It isn't all that shocking, but Bungie has confirmed that characters created in the Destiny beta will not transfer to the retail product.  Furthermore, the vaults have been cleared and leaderboards reset.  So, why is this happening?  Well a lot has happened since the beta began and ended, so much in fact that the characters created for the beta no longer have the same stats as their full game counterparts.

Bungie game designer Tyson Green put it best in a new post on Bungie's site.  There are too many new features, tuned stats, and new weapons that carrying over characters would create balancing issues.

"Since the Beta, we’ve continued to tune and adjust the game. The way you earn experience has been adjusted up and down a bunch of times. Items have been added and removed. New features toggled. Although there’s no single monumental change, the sum of the tweaks leaves characters from the Beta Build in strange shape that would be confusing at best, broken at worst."

This will be the last time anyone has to delete their Destiny character, unless they really want to.  Destiny launches September 9 on PS4, Xbox One, PS3, and Xbox 360.