“We don’t have the ability to immediately remove Tonics in Competitive via our servers,” community manager Cozmo23 explains on Reddit (via Rock, Paper, Shotgun). “We’ll continue to investigate possible changes but this experiment will have to run the duration of the Revelry before we can patch a change.”
Reveler’s Tonic lets player reduce the cooldown on their melee, grenade, or class abilities, lasting for an hour. In combination with certain builds, players can spam grenades, which is fun in PvE, but not so much in PvP.
According to Cozmo23, Bungie expected the tonic to be disruptive, but not in a negative way. Its attempt to add variance to Competitive ultimately made things worse, and now it can’t turn back.
As a result, players will have to put up with the buff until The Revelry ends on May 7th. That’s almost two and a half weeks away and adds to general dissatisfaction with the game’s PvP.