I have seen many bugs, many player complaints and a whole lot of drama in the history of Destiny as a series. But if it pans out, what has been happening behind the scenes in Destiny 2 in regard to loot drops for years, potentially, would be the biggest scandal the game has ever seen. And I do not say that lightly.
This is an old issue, players believe certain perks are weighted to drop more than others on weapons. Every time this happens, Bungie says, “no, we checked, they’re not.” This happened again with the VS Chill Inhibitor, a heavy grenade launcher from the Vesper’s Host raid. Players said the “god roll” combo of Envious Arsenal and Bait and Switch felt close to impossible to get. A few players ran some data analysis that seemed to indicate something was awry here.
Bungie looked into it, responded, and said that surprise, no, perks are still not weighted. However, something else appears to be going on.
This idea was first put forth by T1Vendetta, who came up with the “proximity” theory of drops. In short, the claim is the way the perk columns are listed in the API, which can be seen on light.gg, perks that are closest together drop the most often. As in, that looks like this (via Mossy Max):
In this example, followed up by drop analysis, the most common drop would be ones that have zero or one space in between them, the yellow lines, which is a 1 in 24 chance at that specific combo. But then you move on to a distance of two, which is instead a 1 in 49 chance, twice as rare.
Things get crazy when you get to perks that are a distance of 3 spaces apart (the perk list wraps around from top to bottom in this analysis). And those totals? They come out to a 1 in 454 chance at getting that roll.
The theory sounds insane on its face, but it is very clearly demonstrated with a chart like this, where the light grey/white squares with the most drops have the closest perk distance, and the black squares, with barely any drops at all, are the three distance perk pairs. You can even test this out yourself if you have a lot of Echoes engrams stored. Use them on the Season of Dawn weapons and catalogue the perk pairs in those drops, and compare them to here.
I cannot overstate just how wild this is. This is no longer just conspiracy theorizing. Yes, it’s “fan analysis” but there are…many smart Destiny fans and many with backgrounds in statistics running these numbers. And as an outside observer not personally running these numbers, this explanation makes sense because it explains so many aspects of this:
- It explains why even with RNG, where all of these perk combos should in theory have an equal chance of being paired up, going for a specific roll can feel impossible.
- It explains why it feels like you keep getting the same perk pairs over and over in a way that feels improbable compared to the one you’re actually going for. Have you ever gotten the same perk pair three times in a row and gone “what the hell?” I think every player in the game probably has. This would indicate it’s more than just wacky RNG.
- It explains why Bungie says that when they look into it, individual perks are not weighted. Because they are looking at individual perks, but not this weighted combo idea.
- It relays that Bungie is simply missing this rather than doing this on purpose to make god rolls harder to chase. Yes, the VS Chill Inhibitor roll is one of these super rare ones, but doing this analysis across all weapons, the distance idea is perk-agnostic, meaning a terrible roll can also be the super rare one. Of course yes, sometimes this will be the best roll, but it is not being designed this way. So Bungie doesn’t appear to be lying, even though that will be a claim by many. Still, it’s awful.
I’m sold. I’ve seen enough at this point. Not only does the data here make sense, it also explains why Bungie is missing this by checking the wrong thing, and even anecdotally how RNG drops in the game have felt for years. And again this may have been going on for years, we simply don’t know when this might have started.
If Bungie looks into this and admits that whoops, this is actually happening, players will be furious. In this instance, they would be absolutely right to be. This is dozens or even hundreds of hours per player if they were farming for one of these borderline impossible rolls because this was getting screwed up on a system that weights possibly every drop in the game. Even if this wasn’t some sort of lie or trick by Bungie it is still absolutely inexcusable and it should not have been up to players to catch this.
I cannot wait to see what Bungie says about this, and saying “we checked it’s not true” is not going to work this time. Not for me, anyway.
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