Bungie may finally have a fix for Destiny’s heavy ammo bug

For a while now, Bungie has been struggling to solve an ongoing problem in Destiny regarding heavy ammo disappearing from the player in certain instances.

You love Heavy Weapons. The purple glow of ammunition is a promise of future enemy annihilation by way of your favorite Rocket Launcher or (even better) belt-fed Machine Gun. You buy it in bulk when you visit the Gunsmith. To get the most bang from your space bucks, you equip armor that lets you carry more of the stuff. Unfortunately it turns out that those deep pockets have metaphorical holes in them.

Basically, players have been losing their heavy ammo in PvE when the following happens:

• they die
• they return to orbit
• they encounter a cutscene

Well, after weeks of tracking this bug, Bungie seems to finally have a fix, or are at least on the way to finding a fix. And they hope to deploy it before the end of February.

Attempting to explain the issue in Bungie's weekly update, Sandbox Engineer Jon Cable wrote, "The basic flaw here is an ordering problem. Our inventory system creates your weapons when your characters spawn. When that happens, it tries to restore the same fraction of ammo that you had when you died. The bug occurred because the weapon is created before capacity modifiers from armor perks are applied, so the persisted fraction yields fewer rounds."

So why has it taken so long?

Apparently, Bungie is all about "managing the risk." Basically, there's a chance — and this applies with any fix — that solving one issue could result in something worse than the original bug.

"Players outnumber our testers by factors of several thousand, so if there is a problem that slips through the cracks, it is virtually guaranteed that the community will find it. This bug was mainly risky because it was at the intersection of a lot of different systems – player profiles, investment, sandbox, perks, and weapon management."

In the end, Jon came up "with a surgical change that fixes the main issue and minimizes the chances that a new problem would be introduced." Bungie isn't quite ready to deploy the fix, but they did say they would keep us updated.