The Perk Weighting Controversy Explained

[@benacales409]

The Destiny community would become experts in astrophysics overnight if it ever affected their loot.

[@dusk2308]

yea where i would love to read all of there dissertations on quantum calculations on there god rolls

[@lolosh99]

When the stars and celestial objects dictate what roll people get

[@dreadangel3752]

Never get between a Destiny player and their loot cuz they will rip you in half like Megatron did to Sentinel Prime all while showing the math on how they did it

[@holahulu-c4w]

Nah astrophysics is boring, if you want them to achieve something good hide some sick loot being net positive nuclear fusion reactor

[@Thinkcrown]

GIM DEM LOOT

[@thatguyfrominvincible]

I MIGHT write my computer science final project based on this

[@DanYami]

do that yes, hope it goes well

[@devilishashevr]

we are gonna need an update on if u passed or failed, If u actually use this for ur cs final project

[@zhalosc]

that would be very cool. if you do you should post your project publicly as well. reading through it would be interesting

[@OtherL]

Please do i would love to read the deep dive on something like this cause another comment suggested that its a bug that only JUST now came up. Additionally it could be Bungie just lying. Both would be fascinating tbh.

[@LifeCompanionDogs8083]

I would love to hear some updates to this. Live long and prosper you legend.

[@GeremyG]

I find it so humorous that people were so upset about their weapon drops that they went through all of this to prove their theory. Truly heroes.

[@tommiles4508]

Tbf some people do have 8 hour a day jobs and getting home and spending hours a day grinding to not get the roll you want makes sense that people would start getting pissed and or suss.

[@Agalloch1234]

@@tommiles4508I work full-time and go to school for electrical engineering at the same time. I only play about 1 hour a day and have no problem with grinding. If you don’t like the grind, you don’t like Destiny. As simple and blunt as that.

[@ExtraordinaryFate]

@@tommiles4508 Or you accept you didn’t get the roll and move on. If this ends up actually being an issue, I want them to fix it obviously, but lol

[@jeremygeorge5334]

It’s wild. Like it’s literally been 3 weeks into the act. We have sooo long to get the rolls we want

[@basedmarlon]

@@tommiles4508I hate when mfs use this excuse. If you actually like the game you wouldn’t care if you got the roll or not, challenge yourself in the game instead of chasing god rolls with the little time you apparently say you have with the game.

[@Hyper_1989]

The only solution is to give me (and only me) a godroll VS Chill Inhibitor and then not actually fix the issue for anyone else.

[@TinWinkle_nutkins_the3rd]

I think this is the right move for bungie to make

[@dreadangel3752]

I think this is the right move for bungie to make

[@djwebby105]

I think this is the right move for bungie to make.

[@SpydrByte]

I think this is the right move for bungie to make

[@refloiks3788]

I think this is the right move for bungie to make

[@Forcer69]

Who would win in a fight? The Destiny Spaghetti code or the Community’s Schizophrenia

[@JustAFishBeingAFish]

They both lose, they each overdosed before the fight.

[@goingindieEN]

😂

[@submachinegun5737]

Immovable object vs unstoppable force

[@Fatlumpthe1st]

I don't think anyone wins in that case 🤣

[@StrongOffscreen]

“If Bungie explained it to me, it may cause me a little trouble” “But, would you be wrong?” “Nah, I’m right”

[@fancypantsy2741]

ahh yes, the true final shape of the destiny universe. A gradient pattern on a perk grid

[@1chill_623]

The game going downhill insanely hard

[@patsonical]

me performing Fourier analysis on weapon perk rolls in destiny 💀

[@johnnyhall9154]

The most likely reason this happened was because one programmer in charge of random rolls had logic that looked to be working when testing and for a long time was never noticed. There's evidence this has been in the game for a long time, it was just found now, so Bungie thinks there's no weighting but upon review by Skarrow there was.

[@toxicear5274]

Yeah, that is what I was thinking. As long as it’s an accident and not on purpose, I don’t think it’s a big deal.

[@submachinegun5737]

Good ol spaghetti code and technical debt

[@Smathalgoth]

I wouldn't be surprised if this bug has existed ever since random rolled weapons got added back into the game with Forsaken, it was a pretty late choice to bring random rolls back based on the information we have from the original community summit in 2018. Entirely possible this RNG fault slipped through the cracks as they were reworking D2's weapon setup to have random perk rolls again, and we are only just discovering this now because it took awhile for perk pools to inflate to the size they are now, and this was just the first time it happened with a desirable combo.

[@gavo7911]

@@toxicear5274 Idk think even if it is an accident (which I do think it is), this is still a MASSIVE screw-up. Earning loot is quite literally the fundamental core of this game, and having a bug exist for potentially YEARS that breaks the entire loot grind and makes thousands, potentially millions of hours pointless…yeah that’s very bad. This kind of thing should not have happened.

[@Farengast]

It's almost certainly caused by correlated seeding of random rolls. The perks likely being rolled one after the other and system clock or some other random seeding data not having enough time between the rolls to fully decouple the random number seeding. In the (very) old days you would see games throw up the same random result multiple times in the same minute because the minute value of system clock was part of the seeding for the random number generator. Modern RNG systems are much more sophisticated than that now but potentially still prone to correlated seeding.

