Anthem Accidentally Improve Drop Rates, Fans Prefer It

Anthem had one of those awful staggered release dates, but the 22nd of February was when it was finally released to everyone, and people could finally experience this (according to the reviews) fairly mediocre Destiny clone. But even though the game is still relatively new (kind of?) it’s no stranger to controversy, as a recent but has helped highlight just how crooked the game’s design is.

So here’s what happened: right before the game was launched (again), Bioware released the first of the game’s major updates. That was live for about eleven hours, and then Bioware released another, smaller update that had the exact same patch notes. No one was quite sure what had changed, although there were a few fans who had an idea: specifically, they suspected that Bioware had actually decreased the loot drop rates in the game.

Later, Ben Irvo went to Reddit to confirm that was indeed the case:

Hey - update on what happened here. In our Friday changes, one of the edits we made had the side effect of increasing certain drop chances. 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.

Note: we did intentionally change the drop rates of rare items in certain chests, per the patch notes we posted

So, they accidentally raised the drop rates in the first patch and needed to lower them. In terms of controversies, it’s fairly minor (especially to the kind of crap that Destiny has tried to pull), but those 11 hours did give fans the opportunity to play a far more generous game, which many are saying was a more enjoyable, less grindy game.

Unfortunately, for a live-service game, grind is necessary. And that doesn’t sit well with the fans, who are already discontent with this game.

Too bad you never get a second chance at a first impression.