It’s been a bit of a tin foil hat week in the Destiny 2 community as theories and fan-compiled data have suggested that Bungie is intentionally making some weapon perk rolls rarer than they should be. With evidence piling extremely high, Bungie has now addressed the perk-weighting accusations, saying that while it is not purposefully altering any perk drop rates, it is now “investigating a potential issue” that may be causing the discrepancies.
So, what is it the Destiny 2 community has uncovered, exactly? Well, over the course of this week, players have been analysing the drop rates and chances of pulling certain perk combinations on weapons mainly from the new Vesper’s Host dungeon. High-level players have been chasing a god roll for the extremely strong VS Chill Inhibitor grenade launcher, and began to notice the roll they were all after was barely being pulled at all.
The FPS game’s biggest sleuths have been hard at work gathering more data from a range of weapons, and they’ve discovered a bizarre and concerning trend: perks that are listed further away from each other in the game’s API have less of a chance of rolling together.
While every perk combination should in theory have an equal chance of dropping, there have been plenty of instances in Destiny 2 history where certain weapon perk rolls just seemed impossible to get. Bungie was never able to spot any issues with individual perk drop rates and always denied that there were differing odds. However, this research seems to finally solve the puzzle – and Bungie has now acknowledged it.
“While we have confirmed that there is no intentional perk weighting on weapons within our content setup, we are now investigating a potential issue within our code for how RNG perks are generated,” it says in a post on the Destiny 2 Team account on X. “Many thanks to all players who have been contributing to data collection across the community. This data has been monumentally helpful with our investigation, and we are currently working on internal simulations to confirm your findings. We will provide more information as soon as it is available.”
There are two incredibly interesting angles to this revelation. The first is that the Destiny 2 community’s collective efforts have helped crack one of the game’s longest-running myths and has aided Bungie in spotting a fairly substantial issue. The second is that this could mean that the chase for god roll weapons – one of the core tenets of a looter shooter like Destiny 2 – may have been skewed for months, potentially years.
It will be super interesting to see what Bungie’s own investigation finds, and while I’m not exactly a hardcore Destiny player that’s constantly grinding for perfect rolls, I can imagine there are plenty that are looking forward to a day where the playing field is properly leveled out and the RNG is, truly, random. The response from the community so far has been surprisingly measured and understanding, generally. Given the scale of the issue, I really expected some hostility. But believe me, I’m glad we don’t have any of that.
If you’re preparing to dive into the new dungeon sometime soon, make sure you’ve got our complete Destiny 2 Vesper’s Host guide close by. Alternatively, if it’s time to take a break from the Destiny grind, here are some other excellent space games that will hit a similar note.
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