[@Jake-ALGSxNBPL]

As of 4 hours after this video its now confirmed that this problem is true and has been happening since sometime between foresaken and shadowkeep

[@alexwilliamson9562]

Don’t tell dattos mob they have crazy Stockholm syndrome and are relentless

[@Jake-ALGSxNBPL]

@alexwilliamson9562 real. But seeing how d2 y1 had no random rolls that means that d1 most likely has the same problem with perk weighting because this first appears in foresaken

[@alexwilliamson9562]

@@Jake-ALGSxNBPLdefinitely a pattern showing since shadow keep. Honestly funniest thing about all this is how recently everyone went anti crafting. Who would’ve guessed stacking crazy rng and having no bad luck protection system( like crafting ) wouldn’t be very fulfilling

[@Jake-ALGSxNBPL]

@@alexwilliamson9562 if random rolls were just pre determined patterns this whole time. What else do we and the devs not know about

[@sherbetxdamnare]

Source?

[@HAMMER300RUM]

All i can say is that i love that there is still people that care enough about this game to figure this out.

[@iponce2]

great way to find the silver lining in this. good way to think

[@ooperblownup]

Destiny community when new season or content drops: 😒🙄😐 Destiny community when new controversy is being talked about: 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

[@random_n]

The stereo in my car plays A Perfect Circle a quarter of the time when it's on shuffle. High quality random number distribution is tough to get from computers. Good show from everyone on chasing this down, and on Bungie for making such deep staticial analysis possible with a public API.

[@Spacialvekter]

There /still/ exists an issue on Spotify where, if a playlist is too long, it won't play any songs beyond a certain point when shuffling.

[@Daniel-os3ml]

HE DID IT ALL FOR YOUUUUUUU

[@Xenophagist]

These community puzzles are getting crazy at this point. We're out here tearing the game code apart now? Wild

[@Akamu54]

I think it's really interesting how the community digging into the API is helping Bungie to solve the issue, I'm looking forward to a potential dev insight as well

[@ooperblownup]

Except that whatever public insight they offer is probably not gonna be fully genuine. If it was, it probably would show them to be either incompetent, lazy or intentionally deceiving

[@Akamu54]

@ooperblownup I'm sorry that you're pre-disposed to negative thinking, I hope you can turn that around someday

[@ooperblownup]

@@Akamu54 omg, what a goofy. Alright buddy whatever

[@ebgbees]

Destiny and controversy go together like peanut butter and jelly at this point

[@kissushoto]

Like Germans and antisemitism!

[@robertdewolfe1654]

With a baseball batt

[@inventor4279]

And nothing will keep the game, community has been too Pavlov'd into playing a different game that's actually good

[@ebgbees]

@@inventor4279 It’s so sad to see man. I’ll grant that this isn’t the most shining example of the level of controversy the game has been mired in, but still, holy hell. It’s especially depressing because Destiny 1 quite literally saved my life. For reasons I won’t get into, the game, and the franchise as a whole, came into my life at a time when I really needed it. To see it ran as far into the ground as it has been in recent times has been quite sad.

[@inventor4279]

@@ebgbees you deserve better, just because it helped you at a tough time, doesn't mean it deserves to threat you bad now, make the plunge, I quit almost two years ago and I've never looked back ❤️

[@james.s5903]

I just remember my grind for Servant Leader back in Witch queen. I wanted Rapid Hit/Kill Clip, and it took me about 650 games, and 12 resets just to get those two perks together. I would get RH and something else, or something else and KC, even with the potential to get 3 perks in each slot, it took far too long to get those two together.

[@Welverin]

I was looking for the same roll! When they first updated it with an origin trait, I got to four resets before focusing it. Used all of my engrams and got nothing. Got a random drop from a match while going for more engrams. Couple of seasons later they added Field-tested to it and I did it all again. I got one with RH/KC. Between two seasons, waiting until after four resets to focus any engrams and I managed to get one copy with RH/KC out of ~100 engrams. The rng in the game is awful and everyone who is against crafting can go to hell.

[@Bestow3000]

Till this day I haven't even gotten Heal Clip/Incandescent roll on Abberant Action and even if it's craftable, I quickly noticed somethings wrong already with the perks weighing. Turns out I was right.

[@jellycaketwitch]

@@Bestow3000 Except Heal Clip/Incan has a perk distance of 0 on Abberant so you are part of the conspiracy group.

[@lambseuslocated8069]

Same for me but with slideshow ignition code

[@M0du5Pwn3n5]

1. Computers can absolutely generate random numbers. When will this idea die? Virtually all modern computers have dedicated hardware random number generators in them with a physical source of entropy, and even before that there were all sorts of entropy sources you could get from I/O. 2. The absolute worst PRNG would not have anywhere even close to this kind of periodicity.

[@zerobix6599]

I personally think this started with "Into the Light" i got 3 Shiny Elsie's rifles that all had the EXACT same roll, barrel, mag, third, and fourth column perks, and masterwork. The exact same things. I remember thinking that was weird but after The Final Shape things like that kept happening more and more, so I personally think it started there.

[@Jnoel608]

Yea and also spamming vendor engrams for me felt like I get the same rolls back to back sometimes.

[@alexalachan6952]

Same I felt it hunting Luna howl with heal clip and incandescent but I kept getting discord and this discord and this over and over again only getting one Luna to drop with the roll.

[@elliehugg]

the bugged rng pattern goes back to forsaken

[@zerobix6599]

@@elliehugg you're probably right, I've always felt like things haven't been completely RNG.

