Earlier this month, Bungie released Destiny 2's newest dungeon, Vesper's Host. It's a pretty good time—a fun reprisal of the some of the mechanics introduced in the Deep Stone Crypt raid, and with some unique boss encounters to boot. Good job all around, surely there won't be some major week-long drama off the back of it.
Reader, there has been major week-long drama off the back of it.
Nestled in the dungeon's loot table is a grenade launcher, VS Chill Inhibitor. It can roll with new perk Envious Arsenal, which automatically reloads the magazine when you deal damage with your other weapons. And it can pair with Bait and Switch, a perk that gives a 30% damage bonus when you deal damage with your other weapons. It's a perfect combination—absurdly desirable in terms of boss damage phases. People immediately started to farm for it—repeating the dungeon's first encounter over and over for a chance to get that specific roll.
One problem: people just weren't getting that perk combo to drop.
You can see this via Light.gg, which uses the API to scrape weapon perk stats from players' inventories. Envious Arsenal is the second most popular perk in the third column. Bait and Switch is the most popular perk in the fourth column. The combination of Envious Arsenal and Bait and Switch? It doesn't even make the top eight of most popular combos.
This led to a growing conspiracy theory, "Weightgate," that Bungie was weighting weapon perks—deliberately tipping the scales to ensure the most desirable rolls are much rarer, thus prompting players to keep coming back to the slot machine of weapon RNG for one more go. Some players attempted to investigate this phenomenon further, using data from a set of players who collectively farmed the encounter thousands of times. The problem was none of this was conclusive. Players who did already have the Envious Arsenal/Bait and Switch combo are going to stop farming for it—and so any sample of people who have thousands of clears by definition is only going to include players who don't have that roll.
On the other hand, a statement from Bungie's community team felt pretty definitive: "There is no perk weighting active for any legendary weapon perks in Destiny 2." It did little to quell the growing dissatisfaction, though—the data, flawed as it may be, felt right based on people's own experiences.
And as it turns out, the doubters were probably right. Streamer Vendetta proposed a new "brand of copium"—the perk proximity theory, suggesting that perks that were listed closer to each in the API had a greater chance of dropping together. Amazingly, based on further drop analysis from Twitter user Newo, it seems to be true.
I crowd-sourced over 452 drops of the VS Chill Inhibitor, and the results were eye-opening. I was genuinely shocked the first time I saw this chart. Look at that gradient...This is certainly not uniform, but its not quite enough evidence on its own. pic.twitter.com/iU5cX4gDzdOctober 23, 2024
This analysis shows a clear pattern of drop chances based on a perk's proximity in the game's code, and it seemingly applies to more than just the new dungeon's weapons.
This is the smoking gun for me. 100k rolls of S24 Truthteller on light .gg. Not a single good roll to go for, so the pattern shows really clearly. There's no reason that Moving Target + Threat Detector should be 17x more likely than MT + Repulsor Brace. https://t.co/MwLw9uUJ8g pic.twitter.com/RCfkvBCgYZOctober 24, 2024
Light.gg has now made a page that displays graphs for all of the game's weapons, and the evidence—particularly for those from recent episodes—seems pretty clear. There are a lot of graphs showing the telltale diagonal gradient that suggests a perk's proximity is having an effect.
Enough so that Bungie has responded again, reaffirming that "there is no intentional perk weighting on weapons within our content setup," but confirming that the studio is now investigating "a potential issue within our code for how RNG perks are generated".
The reason that this has been such a major talking point among the Destiny 2 community should be clear: in any game with RNG rolls, it's important that players can have confidence in the fairness of the system. God knows, anyone who's played enough of any loot-driven game will have horror stories about bad strings of luck—RNG that feels like some invisible hand is preventing you from what you want. But, in a perverse way, that's also part of the fun. In a perfectly fair system, the next run could be the one—the big payoff is just around the corner. That context is very different if there is actually some force preventing you from getting what you want.
Ultimately, though, I think the Light.gg admins have a pretty good take on this.
Re: Perk Drama-New tool to help visualize issue https://t.co/vsgfDsLwzv-I do think something is going on-I don't think Bungie would intentionally do this & also give us tools (API) to catch it happening-I do think people need to chill-Full Q&A top of page linked aboveOctober 24, 2024
Sure, plenty in the playerbase are ready to believe that Bungie would weight perks—the community's most enduring cynical take is that the studio will do anything it can to increase player engagement metrics. But also Destiny 2's API is a genuinely exhaustive thing, and gives the community the exact tools that were needed to 'catch' whatever current issue is affecting weapon perks. It would be wild to intentionally try to fudge the numbers while so much raw data is easily available.
It is, though, funny that this drama has surfaced in the same release that Bungie began work to deprioritise the weapon crafting system. It's not clear exactly how extensive weapon crafting will be going forward, but none of this season's new weapons are craftable as yet—all of them relying solely on RNG drops. For now, at least, it's probably best not to spend hundreds of runs farming for a god roll VS Chill Inhibitor. At least until Bungie's investigation is done.
