Over Half of Destiny 2 Contest Top 100 Raid Teams Were Cheaters, Data Shows

Over half of the teams reportedly cheated to complete day one contest of the raid, The Desert Perpetual, in the new Destiny 2 DLC The Edge of Fate.

While there is no official confirmation of cheating from the game’s developer, and all the evidence are circumstantial, community investigators have formed a list of cheaters backed by the following signs of unfair competition:

• Suspiciously fast completion times (sub–10-minute clears on encounters that should take significantly longer, even for top-tier fireteams),
• Exploitative weapon usage (widespread use of Duality and Lorentz Driver in a manner consistent with known damage-limit bypasses or heavy ammo exploits),
• Repetition of player names across multiple runs (the same group of usernames appeared in several World’s First leaderboard attempts and top runs),
• Unlimited heavy kills (evidence of infinite heavy weapon usage without corresponding ammo economy, suggesting exploits or cheats, especially as the new DLC hit players with a noticeable ammo shortage),
• Suspiciously fresh accounts in top tiers (players with fewer than five total raid clears on their account showed up in top-tier clears),
• Disproportionate kill counts (players in one run have vastly different numbers of kills).

The Edge of Fate became the 10th DLC for Destiny 2. It was was released on July 15, 2025, and its initial raid The Desert Perpetual was launched on July 19, 2025. On July 20, 2025, team Nuts became the first to complete The Desert Perpetual, as reported by Gaming.News.

Notably, The Edge of Fate expansion debuted with the lowest number of concurrent online players on Steam compared to previous DLCs, and the first raid didn’t improve the situation.

Set in a mythic sci-fi universe, Destiny 2 features a multiplayer environment with elements of role-playing games and, like its predecessor, is divided into PvE and PvP environments. The game is available on Windows PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

As of the time of writing, developed and published by Bungie, Destiny 2 has a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam with 630,434 reviews and all-time peak of 316,750 concurrent players according to SteamDB.