[@ShepardRockstar]

It started in season of plunder

[@The5lacker]

This is such a fascinating situation because there are *any number* of small, miniscule changes in how RNG functions are built and used that could cause this purely accidentally, and it's basically impossible to notice without filtering through thousands if not hundreds of thousands of data points. As deeply fucked as it is, I don't blame anyone at Bungie for missing this, it's the kind of nonsense you literally can't see unless you're actively looking for it. A fun wrinkle someone found is how the weird perk-distance-weight works with weapons with more than six perks: Notably, it's not just a stable gradient, it *alternates.* Probability drops at Distance-1, goes back up for Distance-2, drops again for Distance-3, goes back up a bit lower for Distance-4, etc. etc. Look at the chart for Anonymous Autumn for example, and you see literal order of magnitude peaks and valleys right next to each other, it's absurd.

[@Blindluck92]

Controversy? In Destiny? I'll try and contain my lack of surprise.

[@HipHopSpecialMusik]

But let's be real - its what people make out of it. Its mostly just people crying lol

[@alexwilliamson9562]

@@HipHopSpecialMusik”your right datto I asked for this actually, I love you I’ll come back to bed could you maybe not hit my this time though?”

[@alexwilliamson9562]

@@HipHopSpecialMusikplayer count will be funny to see in the coming months

[@howbob4118]

Yeah I definitely don’t think this is bungie. More so a very hard bug to find that finally happened to pop up now

[@talia_al_gabagool]

Yeah anyone thinking this is malicious 1) doesn’t understand the spaghetti code of destiny (and the skeleton crew they have 2) are looking to make bungie a villain but they do that outside of stuff like this

[@inoob26]

Technically it is but definitely not malicious

[@Technizor]

It's something you'd only be able to catch by checking on the massive amount of data generated by the live game servers. But it is kinda baffling that a core part of the game (how the loot is generated) had zero eyes on the live statistics or automated analysis that would have noticed this behaviour without the community doing it.

[@LastAustralianGamer]

This didnt just happen now its been there for along time. They just dont have the data since everyone throw away the shit rolls of the weapons so it fks the results in the API.

[@cightless]

throating it

[@FloridaMann123]

People are pretty sure this has been going on since at least lightfall because circular logic has one of it's most desirable perk combinations 3 perks away, and that combination is also extremely underrepresented in weapon rolls.

[@nathaniel9423]

I assume you’re talking about the envious assassin+target lock roll, 100+ clears I still haven’t gotten it. I gave up eventually.

[@CarsonRSS]

Our opinion has arrived.

[@nathandang9920]

I can finally think now that he's said something

[@IDECIDETHETRUTH]

Your original comment is lost in transit though.

[@kky7346]

Opinion (Timelost)

[@cwj2733]

watched paul tassi vid before this. interesting information if true

[@splyced69]

holy fuck can y’all find a new joke

[@doomskull7549]

This is a pretty easy mistake to make, implementation-wise. It's trivial to design a system that outputs seemingly random results while treating the actual pseudorandom number generator as a truly random black box, which it almost certainly is not. This problem comes up a lot in cryptography, and is often known as the random oracle assumption

[@dusk2308]

nah i am a destiny 2 player therefore i must scream

[@Razzy-sr4oq]

Random oracle association. Huh. That's really cool, actually. Thanks for sharing this, I've done learned a new thing lol

[@calvinwilson3617]

While I agree with you from a theoretical standpoint, this was discovered after final shape, which is coincidentally when they moved away from weapon crafting. They've got nothing except for extending the game lifecycle

[@bfedezl2018]

@@calvinwilson3617 go back to the cave goon

[@bfedezl2018]

@@calvinwilson3617 touch some grass

[@inoob26]

Rolling Def and HP on artifact rolls in Genshin Impact be like:

[@bkre7222]

I mean, they are in fact weighted. You have more chance to roll minor flat stats, then %-stats and then cr and cd stats.

[@carlos-zy7vx]

​@@bkre7222 Honestly not that surprising considering it is a gacha

[@wilburforce8046]

Hoyo purposely rigged it though lol

[@cookies23z]

I mean, the gatcha one is even more heavily weighted, and its in specific stats instead of "slots" The same would be like, oh attack on this piece set doesnt drop, but on this set def doesnt drop where for gatchas its "crit" and your other favourite stats drop 5% of the time, flat def rolls much more on everything

[@Karuvatto]

9:06, Hanlon's Razor in full effect. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence", I don't imagine Bungie has done this intentionally either, we all know how Spaghetti the code in this game is and I wager none of them noticed this was happening until now.

[@ogyonmastaflux]

Hanlon's cope, lmao.

[@Razzy-sr4oq]

Hanlon's Razer is always overlooked. Everyone assumes malice when in reality, ignorance or incompetence are far more likely. Hell, sometimes, sh!t just happens.

[@ogyonmastaflux]

@@Razzy-sr4oq In the triple A industry we are at the point where if everyone is actually this incompetent the industry deserves to crash or it's malicious actors surrounding themselves with incompetent workers.

[@beensupe]

@@ogyonmastaflux you believe in conspiracy theories don’t you lol

[@ogyonmastaflux]

@@beensupe I only believe in theories that are proven to be true. I bet you just listen and believe whatever people no matter what data says don't you, ya smooth brain.

[@subjunctivideo]

Guessing we get a diagonal striped emblem out of this when the dust settles.

[@Hanz_Goober]

Ive always loved crafting, because ive always had crap luck. Its nice to be able to get what i want, without stressing about if im gonna get it in one run, or in a hundred runs. I guess this explains why i have bad luck though.

