Destiny 2 dusts off servers after crashing into Moon

Though Destiny 2: Shadowkeep was the first time I'd been playing an MMO around expansion launch time, I knew what to expect last night: surprise; spectacle; excitement; confusion; discovery; server queues; connection troubles; servers going offline; waiting until the next day to play. Reader dear, it delivered on all counts. Following a string of disconnections, sign-in problems, and other datapipe wonk, Bungie took their MMOFPS offline for several hours last night. Today, it seems fixed and fine. Which is about what I expected, especially considering yesterday's big launch also saw the base game go free-to-play and switch from Battle.net to Steam. Many cables for gremlins to tug at there.

Shadowkeep launched at 6pm last night. I had to queue for a few minutes, with my number in the queue hilariously bouncing up and down but no real harm. Then it seemed fine. Going by the barrage of messages in the RPS clan Discord, the servers started to crap out around 9pm. Players were getting booted with connection issues, players couldn't join, sign-ins seemed down... it was messy.

After several notes saying they were investigating, Bungie declared at 10:13 that they were taking the game down for emergency maintenance. That wrapped up about 2am today. The game seems fine now. Not that I can play much during work hours. Damn you, cruel bosses.

A few other issues persist.

MMO expansion launches, eh? Coupled with the influx of players from going free-to-play and the technical process of switching to Steam, I'd expected that to happen. Unfortunate, undesirable, unsurprising. I'd accordingly planned for my big Shadowkeep sesh to be today.

Destiny 2 has debuted high on Steam's list of top games, with a peak of 219,997 concurrent players making it comfortably the fourth-most-played game. That bodes well for days when people will actually be able to play the game.