Get ready to Glorb again, gamers; Destiny 2 players have taken a leaf out of the World of Warcraft Reddit community’s book and tricked another AI news scraping site into reporting on a totally fake boss, Glorbo.
After WoW fans recently noticed that the subreddit was being scraped for automated news content, they began posting about ‘Glorbo’, a new (fake) feature in-game. And sure enough, an outlet called The Portal, owned by ZLeague.gg, ran the news. The article has since been taken down.
Destiny 2 fans decided to give the Glorbo trick a whirl in their own subreddit, but to change it up a bit made good ol’ Glorbs into a new, totally fake, secret boss.
On one post, titled “Anyone see how Bungie foreshadowed Glorbo?” with over 60 comments and 700 upvotes, users excitedly began discussing secret Easter eggs that suggested that Glorbo would be added to the game. “I am seriously astonished by how well Bungie has slipped Glorbo into the most recent lore book on the Bungie Store and even the old grimoire pages of the Destiny 1 game,” one user commented.
Posters really committed to the bit, with multiple posts discussing the supposed secret boss, with some Destiny 2 fans even saying Glorbo ruined the game for them. One poster really went the extra mile while maintaining the completely absurd ruse, saying, “Glorbo killed my grandma.” Users even posted fake Twitter (or X, whatever it’s called now) screenshots from the official BungieHelp account about the fabled boss.
Despite the obviously very fake nature of the news, it didn’t take long for yet another site to fall for the trap. TechBriefly posted a How To piece on where to find Glorbo in Destiny 2. The supposed author of the piece, much like The Portal’s Glorbo article writer, doesn’t appear to have a bio or any links to social media, and a quick search of their name and the outlet doesn’t show up any results other than for the site itself. The article remains on the site currently, and TechBriefly has yet to address the journalism faux pas.
“Guardians across the game are always on the lookout for innovative strategies for this new Glorbo content,” the article reads, before launching into a very detailed guide on how to find the mysterious boss – which in reality is so mysterious that it doesn’t even exist.
As more users catch on to rampant AI automation and news scraping, we can probably expect to see plenty more bogus posts, leaks, and mystery features and bosses cropping up on Reddit and beyond as players try to catch out sites trying to juice SEO without human fact-checking.
Godspeed, Reddit users.
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