[@alexwilliamson9562]

For some reason Datto is championing removing crafting by gas lighting the community and feeding bungie garbage, abrasive takes. So hope u dont get too comfortable with the bad luck system because datto wants it removed.

[@VitreousVirtuosa]

@@alexwilliamson9562 To give some leeway from my memory of datto's thoughts on episode 1 of Revenant, he didnt want crafting gone but understood why none of this seasons weapons were not craftable, and instead he suggested doing like original onslaught in having shiny cosmetic versions of the seasonal guns only drop from onslaught, but leave the regular season guns craftable. Datto's issue with crafting is it effectively removes the chase and reason to run content. Like, after you get all a raid or seasons craftable weapons the only reason you have to engage with the system is armor and the exotic. And once you get an armor set you effectively have no reason to ever run that content again except for fun. I dont think he wants crafting removed, but rather something added in that people have a reason to chase. (At least, from my memory.)

[@alexwilliamson9562]

@@VitreousVirtuosanah bro he said that they should remove it because it got rid of the chase sure but he literally said his solution is to remove the crafting of the seasonal weapons because he had no reason to run the seasonal activity so he wants random rolls and more artificial grind rather than idk maybe just tie the red border to the seasonal activity, there still a chase it’s not like I log in week 1 of a season and have everything crafted within hours, it took weeks to get everything crafted and it was the best bad luck system we had. But dattos doesn’t like that and has openly admitted so

[@alexwilliamson9562]

@@VitreousVirtuosaalso idk where you got him suggesting they use onslaught again and use shiny guns is crazy if true just shows u that bungie is in his gas lighting, elitist wanna be echo chamber. Hopefully they can see they’re listening to the devil on their shoulder and now the angel before it’s too late

[@Dynasty1818]

If it's deliberate which it undoubtedly is, it makes complete sense when you think of it from a business point of view - keep chasing the roll means you keep playing. That's all they want. Keep you playing. Once you get that god roll you'd never come back and get bored of the new content and leave. Low player numbers are bad for business

[@hallowjupiter6305]

Honestly, after seeing the tweets and hearing the process... I'd love to hear what the meeting sounded like when bungie realized that the players weren't being Schizos, and it was actually an issue. I could certainly imagine an "Oh shit... they're right, they got the data" Cause like, let's be real. Even at full staffing, I imagine there is *no* reasonable way for bungie to actually test for something like this purely internally. This is one of those things that I imagine almost any dev team would probably need the players to find like this, cause you just need so much date to properly show the issue and prove it's there. It's awesome they were able to learn about this with player help. I haven't been following this till now, I hope the fanbase isn't too hard on them for this, after all, they're probably learning about this *with* us

[@alexwilliamson9562]

Crazy how even the community manager was trying gas light the community, it’s like half the community wants to be elitist so badly that they just take any garbage elitist take from any KZbinr and try gas light as many people that it’s a good thing, while casting away anyone who can’t get on board. The “don’t like it don’t play” line getting thrown about will do wonders for the player count

[@oshenplays]

It's the Destiny fanbase brother. They are always going to take it too hard on them. They are elitist and doomsayers going to create animosity out of everything, even if it's very stupid mistakes from Bungie and make echo chambers on it with the Content Creators just click baiting and feeding into to make it worse.

[@NyxK3]

Thing is, this was all visible through the API but no one thought to even look/check until chill inhibitor prompted Newo to display the perks people were receiving. It's not that bungie couldn't have known or lacked the data, they just never bothered to check because as far as they were concerned there was no reason to Arguably they should have caught this when they first implemented random rolls which is when we suspect this problem originates from. After all the loot chase is the entire point of the game when it comes down to it

[@riplix20]

@@NyxK3 idk dude I tend to play games to have fun with the gameplay lol. Imagine playing devil may cry, and having fun but quitting because you had no new moves left to buy

[@calvinwilson3617]

If you think bungie doesn't log the drops you're crazy. They could pull the data and confirm themselves very easily

[@hammyboi891]

This reminds me of the Spotify randomizer situation. When users set a playlist to “random” it would literally pick at random any song to play. Sometimes, this meant that it would either replay a song you had already heard one or two songs ago. This led people to think that the randomizer wasn’t random, so Spotify had to go in and add code to ensure there was a sort of “cooldown” that would ensure that a song that had already played didn’t play again for a duration, which therefore made it statistically *less* random, but improved the perceived “randomness” by users.

[@never3nder]

Pretty sure that was iTunes - much longer ago.

[@azmbp2]

@@never3nder it was iTunes, they are misremembering a well known event. Steve Jobs comes to mind literally saying “We’re making it less random, to make it feel more random.”

[@elegy8187]

9:06 Emphasis on this! I’ve seen so many people making conspiracy theories and accusing Bungie of intentionally weighting the drops in this way to make players play for longer

[@yeah6567]

Bungie themselves said in a tweet there is no intentional weighting, but who knows, I wouldn't be too surprised if they're doing this to make us play longer 😭

[@fort809]

Bungie has a bad record with this. previously they denied XP throttling and were proven to be lying based on data, and now bungie has said there’s no RNG weighting yet the community has proven there is based on the data. There’s also the fact that it leads to more player engagement, bungie directly benefits from this RNG glitch existing

[@jamescruz8678]

​@@fort809And more recently they've also done the following to inflate player engagement metrics: - The old transmog system being too convoluted - Ada-1 selling mods on a rotating basis for way, way too long (they still do this with shaders) - The old crafting system - The initial launch of exotic class items - Intentionally adding garbage perks to fill out the perk pool - Outright removing crafting from this Episode's seasonal weapons - And then the usual "hey you're only allowed to have one lottery ticket per character per week without any way of grinding your way into getting more sorry bud" bullshit And now THIS happens. Intentional or not, at this point this is such a Bungie feature they'd sneakily add in several months down the line.

