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Anthem's Drop Rates Raised And Then Lowered Again
On Friday, when Anthem got its day one patch last week on the actual day one of the game, or day seven if you've been playing for a week already. An unintended consequence of that patch has resulted in players on the game's Anthem subreddit and BioWare's forums arguing back and forth all weekend about whether the loot drop rates were lowered or not.
Right before the game released, BioWare sent out the first of the game's major updates, but then put out a smaller update the next day. Both updates shared the exact same notes, causing quite a bit of confusion, but fans who bought the game on Friday felt like they noticed something strange. After the second update, the loot drop rates seemed to have decreased, leading to arguments online with whether the game had a sudden stealth nerf to drop rates, with some people insisting they have and others saying it's exactly the same.
Anthem lead producer Ben Irvo came into a Reddit thread about the subject to clarify.
"In our Friday changes, one of the edits we made had the side effect of increasing certain drop chances," Irvo wrote. "This was not intended. Once we identified the problem we changed it back to how it was before. That was about 11 hours later. Took a little time for that message to make it around internally and to make sure we understood what happened and how to avoid it going forward. It’s never our intent to make changes without being transparent, so we wanted to come in here to respond and clarify."
Basically, they accidentally raised the drop rates and thus needed to lower them, but didn't communicate this until people had already realized it. Which feels like an honest mistake, but definitely exposes a raw nerve that the community had already been observing. With the way Anthem handles loot, which is mostly based on random chance of getting the right gun with the hopefully right random ability attached, raising drop rates is drastically better than lowering them.
It remains to be seen how BioWare will respond to the feedback of the current drop rates that they intended to have in the first place.
[Source: USG]
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