A_dmg04, the Bungie Destiny 2 community manager, made a good post on Twitter about player fashion, and the response has been… well, difficult at best. The tweet showed a screenshot of Vanquish’s Guardian and said, “This is sick. Great looks, Vanquish!” along with some images of the armor setup. Vanquish replied to the compliment with a heartfelt “Thanks dude! Appreciate it 💜,” and those were basically the good comments. That was when everything just started to go downhill, as they tend to do these days whenever something is posted by a Bungie employee.
The Destiny 2 community has been on turbulent waters recently, and players have not been shy to let developers hear how they feel. While a few truly appreciated the fashion show like Revived_player1, who said “Ooooo this jawn tough!!” (an expression presumed by some to mean “that looks good” in Philadelphia slang), the greater parts of the replies were… not at all about fashion. Not even close.
Within a few moments of the tweet’s release, the complaints started flooding the replies on every subject from cheated Trials of Osiris to the late State of the Game announcement. One user, tweet_YMA, had the balls to ask, “That’s cool and all but could you address the cheating pandemic going on in Trials rn?” Which, in all fairness, is a very valid question. “Cheating” in Destiny 2’s competitive PvP mode has been really big in the past couple of months with players raising one concern right after the other; hence fashion tweets by Bungie community managers, and not concerning themselves with identifying nose to game-breaking issues, simply paved the way to anger.
Then HSMBURGER commented, “anything but dropping state of the game,” a clear reference to the long-awaited roadmap promised by the Bungie to the players. The studio said they’d have a State of the Game update laying out plans for the future, but the update has been delayed lots of times now, to the increasing frustration from players about the mute silence. Patrick Caldwell summed up the sentiment perfectly: “Wish this was for excitement about playable content and not a fashion show. Sad.”
Getting even messier is the lot of responses. Some responses went completely off-topic into… politics at least? RealgoblinTTV responded with “Dmg and his woke transvestite buddies are members of Antifa not a big surprise,” which is…? And how exactly did we get from Destiny 2 fashion … to that? Another user, Isaiah 🃏, actually called it out, tagging dmg04, and said, “Please do something about this person, he’s spouting more bigotry as I type this.” So yeah, the reply section got very interesting.
Meanwhile, some of the others were more specific in their complaints about the game. LaXy_43 stated, “Would love to rock this cosmetic sadly the game is so boring to grind and I couldn’t bring my og weapons I played with last year with me 😭,” touching on the ongoing controversial Destiny 2 sunset system in which older weapons were phased out, something controversial ever since it was put into effect. Jerry Oliver, on the other hand, seemed to have no restrictions: “How about you guys take a great look at your anti cheat? It doesn’t work. At all. Like, totally non existent. Nada. In other words crucible is a fucking joke.” Oof.
Perhaps the strangest facet had people debating amongst themselves on… whether community managers should even be posting fashion at all? There went the entire back and-forth purporting to have evidence about dmg04 allegedly not doing his job by posting these things. Like, James Jackson (a.k.a. ProSportsGuru93) went on to defend the community managers’ right to publish positive content, while others kept insisting he should only be addressing issues in the game. It escalated fast with remarks like, “You just made up something and applied a false connection to it lol,” and, “Kind of hard to talk to you or take you serious when you just make up shit.”
Then there were outright insults coming from the trenches: aPulsey said “You and the destiny team should be ashamed of what this game has become,” a shout felt instantly followed with Zio, “Can’t wait for you to bankrupt and shutdown 🙏.” W-well, very harsh. Forgive those players; after all, we are talking about a video game here, not international politics.
What’s interesting about this is how real this whole situation really highlights the current state of Destiny 2’s community interaction. At one side, you have developers trying to engage in positive ways in emergent player creations and fashion (such a huge part of Destiny’s endgame, to be honest). The other side has players so furious over persistent issues that they just refuse to acknowledge any positivity anymore. The biggest community may be at a breaking point in which every form of communication that is not directly addressing their big problems just spins them on.
As for the fashion that set this whole thing off? Just as cool as it looks in the tweet. Vanquish put together a well-thought-out Guardian outfit, along with some beautiful shader combos and armor pieces that just clicked well together. Maybe under better circumstances, this would have been worth a community shout-out. But now? All these unresolved issues with Destiny 2 have simply turned this into one more channel for player venting.
So yeah, that was just a casual compliment about video game fashion that spiraled into… that. The Destiny 2 community, loud and passionate as ever, is currently showing far more frustration than enthusiasm. Bungie now has rebuilding trust to work on, and until then, not even innocent posts about cool armor sets will escape a wave of complaints about ongoing cheating, late updates, and just about everything else the Guild isn’t happy about. The fashion might be sick; it’s the game’s health that worries everybody. Destiny 2 is also available on PlayStation and Xbox.