[@TheFallinhalo]

theres past evidance to lead credence to it being a possibility. for those who were around during those days, the Devs litterally Throttled our XP gains to prevent us form getting too many Bright engrams early into the games lifespan,

[@Unknown08528]

You really think Bungie will just come out and say "yes, you've got us"? No, they will deny it until the last second even if they got caught red handed

[@ThatsMistaTwistToYou]

this is potentially simply a mathematical distribution problem when dealing with randomness, i.e. something that, at the time, solved a problem to generate perks seemingly randomly, but over millions of iterations showed in an inherent skew in the data - I'm really interested in that dev insights article on the mathematics of randomness and the perk rolling algorithm, as the two pieces of code together may not explicitly show any skewing, so it'd be easy to miss in testing. I also wonder if the distribution improves/worsens when a perk column has more perks in it? Lots of questions, the answers to which will dare I say improve a lot of games in the future. Heck it could even be a GDC talk someday! Well done, community, on working so hard on uncovering at least the first part of the mystery.

[@flamingscar5263]

I ALWAYS said that we can not just assume perks are not weighted, not saying Bungie is doing it on purpose, but computers are actually REALLY bad at randomness

[@Kostyahellstorm_IronLord]

EXACTLY You try to code in Randomness the computer won't think really

[@itsty-ler]

End of the video thoughts are probably correct, algo that determines table choice must be old and not really looked at often or audited past its initial implementation, and whatever it's doing has lead to an unintentional pattern in shortest-route taking

[@Wongcsable]

Time for Bungie to invest in a couple dozen lava lamps

[@jamescruz8678]

​@@WongcsableHonestly I really hope they do this lol Pseudo-randomness is a problem tackled and implemented much better by many more capable teams and that lava lamp wall from Cloudflare is my favourite.

[@BMacanik]

Been saying for a long time weapons and perks were weighted.

[@Bugattiboy912]

We have all been eagerly anticipating our opinion on this matter since it blew up. Thank you Datto for providing it.

[@alexwilliamson9562]

@bugattiboy912 it’s like the 1984 screen meme but instead it’s moronic, wanna be elitists failing to see they are the true abrasive side of the community listening to the king of gaslighting and “you asked for it”

[@jyapp4489]

I would not at all be surprised if this was just a coding goof someone needed to make to get the system out the door. I mean, this system has been in the game and likely near-untouched since Forsaken, with the only potential major update being Witch Queen.

[@luk4aaaa]

Looks like it so far. Had it been intentional to keep people grinding they would have always put the best perks far away from each other to maximise the time spent grinding, but that’s not even close to the case.

[@jehhy8984]

It's wild because you can still see the same pattern on certain weapons dating all the way back to season of the dawn. I think it becomes hard to see on older seasons because of two reasons: a lot of them have been dismantled, only the good/better rolls have been kept so it skews it. That being said it's insane that you can still see the same pattern dating so far back. I don't even know how quickly a solve could be for this given how integral loot is for the game

[@blackstreak02]

They intentionally hid the nerf to ignition mechanics just for the VH dungeon. Its gone spaghetti and wont be fixed until mid-november. This is just on top of numerous bugs that are happening that havent been resolved. Remember what they said about anti-barrier not working with Wicked Implement although its not intrinsic (simple evidence by being overwritten by radiant.) Bungo is basically having a massive technical debt. Its not malicious sure, but its incompetence thats snowballing and we are getting fucked along with it.

[@rayanemsii]

I had been farming brave weapons for the past few weeks for some rolls that I missed and I definitely noticed that some perks were just not dropping at all for me, like I've been trying to get the envious/bait edge transit and I can literally count on one hand how many times I've gotten one of these two perks

[@reed560]

Optimization often leads to "good enough" solutions sometimes. This pattern really reads like a "seems random enough and not too heavy," type thing.

[@kenja0685]

The fact that we haven't noticed for years means that the alternative options that were available (Weapon Crafting, Double Perks, Weapon Focusing) were viable enough solutions to mitigate bad RNG. But it took Bungie slowly moving away from them (Less weapons to craft, Focusing being more expensive, not offering Double Perks in some high value content like Dungeons) for us to notice how bad the base system was. We need to preserve the ways we curb RNG or offer other solutions that make things more deterministic (perk targetting a la Exotic Class Items).

[@hcgtiger4724]

Always felt like some perks almost paired together on guns so this totally makes sense.

[@jashserfus]

The craziest thing is that this checkerboard pattern dates back to the release of Witch Queen... which is when crafting was introduced. Pretty much anything from Risen to Revenant that isn't craftable has the pattern with some exceptions. Before then, you can't find a single instance of this pattern.

[@slaphand9578]

There's evidence it actually goes all the way back to Forsaken. I saw a chart of the perks on the OG release Crooked Fang-4fr that had the same pattern as the charts at 5:52.

[@enloe92]

it likely was introduced when random rolls came back to the game in Forsaken, and the RNG system for how weapons are generated hasn't been touched since then, the checkered pattern still shows on some of those older weapons just harder to track now since most players aren't keeping all those drops still.

