destiny 2
bungee
Over the history of the Destiny series, I’ve seen a lot of bugs, player complaints, and a lot of drama. But if it goes well, what’s been going on behind the scenes in Destiny 2 for years regarding loot drops could potentially be the biggest scandal the game has ever seen. Sho. And I don’t say that lightly.
This is an old issue where players believe that certain perks on weapons are weighted to drop more than others. Every time something like this happens, Bungie says, “No, we checked, and that’s not the case.” This happened again with the VS Chill Inhibitor, a heavy grenade launcher used in the attack on the Vespers host. Players said they found the “God Roll” combo of Envious Arsenal and Bait and Switch to be nearly impossible to obtain. A few players ran some data analysis that seems to indicate that something is wrong here.
Bungie looked into it and responded and surprisingly said, no, the perks aren’t weighted yet. However, something else seems to be going on.
This idea was first proposed by T1Vendetta, who came up with the “proximity” theory of drops. That is, the way the perk columns are listed in the API (you can see it on light.gg), the perks that are closest to each other are dropped most often. This looks like this (via Mossy Max):
park combo
Mossy Max
In this example, the drop analysis is then done and the most common drops are yellow lines with 0 or 1 spaces between them, and the probability of that particular combo occurring is 1 in 24. But then we go to distance two. This is a 1 in 49 chance, twice as rare.
Things get weird when you reach a perk that is 3 spaces away (in this analysis, the perk list wraps around from top to bottom). And what is the total? The odds of them getting that roll are 1 in 454.
destiny 2
bungee
This theory sounds crazy at first glance, but it is illustrated very clearly in the following graph. The light gray/white squares with the most drops have the closest park distance, and the black squares with the fewest drops are the three distance perk pairs. You can also test this yourself if you have a large amount of saved Echoes engrams. Use them in Season of Dawn weapons, catalog their drop perk pairs, and compare here.
I can’t stress enough how wild this is. This is no longer just a conspiracy theory. Yes, it’s “fan analysis”, but there are a lot of smart Destiny fans out there, and a lot of people with statistics backgrounds run these numbers. And as an outside observer who doesn’t personally manage these numbers, this explanation makes sense. Because this explains so many aspects of this thing.
This explains why aiming for specific rolls feels impossible, even in RNG where all these perk combos should theoretically pair up with equal probability. This explains why it feels like you keep getting the same pair of perks over and over again in improbable ways compared to what you’re actually trying to get. Have you ever gotten the same pair of perks three times in a row and thought, “What the heck?” I’m sure every player in the game has. This shows it’s more than just some fancy RNG. This explains why Bungie says individual perks are not weighted when researching. Because they’re looking at individual perks and not this idea of weighted combos. This tells us that Bungie isn’t doing this on purpose to make Godroll harder to follow, they’re simply overlooking this. Yes, the VS Chill Inhibitor roll is one of those ultra-rare rolls, but if you do this analysis across all weapons, you’ll realize that the concept of distance is independent of perks and even a terrible roll can be a super-rare roll. means. Of course, this may be the best role in some cases, but it’s not designed that way. So, despite what many would claim, Bungie doesn’t seem to be lying. Still, it’s terrible.
It was sold. I’ve seen enough at this point. The data here not only makes sense, but also explains why Bungie missed this by checking for the wrong thing, and even an anecdote where RNG degradation in games has been felt for years. Masu. And again, this may have been going on for years, but we don’t know when this started.
If Bungie investigated this and admitted that oops, this is actually happening, players would be furious. In this case they would be quite right to be so. This is probably because the system that weights every drop in the game was messed up, so if you were working on one of these borderline impossible roles it would cost you dozens of hours per player, or even more. It will take hundreds of hours. Even if this wasn’t some kind of lie or trick by Bungie, it’s still absolutely inexcusable and it shouldn’t have been up to players to figure this out.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Bungie has to say about this. Saying “We confirmed that’s not true” won’t work this time. Not for me anyway.
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