The Cord: Bungie Protects Streamers and Leaves DBNOs To Die.

 


Dear Bungie,

The next time you’re planning on waiting all day to drop patch notes or future patch notes plan can you not do it right after I’ve finished editing an interview? Thanks.

Anyway, we’ve just received communications from the Marathon Development Team regarding two topics that have been discussed extensively within the community for weeks; Streamer Mode and a curbing of “Self-Rez” effectiveness.

Bungie outlined that, with the launch of Season 2, creators can expect a new batch of Quality of Life changes that should protect, and by virtue enhance, their experience as they broadcast their games. Content creators can expect the ability to hide their and/or their crew’s names on their own screen, replace their in-run name with a generic one in places like pings, kill feeds, death recaps, and spectator mode, replace other, non-crew related, players’ names on their own screen with generic names, and a configurable MM delay to mitigate stream sniping.

Many larger creators in the community have expressed issues related to, most frequently, stream sniping, including Tyraxe, who famously began to black out his screen during his “World’s First” Compiler Clear runs. On the other side of the coin, player AiiyGatorz publicized an unfortunate incident where an enemy player who’d noticed her username began to sexually heckle her, which makes username protections a necessity when discussing community and player safety.

Ultimately, these are welcome changes as they help protect creators and regular players from harassment, stream sniping, and targeted griefing in a game where individual matches carry serious tension and time investment. By hiding names and replacing them with generic aliases, Bungie is making it much harder for viewers or bad actors to identify, track, and intentionally target specific players during a run. The matchmaking delay serves a similar purpose by disrupting queue syncing, which is one of the main ways stream snipers get into creator lobbies in the first place. Overall, these systems improve player safety, reduce toxicity, and help preserve match integrity while still keeping the features optional for people who want visibility and interaction with their communities. While mainly directed at streamers, these changes will be available to all players, even those with no interest in content creation.

Continuing on with global changes, Bungie also announced a significant change to the way in which Self and Team revives work. 

In the next update,1.0.9, the time it takes for a runner to self-revive will be noticeably increased, which will also lead to a rebalance of the Revive Speed stat. When the Revive Speed stat is at 0, players can expect to see a 33% increase in revive speed time, from 12 to 16 seconds.  Conversely, when the Revive Speed stat is maxed out at 100, players will see a massive increase of roughly 71%, from 7 to 12 seconds.

These changes ultimately slow fights down into a more tactical pace and make downs feel more meaningful and consequential. When self-revives happen too quickly, especially with high Revive Speed builds, players can immediately re-enter fights before the opposing team has time to reposition, heal, reload, or capitalize. That can make combat feel chaotic and undermine the importance of securing downs. By increasing the baseline self-revive time and heavily reducing the effectiveness of Revive Speed stacking, Bungie is creating a larger punishment window for getting downed and making team coordination, positioning, and decision-making matter more. It also reduces situations where players feel like they have to repeatedly win the same fight over and over because enemies keep instantly getting back up.

In the coming weeks, we'll see how these changes play out as the game continues to evolve the the Developers continue to keep their ears to the ground. Until then, I hope you're all preparing your vaults for 10 days of Cryo Archive to end the season.

Tomorrow, look forward for my interview with NAPainter regarding the recent "Compiler Loot Room OOB" controversy.

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