The Destiny 2 community has stunned well, itself, by a new project that seems to have proven that drops have been weighted improperly for potentially years in terms of paired perk rolls. Now, Bungie is even admitting that something is in fact going on here after years of denial.
To summarize, while Bungie has always maintained that there is no weighting of individual perks on weapon drops, Destiny 2 player data-crunchers ran an analysis that showed that certain perk pairs have in fact been weighted. The bizarre explanation seems to be based on how the columns of perks are listed in the API. If the two perks are next to each other or one space diagonally away, it’s a 1 in 24 chance of getting that pair. But if they are the max of three spaces away, it rockets to a 1 in 454 change, indicating why some combos have often felt impossible to get.
This data started to coalesce a week ago as a result of the rarely-dropping god roll combo on the Vesper’s Host dungeon’s new grenade launcher. Bungie, once again, put out their statement about no weighted perk rolls, but with this new data they are forced to admit something is up and they are investigating further:
So “investigating a potential issue” in the code and “working to confirm your findings” is pretty clear language, and it is insane that it has taken literal years for this to be found, as this data stems all the way back to potentially Beyond Light where major weapon change were made.
I called this the biggest scandal in Destiny history, and I do believe that is true. More than XP throttling, in any case, as XP is simply not that important to the game. But this is the core of the entire game, loot farming, and it means certain rolls have been close to impossible to farm for years now. This may not have come up all the time as you would need A) a weapon you care about B) the god roll being three spaces apart and C) a terribly farm to run like a dungeon to really notice. But I can think of plenty of times this has happened.
Others think this is not as big of a deal as there have not been that many god roll combos in this category over the years, and in fact, this distribution means that players may have gotten some rolls earlier than they would have otherwise had things been normalized as they should have.
I really, really want to see what Bungie’s eventually explanation for this is, when a fix might happen and how this could impact farming in the future (dungeon farming, to start with, is awful with or without this happening). We should know more soon.
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