Nefarious players are employing a game-breaking Destiny 2 bug that allows them to crash another player’s game by sending them a malicious message in the FPS game’s text chat. Bungie has now disabled the game’s text chat functionality temporarily across all platforms while they investigate the issue and prepare a fix.
The text chat bug was initially reported on both the Destiny 2 forums and the game’s subreddit. Players noted that a particular text string being posted into the chat window would cause anyone who saw it to face an instant game crash, booting them out and returning the Weasel error message.
In particular, this began to affect the game’s PvP – rather than posting the message to a wide chat, some dastardly Destiny deviants decided to whisper the text string to their opponents, causing the other players’ games to crash and securing themselves an easy victory. Some players reported that even disabling your chat doesn’t resolve the issue, as the messages are still sent to your character, just not displayed to you.
While players are obviously reluctant to share the message in question, several people report that the culprit is a lengthy ‘copypasta’ meme that has been translated from English into Chinese, which pushes past the game’s expected character limit for a single message. Because Chinese characters typically require slightly more memory per character, this causes a memory overflow which then results in the game crashing.
Bungie tweeted that they were investigating the issue, and then shortly afterwards announced that they “have temporarily disabled text chat on all platforms in Destiny 2 while we investigate an issue causing Weasel errors.” Hopefully this should be quickly resolved, and players can return to sending lovely messages of thanks and support to one another again as I’m sure they always have done.
This week at Bungie, it was announced that Destiny 2 skill-based matchmaking is coming to select Crucible playlists in the space game. A big showcase in August is set to reveal the future of Destiny 2 – where Bungie is expected to show off the multiplayer game’s Lightfall expansion.