[@alexwilliamson9562]

@jashserfus ain’t no way your trying to turn bungies cock up into a crafting caused perk weighting conspiracy 😂😂😂

[@ItsCrucifixTV]

They may not have done perk weighting on purpose, but I’m curious if they were aware of how perk rolls were being distributed and aligning the perks accordingly to keep people chasing the weapons for longer. I hope that makes sense. Anyone have any insight?

[@reganator5000]

'Random is not ever truly random' is the reason that for actual random generation a company keeps a wall of lava lamps with a webcam pointed at it - it can produce a truly random number, unlike normal computing.

[@kevinharrison790]

Fantastic summary, especially mentioning the mitigating factors like crafting and double-perks for noticing this issue earlier.

[@lilj3rf446]

the people trying to cope themselves into believing bungie didn’t do it on purpose to try and prolong or their quickly dieing playerbase is funny ash

[@one_legg]

What if the godslaying on was the friends we made along the way?

[@Apogenezis]

6:20 - so Bungie is Unstoppable Champion?!😮

[@Endless7764]

I honestly assumed perk weighting was already part of the game. There are multiple weapons that I have farmed for were I repeatedly got the same trash roll but it was nearly impossible to the roll I was looking for. This was specifically annoying with Elsies rifle trying to get repulsor brace and destabilizing rounds. I got nearly 100 drops of the weapon before getting the perk combo this the gun focused. However I was about to get several identical rolls of a trash roll, down to the barrel perks and all.

[@generalscorp22]

I've gotten one. It rolled with envious arsenal and bait n switch. There goes my rng for the year

[@jer103]

Bungie not realizing there's an algorithm to how often perks are dropped is like finding a new glitch with Telesto once new content is added...

[@NullEmbrace]

It has always felt rigged, now we know it is.

[@charlieb8735]

My assumption is that it uses a RNG seed and references the array length of the perks for the modulus. Since arrays/strings/lists start from 0 the length is 1 greater than the maximum index. That means that the only way the increment would be the requisite 0 is if 7 divides evenly into the random number. The exact implementation may be a little more complicated but since it’s 6 in each pool, this one ends up particularly severe and self-evident. In any case, when it comes to computational “randomness”, it’s very difficult (if not impossible) to be 100% sure things like this won’t happen especially when you want to minimize the calculations involved for the sake of speed and efficiency

[@crowhaven895]

D2's major content updates are basically over, supposedly. It would make sense Bungie would throttle the best roll gear drops. They can claim it's a mistake once any issue is found. My faith in them has wavered and I'm not sure they can build it back up.

[@Avoncarstien]

I'm moreso than anything amazed how long this seems to have been a thing that we just haven't noticed or maybe been bothered enough by to actually put enough attention on it to get it resolved. Which at this point is still assuming there is actually a problem, although the data at this point is *pretty* strongly indicating that there is one.

[@Haon1Rebmun]

Oh so that’s why I haven’t been able to get a pugilist/hatchling breachlight

[@fizzyoddcod]

I’ve felt like bungie’s been weighting the drops for years now, whenever I’d be farming for a god roll it felt like I was seeing the same few perks so often. Good to know that’s not entirely observation bias and that there has actually been perk weighting (I don’t honestly believe bungie when they say it’s not being intentionally).

[@virusklaxsosaur4054]

As im sure others have said i wouldnt put it past bungie to do it afterall they lied about XP throttling

[@MrBadgerPissed]

This shit may have been weighted well before that but had less attention, when rampage 120s could 2 tap I think I farmed like 15+ igneous's and I don't think I saw rampage once. On the topic of Bungies intent, it likely was a mistake but it's kinda a joke that they just immediately denied it until the community proved it as extensively as possible, seems like it would drive player engagement in their favour the same way that removing crafting drives player engagement (gamble forever with odds that are like like 1/36 best case scenario but more like 1 in thousands when stats matter, not taking weighting into account now lol)

[@xebenatrosxeracroft5178]

Craftable weapons solve this issue 10,000%. Not having anything craftable with the current season, just makes no damn sense to me, I so freaking wished Bungie would just update the Crucible/Iron Banner weapons to be craftable, several weapons from those 2 Activities, have so much power or potential in other content like, Vanguards or Lost Sectors, while loot from those areas, is for the most part 50/50. I'm not even surprised that the rolls people are trying to farm for, just don't happen, it didn't work for me when D2 first came out, it certainly hasn't worked now, I'm still attempting to get a Slideways with either Chain Reaction or Hatchling, but, no luck, just make everything craftable oh and, can we please get rid of those Harmonizers & just make the associated weapon, to have a chance of being a Red Border, so much can be fixed if these people at Bungie would just, I dunno, respect the players.

[@DescendantV]

Seasonable weapons should be craftable, PvP weapons should NOT.

[@xebenatrosxeracroft5178]

@@DescendantV Why not, Iron Banner doesn't come around a lot, and if you only PvP, wouldn't you want your weapons to be at their best for PvP, versus using whatever the RNG gods dictate your next roll should be.

