When Destiny finally came out in September 2014, players quickly found out that Bungie had overpromised and under-delivered. Since then, the development team has been working extensively to bring the game up to speed.
A year and a half later and thanks to an ongoing stream of small fixes and updates, the game is finally close what it should've been at launch.
Destiny's February update was released earlier this week and it introduced a very subtle-yet-very-interesting tweaks to the game. As part of the update, Bungie introduced a "Damage Referee" that aims to balance online skirmishes by punishing players with high lag.
The system incorporates additional checks to identify players that manipulate their connection speed to gain unfair advantage in combat or players who take advantage of their poor connection to make it harder for other players to hit them.
We've all played online death matches against high-ping players and felt the frustration of scoring a perfect headshot and finding out that it didn't register because the high-ping player wasn't actually there when you shot him. The new Damage Referee system aims to make that a thing of the past by detecting those situations and registering them as kills. On the other side, the system also decreases the accuracy and reliability of the weapons held by high-lag players.
Of course it is unfair to punish some players for their poor connection speed, but it can be argued that it is not fair to let them ruin the game for other players either.