• Destiny 2 players noticed a weapon refused to drop with two specific perks.
• Using a wealth of data players soon spotted that weapon perks weren’t actually being determined randomly and reported their findings to Bungie.
• The developer has noted that players were in fact correct and perk allocation is bugged.

Randomness is part of the reason players keep returning to Destiny. Throughout the game players acquire weapons and some of these weapons have perks that are assigned randomly. This chaos is partly what fuels the loop that players engage in and those players have uncovered a problem Bungie didn’t know it had.

Earlier this month the newest Dungeon in Destiny 2 arrived. Vesper’s Host, as with all Dungeons, contains unique weapons and armour for players to pursue and like many end-game rewards, the weapons are highly-sought after given they feature a great set of perks weapons can roll with.

Following the launch of Vesper’s Host, the Destiny 2 player community identified a weapon worth chasing in VS Chill Inhibitor (the bottom-most weapon in the header image). The best perk combination highlighted by players was Envious Arsenal (when dealing damage with your other two weapons this one is reloaded) paired with Bait and Switch (damage boost when dealing damage with your other weapons first). Except, getting this reward to drop with these perks has proven difficult. So difficult in fact that some players crowdsourced data to see if maybe there was a pattern.

Lo and behold, one was spotted. Players showed data – though it was a relatively small dataset – that proved that a VS Chill Inhibitor with Envious Arsenal and Bait and Switch dropping was as rare as it gets.

But Bungie said that it checked with the people behind these systems and there was “no perk weighting active for any legendary weapon perks in Destiny 2”.

However, the data said something different and the Destiny 2 community persisted and eventually it found something more concrete but to explain that we need to understand perks in the game and how they are selected.

Every weapon has four columns that are populated with perks when it drops for a player. The columns most players focus on are columns three and four which those marked in the red-box in the image below. These perks offer up special effects or benefits such as damage being increased.

As you can see the columns line up and what players found is that weapons with column three’s first perk and column four’s sixth perk were incredibly unlikely to drop.

The folks over at Light.gg have created a tool that showcases just how pervasive this problem is and its astound to see especially for more common weapon where there is more data to draw from.

This is, to be frank, a massive discovery to make about something so small. Did Bungie do this intentionally? No. While some will claim this drives up engagement of the game, we don’t agree with that perspective because there are other, simpler levers Bungie could pull to do that.

No, it seems that this is an honest to goodness bug/error in the coding where perks are being generated based on the first perk rather than independently.

Bungie has even acknowledged that it was wrong earlier this week.

To us this seems like a product of Destiny 2’s age and the multiple different systems that have been implemented over the years. Eventually something will cause bugs even if that wasn’t the intention. How long this bug has been present isn’t clear but Bungie is generally good at playing open cards with players.

This is however, a great story about how “feeling” like something is amiss can lead you to find that something truly is wrong by using data and critical thinking.

The discovery of this problem is also testament to how good content draws Destiny 2 players back to game. Over the last 30 days player count has climbed 35 percent, somewhat offsetting the 97 000 players who left the game following The Final Shape’s conclusion.