[@ZomgLolPants]

the pattern in perk distribution reeks of someone improperly using modular arithmetic

[@CranjisMcBasketball-cmbb]

just make everything craftable

[@alexwilliamson9562]

Nah man datto… I mean “the community” (dattos most loyal wanna be elitists and probably the most abrasive side of the community) asked for reduced crafting. The don’t like don’t play line goes hard honestly, only the true victims of Stockholm syndrome will stick around

[@CranjisMcBasketball-cmbb]

@@alexwilliamson9562 very true i got some from garden crafted but don’t plan on playing anytime soon or even buying frontiers tbh. nice timing to pull back on crafting when bo6 (zombies) is coming out lmao

[@FaIzaro]

We can say that they never knew, but I would go back and look at how they placed perks in their columns going back X amount of time. See if there is "conveniently" placed spacing between what the new perk/best perk combo rolls are/were at the time.

[@phoenix9531]

I do think this is unintentional, so I see no malice in this. While some people say that to have such a rudimentary randomness mechanism is embarassing for bungie, I could see how someone could design something and implement it, and as long as nobody says anything negative, it stays in. The thing that really baffles me is not the original cause of the problem, but that with bungie saying so often that they're looking at and tracking data to improve aspects of the game, how this wasn't spotted for years. They have the data of all weapon drops, of inventories, all the things the community is now tracking + so much more, and this incredibly meaningful statistical difference has never been noticed? Especially if it seems to affect all randomized aspects of the game?

[@ZagZagro]

As I've written in other places, it's 1 of 2 things and i don't know which one is worse. Either they lied to keep play cycles longer or they're so incompetent that they have been building systems to circumvent their own trash RNG for years whether it be weapon crafting or creating guaranteed perks for exotic armor, which everyone seems to be forgetting for some reason.

[@phoenix9531]

@@ZagZagro No I don't think they are creating additional gameplay systems in plain sight (which requires UI development, gamification psychology/player feedback testing etc.) that are actually primarily supposed to (secretly?) circumvent their rng mechanic. That seems way to convoluted and terribly ineffective at that, since all the things you mention only apply to some weapons and or are optional. If they wanted to fix their randomness mechanism, I'm sure they would do that, instead of slowly introducing a bunch of resource-intensive partial solutions in the form of alternative offerings, which sounds like reading too much into it imo. How come you don't see the possibility that the RNG is bad, but not on purpose?

[@A_Cool_Tunafish]

⁠@@ZagZagrothey’re not stupid enough to lie about something like this

[@NyxK3]

The thing is they might have access to all the data but there's no magic button to see all that data mapped out in an easily interpreted manner. They'd have to go out their way to do what the community ended up doing, and since they had no reason to they simply didn't. That said it's their game and their responsibility so it's still on them that it's gone this long unnoticed. But yeh. Not like it was as obvious or easy to see as you might think

[@ZagZagro]

@@phoenix9531 which comes back to my point that they are clearly incompetent.

[@scofozo]

it was actually the exotic class item that sparked this, we've been farming weapons forever, but the exotic class item was the first time we ever graphed an item's rolls in the form of a matrix when farming it, to display which combinations we already had... Someone inevitably liked the idea, and decided to use a matrix to track the rolls of this weapon, practically the first new weapon to farm since the exotic class item released

[@garrigaj1]

You what else Bungie would never do: throttle XP. Oh, wait! They did, and denied it for a while until they came clean.

[@SpikePBB]

We had this with Luna's Howl - incandescent & heal clip from the original Onslaught. That perk combination just didn't drop often and when people complained - including me - we were told it was just 'rng' and I knew it wasn't.

[@Farengast]

Smells like correlated seeding of the random number generator to me. Their entropy system is failing somewhere between the rolling of one perk and the rolling of the second.

[@MrMultiPlatform]

No reason? It increases play time.

[@DeathsPit00]

I agree that this issue was not done maliciously or even on purpose at all, but I think that the issue itself spans to way before TFS. The perk weighing issue has been brought up in the community before and just went nowhere because we had crafting to fall back on. The last time that I actually remember seeing posts about it was for the Linear Fusion from Caiatl in Duality. The 3 burst arc one that I don't remember the name of that was the first of it's subtype iirc. It was meta back then before it was usurped by the craftable Taipan with the Veist origin perk. We do have way more data to go on this time around and I'm very interested to see what Bungie finds in their simulations, but will be very disappointed if they try to downplay what they find. They really need some good will right now though so I very much doubt that they'll do that.

[@gfinc1601]

This is why I can't get heal clip/incandescent on luna's howl!!!

[@reidjetton9167]

The seasonal arc GL has the same perk combo btw. If it’s just the perk combo and not the stasis part people are after, it’s probably easier to just farm the seasonal one

[@zigzagnoleaf24]

These guys went out there and proved bungie had an issue that bungie didn’t even know about 🤣 truly epic

[@Umbreon_T96]

Plus with more and more perks being added to the game each season it becomes harder to get the exact combo you want. It used to be a perk pool of 4-5 and now it’s like 7-8 in each column

[@brandondennis7527]

"There is no perk weighting in Ba Sing Se"

[@cheesendonuts]

Season of the Dawn, when we could donate the seasonal bucks at The Tower. So many Perfect Paradoxes, and I swore then there was perk weighting when I'd see certain perks more than others. No one was talking about it at the time, so I let it go.

[@Radio_Active369]

This is super interesting. I can't imagine that this was accidental. Either way, this explains a lot.

[@dusk2308]

i mean you gotta realize that you sound a lot like those people who said that the hurricane only hit red districts right? where i know that they throttled XP 7 years ago i don't think it was that deep 7 years ago when the weapons only had one roll

[@ozberkolcer]

There's no way Bungie is unaware of this situation. They have the raw data, they know how common or uncommon perk combinations are. If you look at their wording about this issues you can see they carefully selected what they wanted to say.

