It is with grim solemnity that I must share some terrible news: Destiny 2 has cheaters in it. Quite a lot of cheaters, actually—in fact, the majority of players in a top 100 ranking for the contest mode of The Desert Perpetual raid are stinkin', filthy, no-good hackers, why I oughtta.
As spotted by @aquativityy on X (thanks, Forbes), RaidHub's top 100 leaderboard has narced tremendously on the top percentile of the Destiny 2 playerbase. You can see a full Google doc being assembled in real-time here, which has spotted some blatant signs of skullduggery.
Clears rinsed in 10-20 minutes (for comparison's sake, the confirmed world first completed it in over 15 hours), using the guns Duality and Lorentz Driver (a combo of weapons used with 'net limiting' to do boss-melting damage), fresh accounts with very few clears, one player having over 300 kills while their teammates have only a handful, and so on. Basically, almost no-one in this top 100 list did it legit.
This would make an already-exclusive club somewhat even more exclusive—seeing as it's estimated under 500 teams cleared it at all, cheating or not, in the 48 hours that the contest mode was available.
None of these cheaters actually impacted the World First Race, because, as you might imagine, entrants are closely-monitored by Bungie. And as our own resident Destiny 2 player (there are actually a few) Phil Savage tells me, The Desert Perpetual had some incredibly hardcore DPS checks, far outstripping previous contest modes. In other words, you're either the best of the best, or you probably fibbed your way into a challenge emblem.
While this is a bit of an embarrassment for old Bungie, it's not something limited to their game alone. It's downright preferable to Final Fantasy 14, where we've had our world first raids ruined multiple times over by players using plugins under Square Enix's nose. Even under the all-seeing eye of a livestream or two, people will try and get an edge any way they can.
Monster Hunter Wilds endured something similar, too. The moment it launched its leaderboards for timed expeditions, players were posting 10 second completion times.
Heck, even World of Warcraft had a problem with this recently, with a guild of hooligan hackers that cheated their way to a world-first rank in a new raid, were banned, reversed their guild name, did it again, and then posted the evidence to YouTube. It's something of a sport for these people.
I suppose the volume here is telling—I counted around 60 "confirmed" teams from that document, and the number's still ticking up. One thing's for certain, Bungie's got a new cheat-maker to go a-huntin'.
