Developer Bungie pulled the Iron Banner event from Destiny, merely hours after it went live, and for the time being there is no information on the reasoning behind the move.

In any case, the Iron Banner bounties are now gone and Iron Banner is no longer available to select from the map. The back area of The Tower, Destiny's main hub, is closed off, and players are no longer able to take part in the event.

Destiny is a huge game, and developer Bungie as well as publisher Activision have pledged to continuously add new content for players to explore, for both PvP and PvE fans to take part in.

The first of Destiny's raids, the Vault of Glass, was released shortly after the sci-fi flavored first-person shooter's launch in September, and thousands upon thousands of gamers successfully completed its challenges.

The Iron Banner, however, was not received as well as the Vault of Glass was, largely due to the fact that many gamers expected a different experience than the one on the menu. Now, it seems that Bungie set the event live for a couple of hours, before pulling the plug on it.

The most likely explanation is that Bungie started the event prematurely, enabling gamers to join it before all the promised changes have been worked into the game code.

The first Iron Banner event didn't go down too well

The Iron Banner is a special competitive event, geared toward multiplayer users, where stuff like level, armor and player damage ratings makes a huge impact. The Crucible, Destiny's main competitive multiplayer mode, is balanced so that the player advantage gained from in-game items is rendered irrelevant, in order to create an equitable PvP experience for gamers to take part in.

The Iron Banner, however, promised that power would matter, and that players who had gone through the trouble of securing the finest loot available would have a noticeable advantage over those with lower levels.

However, the last time the Iron Banner was available, many complained that the gear disparities were not properly reflected on the playing field, and that players with low level and no gear could still easily outmatch even the most hardened Vault of Glass veterans.

Bungie promised to rework things so that high level characters would have enough of an advantage, but when the Iron Banner was released earlier today, those changes were not in place.

Bungie pledged to make bounties a little easier, not as grindy and demanding as the first time around, and promised to implement a ton of other fixes and quality of life improvements.