Whether you like it or not, Guardians have stepped into a war with the Beaver online. Unlike the likes of the Cabal or the Vex, players aren’t simply able to dispatch the Beaver by shooting it. Instead, this is a well known error code that some receive when they encounter server connection issues, but as luck would have it, it would appear that Bungie and Valve may have done something about those pesky Destiny 2 Beaver issues.

Valve software developer Fletcher Dunn recently took to Twitter to discuss the Destiny 2 Beaver server issue that many players have encountered and how they were able to track down the cause. For those not in the know, players would get a Beaver code when their system had trouble connecting to other players’ systems. Since Destiny 2 has been using Steam‘s peer-to-peer networking tech, which Dunn works on, this has given him the opportunity to take a deeper dive into what is going on.

The tech is software-based routing: route through general-compute linux boxes using custom protocol, with clients exercising significant routing autonomy. Since peers do not share their IP addresses, script kiddies cannot DDoS other players.https://t.co/Uxp8hgThZX

— Fletcher Dunn (@ZPostFacto) July 23, 2020

Each connection involves 4 hosts: 2 clients (that we cannot access) and 2 relays. We dug through countless examples, correlating Bungie’s records, session summaries in our backend, and logs from the 2 relays. Forensic debugging of problems you cannot reproduce is frustrating.

— Fletcher Dunn (@ZPostFacto) July 23, 2020

Dunn then went on to say over the course of a couple months, he fixed a few bugs here and there while Bungie worked on fixing issues with the API integration. However, it wasn’t until Dunn took a look at two relays that are in Virginia, one of which has their “experimental XDP path enabled.” This led to a breakthrough is the case of the Destiny 2 Beaver server issue.

The kernel does a heroic amount of work for you to deliver a single UDP packet, most of which is bypassed by XDP. So XDP is *insanely* fast. In our case, the XDP code can process 5x-10x the packets for the same CPU cost as the plain BSD socket code.

— Fletcher Dunn (@ZPostFacto) July 23, 2020

So this relay was an “oddball” in the fleet, and for it to be implicated was suspicious.

I ran a query our connection analytics to see if it was an outlier.

— Fletcher Dunn (@ZPostFacto) July 23, 2020

As it turns out, one of those Virginian relays saw a much higher number of disconnections than the other, but it was not the “oddball” as many would suspect. It was the other one. “With XDP, you are serializing raw Ethernet frames, including the next hop MAC address,” Dunn said about the bug involved with the Destiny 2 Beaver server issue. “If the final destination is local, the next hop is that host’s MAC, otherwise it’s a switch.”

Once Dunn knew what to look for, he was able to identify other examples of the same bug, which then led to Bungie confirming that disconnection rates have returned to “similar levels reported in past Seasons.” Needless to say, the Destiny 2 Beaver has not been defeated, but merely forced back into its cage. As Dunn said, “networking is complicated.”

Destiny 2 is currently available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. In more recent news, it was revealed that the Destiny 2 Beaver (hopefully contained) will be coming to Xbox Game Pass later this year. Keep it tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers as the ongoing war with that rodent continues, and for other gaming goodness going on right now, check out the following:

• Xbox Boss Phil Spencer Hints At Another Xbox Series X Showcase On The Way (VIDEO)
• Halo Infinite Is Bigger Than Halo 4 And 5 Put Together, Says 343 Industries
• New Resident Evil 8 Trailer And More Rumored To Drop Next Month

What say you, Guardians? Have you gotten mixed up with the Destiny 2 Beaver server issue before? Sound off in the comments section below, and be sure to follow DFTG on Twitter for live gaming and entertainment news 24/7!

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