[@sauceinmyface9302]

Thank you, datto, for keeping a balanced and fair view. A lot of people are pissed, equating this to the xp throttling fiasco from d2 vanilla. I think this is Bungie investigating an issue in the obvious, but wrong, direction, and finding no problem. Rng equations like this are really easy to set and forget for years, I mean this really could go all the way back to Forsaken. It's completely possible this was an experimental file left buried in a folder by a developer who no longer works at bungie.

[@BatM-l6j]

See people, crafting saves lives.

[@alexwilliamson9562]

Nah bro we asked for no crafting this seasonal actually, at least that’s what Datto is trying to gas light us into thinking

[@maxdeathlore]

Great job putting this out so quick!

[@shadowman2101]

It is just ppl vs computers situation. Just because of the way random numbers work as you said. This has been an issue for years. Hope they can get a more stable algorithm to allow this to not happen as often

[@charlie-vw7zw]

Icebreaker exotic drop chances from the dungeon triumphs should also give a chance to drop multiple perk columns on the guns

[@dannop8795]

What's the most valuable currency in the entire game? Weapons. You're not running Warlords Ruin 70 times trying to get glimmer. If weapons are the key to replayability for Bungie, why WOULDN'T they skew this in their favor?

[@empiyrr2133]

I cannot imagine how long this has been going on for potentially going on for and may have influenced the addition of crafting

[@Operational117]

I have no idea how this could have been accidentally implemented. This looks extremely intentional, the pattern is undeniable, and no matter how I twist and turn the situation in my head I cannot come up with a probable cause for an accidental implementation. But that explains why I often got a very narrow set of perk combos over dozens of drops for a single weapon. If the system uses a random offset from the first perk to calculate the second major perk, then at least one way we would get this pattern is if the offset roll distribution is a binomial one (that is, bigger offsets have smaller probabilities) and one way this could happen is if each offset, starting with 0 and working upwards and downwards like 0, -1, 1, -2, 2 etc., is rolled before the next, taking the first successful roll it gets. This would make the pattern that we see. That may have been a design choice that wasn't thoroughly thought through, but such a design choice seems to be too complex for it to not have been intentional. _(though I wonder how double-perk columns are handled...)_ Really, simple is better, just roll the last column like you roll the rest. This creates a perfectly even distribution. EDIT: Some wording adjustment and additional information.

[@necrolios4640]

I remember when witch queen came out and they added the “CANTATA” literally took me 3 months of constant farming to get 1 to drop and it was only after I messaged customer support asking if my account was bugged. Next day I got like 3 within a few hours games loot is so weird.

[@urazz7739]

It's stuff like this is why people are fine with weapon crafting. At least with weapon crafting, you'd get the roll you want eventually. Some people never truly got the rolls they wanted with RNG with this unintentional perk weighing.

[@zacharywilson3807]

The numbers, Mason! What do they mean!

[@samaron8970]

Wait... so if this is how it works, and cold comfort is supposed to fit this patterne... then how come I've gone the dungeon dozens upon dozens of times and have the TITLE, but still have only ever seen bait and switch on it once?

[@ooperblownup]

A "Days without controversy" board at the Bungie office would look very nice

[@McDIESEL-N7]

So you say that you see little reason for them to lie about something like perk weighting, but they certainly lied about their ability to control Xur's inventory in D1. I would say they are similar situations.

[@kingdragoonmk10]

Part of the Problem is that it isn't the first time Bungie has outright lied to players, So even if (like ignition damage for the dungeon) it was a simple matter of Incompetence, they made a Reputation that makes it very easy to assume malice... Im sadly not certain which way or the other, or if the truth is a little of both.

[@Finding_Nimoy]

This explains why I haven't gotten a slideshot explosive rose in over a year...

[@anguswilson6234]

I had a suspicion something like this was in the game after spending more engrams than I can count on riiswalker and fortissimo-11 and never getting the rolls I wanted but repeatedly getting the same unwanted rolls, often multiple times in a row.

[@pyiemadofarmule]

So this is why I could never get archers tempo precision instrument on point of the stag. The perks are 3 slots away from each other

[@jackflann2274]

That’s actually crazy. I tracked cataphract and cold comfort rolls last year and I noticed the same pattern, and I really thought something was happening. But someone like me can’t do much about it so I didn’t do anything about it

[@ItsJust-Tra]

This is true. Some rolls felt impossible while others commonly drop. Another reason why I have dropped D2.

[@itsreapernecrosis2215]

I called it in my discord with my buddies, that they would call it a "bug" or an "issue" and shoosh it under the rug. And then they did exactly that. I have a buddy from the upside down land in that discord who codes, he explained it pretty well and that it would only take him a few minutes to fix it and that there's no way they were that stupid not to notice such a basic mistake. Not like bungie hasnt done this before, when they throttled xp. Theyve always trying to extend that playtime, theyre just trying to be smarter about hiding it now. Ill trust my buddy over the corpos.

[@JayJay-7661]

This has been going on alot long then what people may think. I've been farming the rose since it came out and still yet to get a slide explosive payload. That combo is also in the extremely rare zone of the charts.

[@SaltShaker-tr7bv]

Now that I think about it once you mentioned brave weapons I have never gotten the ambitious assassin with Chain Reaction and I have had 100 plus runs in the first week of that release