What is the LAN cable?

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.