunate ones can even get to thew first three minutes of the intro video. A post from a Bungie Forum moderator didn't do much to instill confidence: "In Destiny there are account restriction and bans,", Bungie moderator "Kellogs" writes. "Restrictions are only temporary but must be waiting out while bans are permanent. Please note that Bungie will not discuss or overturn account restrictions or bans."It's interesting to note that the same moderator indicated that some apps that might be incompatible with Destiny 2 - read, all of the above - would result in the game not launching, but not on a ban. This seems to be in line with Bungies' terms and conditions on PC overlay support, but nevertheless, hasn't stopped many, many users from calling that claim an outright lie. Apparently, a not insignificant number of users have seen themselves banned, instead of a game application fail to run instance.If you've bought a digital Battle.Net key for the game, and have been banned due to this inexcusable usage of blind banning, you may have some luck in requesting a refund directly from Blizzard support. Users who have bought a physical version fo the game, however, will see their refunds be much less likely.