Destiny 2 players believe the game is secretly cheating on them. While on the surface it’s an epic space opera about humanity facing off against cosmic evil in a post-apocalyptic future, Bungie’s sci-fi shooter is also Pokémon-Collector style, where players earn occasional, ornate, and powerful weapons instead of cute magical creatures. The game’s latest “weightgate” controversy is a strangely compelling conspiracy theory that claims that the decline in certain ideal weapon variants is much lower than that of junk, reigniting senior debates about Destiny 2loot system and whether it’s really fun or not.
If you’re a regular player, you probably guess I’m talking about feat combos and god rolls, but if you’re not, it’s crucial to know a little about the basics in the heart Destiny 2chasing loot. Most of the weapons you can get in the game drop with two random attachments that allow you to do everything from increasing reload speeds to more engaging things like adding elemental explosions to precision hits.
Some trait combinations are considered much, much better than others, based on their synergy with the weapon’s base stats and the broader meta-manipulation of the character who is ruling at any given time. These combos are called divine drops, and they determine whether the legendary drop you just found is worth keeping or junk that needs to be destroyed immediately. In theory, trait combinations should be completely random, providing the same chance of receiving a god roll as any other possible permutation. But a recent conspiracy says it doesn’t actually work, and players think they have the math to prove it.
At the heart of this scandal that Destiny amateur Paul Tassi at Forbes Is calling it potentially the biggest in the history of the gameis a recent grenade launcher called VS Chill Inhibitor. It has just been added to the game in Episode: Revenantsecond content update since then Final shape expansion in June, as one of the legendary drops in the recent Vesper’s Host dungeon. The benefits of the god roll are Jealous Arsenal and Bait and Switch, which reload weapons from reserves and enhance damage respectively. Both are activated by dealing damage with other weapons, making it an straightforward to utilize but very effective threat.
However, players are staging the first encounter in the Vesper Host dungeon ad nauseum, and are having difficulty getting results on this particular god roll more often than any other in recent memory. As soon as the dungeon launched, theories immediately arose that there must be some glitch on Bungie’s end that was unintentionally making divine rolls for VS Chill Inhibitor shockingly occasional. Single player data testing this hypothesis escalated over the weekend to the point that Bungie decided to respond directly.
“Hello everyone, we were talking to the Sandbox folks about this this morning” – the Destiny the band’s Twitter account wrote on October 21. “There is no active feat weighting for any legendary weapon traits Destiny 2. In the last update, we added perk attunement to exotic class items, but it’s a different system. It seemed to be an open and shut case, with denial leaving no room for alternative interpretations or theories. However, days later, players were still crunching the numbers and found Bungie’s denial even harder to believe.
Here’s the gist of the conspiracy that took shape this week: as stated by T1Vendetta. It’s not that Bungie is intentionally making the most desirable god rolls for weapons harder to obtain than other trait combinations, but rather its RNG code randomly favors some combinations over others. In particular, there is an idea to have benefits listed further apart in Bungie’s API tables for Destiny 2 they are less likely to appear together, while those closer together come together much more often. So while these discrepancies actually occur all the time, players only notice them when a weapon god roll combines two traits that are extremely far apart in the table.
Analysis according to YouTuber Skarrow9 walks players through the theory in more detail and presents anecdotal player data and crowdsourcing research to back it up. Suspicion is growing in society that this is actually due to a bug dating back to release Final shapeas evidenced by the unusual perk drop rates for the grenade launcher re-released in this expansion called the Truth Teller. “At this point there doesn’t seem to be any malice towards or from Bungie, but the data is there,” the player wrote on the subreddit in one of many popular threads discussing the problem. “Whether this is a bug or an issue with how bonuses are generated, we just want answers or further investigation.”
Some players are already trying to figure out how such a bug could creep into the game without Bungie detecting it, and it can be assumed that it is due to implicit bias, but RNG is currently programmed to drop bonuses. Bungie hasn’t reached back to clarify whether the community is still leaning towards windmills, or if there really is some deeper issue that’s keeping players from getting the god roll they want. Whatever the truth turns out to be in this case, this whole ordeal raises a much bigger question for players: whether the pursuit of loot in Destiny whenever actually good?
This game has always struggled to walk the line between giving players what they want, when they want it, and forcing them to grind until they get lucky. Making loot straightforward and uncomplicated to obtain would defeat the purpose of the game, but at some point too much work and RNG can make the whole thing feel more like operating a slot machine than having fun. These tradeoffs and how effectively Bungie balances them have been front and center this month, especially as weapon crafting has been partially phased out.
This system once acted as a source of bad luck protection that ultimately allowed players to create the exact god roll they wanted, regardless of whether it ever fell or not. This was a double-edged sword, however, as it made actual god rolls redundant when players came across them. Instead of grinding to unlock crafting patterns and crafting their favorite weapon, players now go back to slogging through the same tasks while waiting for their luck. As someone who came back to Destiny 2 Booty face this month, it definitely sucks.
“The advantage of crafting weapons will always be greater than mindlessly grinding weapons.” reads one post which has recently gained a lot of attention on the subreddit. User lordofabyss is basically saying that managing multiple rolls for dozens of weapons because you don’t know which one might unexpectedly become part of the future meta is tedious and messy. This is also a bummer for those who, for some reason, never get that god roll they were chasing. Another large thread points to thisregardless of craft, the overall reward level for more tough activities in Destiny 2 feel unnecessarily stingy. There’s nothing worse than running dungeon or raid encounters for an hour and getting nothing useful.
One Twitter conversation touched on these long-standing issues Destiny 2 in the context of MMOs more generally, which Bungie has slowly become over the years. “RNG to RNG” he tweeted CammyCakesYT. “Whether or not there is an unknown fundamental error…Destiny 2 Grind seems bad compared to other games because it was always missing: player trading, a crafting system for complex modifications, cosmetics for which you can use spare currency. Without getting into the weeds Destiny 2loot chase compared to those in games like Final Fantasy XIV, Diablo IVOr Warframesone of the things he’s clearly suffering from at the moment is the fact that Christmas rolls are actually things Just something to chase now.
Maybe this will change with ambitious next year Codename: Frontier planswhich Bungie says will borrow from metroidvanias and roguelikes to structure content in a way that’s potentially more fresh and satisfying. For now, the bugged god is rolling or not, the state Destiny 2 seems a bit shallow. The new dungeon is excellent, and the potion-based tonic system in this episode is a really cool idea, but the foundation that holds it together feels weaker than it has in a long time.
Update 24/10/2024, 19:20 ET: Bungie responded to Destiny 2 community about the alleged weighing of benefits and confirms that it will resume its own investigation. It definitely looks like there may be more than a grain of truth to the “weight of the scales” conspiracy theory after all.
“While we have confirmed that there is no intentional weapon trait assignment in our content configuration, we are currently investigating a potential issue in our code regarding how RNG benefits are generated” – Development Team he tweeted. “A big thank you to all players who contributed to data collection across the community. This data proved extremely helpful in our investigation and we are currently working on internal simulations to confirm the findings.”
