I like to think I’m pretty Internet savvy, so when someone first told me that the latest cheese for Destiny involves yanking out your ethernet cable, I thought they were screwing with me, like when some forum miscreant says that “Alt-F4” is the solution to your web problems. Turns out they weren’t. It’s real.
Yep, the latest Destiny exploit might be the funniest one yet — thanks to some Bungie net-code flaws, you can easily beat Crota, the toughest boss in the game, by making one of your team members pull out their LAN cable. This is not a joke. Players first discovered the exploit a couple of weeks ago, while I was on vacation, and having just heard about it and successfully tested it out, I can confirm that this is the most ridiculous cheat I’ve ever seen.
Last night, my raid group beat Crota legitimately for the first time, then went on to try out this LAN yanking exploit with alts. It works. Here’s a walkthrough of how it’s done:
1) Get to the Crota checkpoint, just after the Deathsinger.
2) Pick one fireteam member whose job it will be to yank the cord, then have him or her go SOLO into Crota’s End to ensure that he or she is hosting the game.
3) Have everyone else rejoin the fireteam. Wait for the leader to revive everyone.
4) Start the encounter as normal, killing all of the initial mobs and then heading out to take out the boomer knights on the tower. (We usually go left and park on that side.) Be sure to take out the bridge knight, too.
5) OK, now things get interesting. Have everyone focus fire on Crota. Don’t worry about the swordbearer — just take down Crota’s shield.
6) The second Crota gets down on his knees, have your host pull out his LAN cord. (Note: You can also disable your connection in other ways, so it might not have to be an ethernet cable for this particular exploit to work, but this is the way we did it.)
7) If the host did everything right, there will be a brief lag spike, and then Crota will remain on his knees, indefinitely vulnerable, which means you won’t have to worry about his attacks or his shield regen. Suck it, Crota.
8) Now have your host rejoin the raid, go revive him, and then take out the swordbearer and have someone wail away at Crota while everyone else watches for boomers and other adds. Should take one or two sword cycles at most. You’re still on a timer for the Ogres and for Crota’s Enrage (which is very bad news), but given that Crota isn’t moving, taking him down should be very easy.
Here’s a video of the exploit in action:
Is this cheating? Absolutely. Is it morally questionable? Sure. Will Bungie probably patch it out as quickly as they can figure out how to fix this? Undoubtedly.
But… I like to think of this as revenge: Players are finally taking advantage of a game that tries its hardest to take advantage of them.
Comments
31 responses to “Destiny’s Latest Exploit: Pulling Out Your LAN Cable”
the more i hear about destiny the less I want to play it
You’re missing out. It’s a very fun game to play. I bought it day one, but if I would have waited for the reviews and all the negative, I’d never have got it.
I’m glad I have it though. I’ve out 180 hours into it and still keep going. Yes it has its flaws. It isn’t perfect, but the core gameplay is fun as hell. Even more so with friends.
I had the opposite experience, I decided over Xmas to take the plunge, playing it turned to a grid really quickly, and definitely has the Clash of Clans, more work than fun/give us your money kind of vibe. It was fun with friends for a bit, but it got old really, really fast.
I love the shooting mechanic, but it just makes me wish Bungie had made Halo5 instead of this addiction-attempt of Candy-Crush_Halo.
it’s a good game, but i’m just done with it. (but I’m still checking those latest informations hey?)
It’s actually fun but can be very lonely at times, especially when your friends are offline. Would not recommend unless you have friends willing to play too.
yeah who can afford $500 just to play a game
Makes you wonder who thought of this and how they came across it the first time.
The leader of the group probably dropped while this was happening then just refined from there.
Yeah, been a big Destiny fan but the grind is becoming just too much for too little reward…there is obviously a fine balance between giving too much away in drops and loot and too little that drives people away…there appears to be an imbalance in what some people get over others.
This cheese is being used a lot which to me shows that there is too little reward in the game and people are simply trying to get through the raids repeatedly to see what drops.
Yeah the loot drops recently have been almost non existent. I havent bought the new expansion but purple drops are so rare its ridiculous. I managed to get 2 in the past month and one of them decrypted to ascendant materials.
I won’t be bothering with the expansions. Most of my friends have already stopped, I have one who only recently got the game so he is the only one I see playing.
All this game is about is finding exploits and getting better loot. How boring.
Are we allowed to call it an MMO yet or are Bungie still trying to call it something else?
I could make similar ignorant generalizations about almost anything.
Books are slow and quiet. How boring.
Guardians of the Galaxy is just color and jokes, how boring.
Dragon Age Inquisition is just talking to people and being PC, how boring.
The Internet is just full of pork and inarticulate generalizations, how boring.
just doesn’t work.
wtf? did I hurt your feelings about Destiny?
Bungie have banned for this exact method previously in Halo: Reach. Good luck with that.
Beware! Back in the Reach days, Bungie was very ban-happy with people yanking their LAN cables to complete daily challenges more than once.
In Reach? They were throwing the ban-hammer down as far back as Halo 3 and even as far back as 2.
Totally. But I mean the cable tank truck in particular is precedent for this being a punishable offends. Actually, come to think of it they weren’t banning, just giving time outs and rank resets.
Doubt they will ban now that it is a cash-cow to keep you connected.
Eh, I could see punishments or penalties. Sure, they might piss off paying customers, but the presence of these glitches trivialises the game for players like me who like the challenge. And I’m a paying customer too.
How does someone else cheesing Crota in any way affect the difficulty/challenge of you doing a legit run on him?
If you like the challenge then it shouldn’t bother you. The challenge remains the same for you. It sounds like what you *really* like is placing restrictions on other people.
Croats End Cheese, yum!
Yank cord at Crota,
Kick more scrota
“Here’s a bug in an MMO that would almost certainly result in the users being banned.”
“Let’s tell millions of people on the internet.”
I mean I’m not saying they WILL get banned, but I think if WoW had a raid boss that could be defeated in a similar manner, any guild doing so would surely be punished by Blizzard. At least, if it were a progression boss.
Atremedes in Blackwing Descent … Blizzard doesn’t give a damn if it’s a prog boss if you’re a top 10 guild.
This also works if you just close the game on the xbone home screen. Seems easier than pulling out a cable…
Faking a disconnect. And they tried to say it’s not an MMO.
Oh look, another Kotaku Destiny post…
Why do you read them?
Very good! VERY GOOOOOOOD! Why are you wasting your powers of deduction here when there’s so much injustice in the world? Go! Go! For the good of the city!
The new raid is full of bugs. Skipping half the lamp section by shooting yourself up with an exploding lamp, sniping across at the bridge until the ogres come along instead of getting across the bridge. If the end game wasn’t so annoying to do normally. Yeah I get that it’s supposed to be the hardest part of the game, but they seem to’ve made it hard simply by putting the end of raid enemies up to level 32 when players can currently only get to level 31. What’re they going to do to make it even harder when hard mode is dropped? Up the level even more? Make the enemies into bigger bullet sponges? Yeah players can cheese the game, but tbh, Bungie will cheese the players by how they make the raid even harder