A: Members of the community observed that the perk combo Envious Arsenal + Bait and Switch was not appearing in the top 8 most popular trait combos for the weapon VS Chill Inhibitor shortly after the launch of Episode: Revenant, despite it being an obviously powerful combination that one would expect to be popular. This led to accusations that Bungie weights specific perks on weapons differently, purposefully causing some rolls to be rarer than others. Bungie has responded saying that there is no intentional weighting of perks happening.
A: Explicitly on the contrary.
In my opinion, it makes no logical sense for Bungie to intentionally implement weighting of this sort while also providing a mechanism in the API to prove that they're doing it. Why would they do something that would nuke goodwill with the community (which, frankly, is in short supply as of late), then give us the tools to catch them red handed?
If Bungie's response to all of this is to disable the community's ability to see this data in the API, then people have every right to lose their collective minds as there is at that point very little doubt what their intentions are. Short of that, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and do what I can to help figure out what's going on. My hope is that this tool will help both the community and Bungie visualize the pattern that has emerged in order to get to the bottom of what is actually happening and fix it.
A: No, the stats that power Popularity Ranks (and thereby, this tool) are based on the entire Destiny 2 playerbase and their inventories, not just those who have signed into light.gg, with only a few exceptions:
The concept that I only look at those players who have signed in only applies to Community Rarity — the section of item/collectible/triumph pages that describes how rare they are. The stats on this page and on Popularity Ranks across the site are based on the entire playerbase and are based on a large enough sample size to be representative of what's actually going on in-game.
A: Sadly this is just a misconception. The scraper responsible for generating Popularity Ranks / these stats does not use anyone's light.gg credential to try to pull their profile. This means that even for players that have signed into the site, we still ask for their profile as if we were a random API tool that they've never heard of before. By default, your Bungie.net permission settings do not allow random API tools such as this to view your full inventory, just the weapons you have equipped. That means in most cases, we can only see a maximum of 9 weapons, 3 for each character.
For the small portion of the playerbase that do allow us to see their vaults, yes, we do parse those because again, we figure if they know enough to change these permissions they're more likely to be making informed decisions on what weapons to keep/destroy, so their 'input' into the system is valuable, even if they do have some old rolls in there that they keep for nostalgia's sake, just in case, whatever.
A: The purpose of this restriction is to give a way for weapons that have been dismantled to fall out of the stats eventually. Keeping a record of every weapon ever dropped is obviously not reasonable. Even with these restrictions we still track millions and millions of individual weapons, and the server and storage costs to keep the data fresh and parsable are significant. The 2 week window gives us enough time to see the effect of things like Xur selling a roll people like on Popularity Ranks without permanently skewing them should the roll end up not being popular in the long run.
Also, purely from a statistics perspective, the older a weapon is the more likely it is to be hit by one of the exceptions above and fall out of the stats. The pattern does appear to be visible on weapons as far back as Lightfall (potentially even further), but the older the weapon the more of a stretch it appears to be to find the pattern. Again, I would argue that any old weapon that is still being actively equipped (as is required to meet the API permissions restrictions I discussed above) is more likely to represent someone's true preference on that gun rather than just whatever roll dropped for them that they decided to keep for 10 years.
A: You have to remember the purpose of this whole system is to determine what's popular. Using it now as a tool (specifically, a pitchfork) to determine if Bungie is intentionally weighting perks is something that has just sort of happened as a consequence of the community trusting these stats over the years. If I'm just trying to figure out what's popular, we have to assume the perks a person is using on an equipped weapon are the ones they like the most. Keeping track of the fact that you've got a linear fusion rifle with swashbuckler available and unequipped doesn't really seem to add much to the conversation about what's popular.
In the context of the perk drama, I bring this up because it does appear that weapons that often roll with extra perks do not seem to exhibit the same pattern as weapons that roll with only one perk per column. Whether that is because they obey a different set of rules when they roll or because the availability of the extra perks causes the roll to more accurately reflect a player's preference than just the roll that dropped is hard to say. I just wanted to point it out before people try to use it as a gotcha.
A: Those stripes are what we're all trying to figure out. They are more evident on the Revenant weapons because as of this writing (2024-10-24), we have only just made it into the second reset after the launch of the episode. The two week 'dismantle' window has just started to kick in, so the stats that we're seeing are very close to just a snapshot of what has been dropping in the past two weeks regardless of whether or not people sharded them. This is important to note because an easy argument for why the stripes are showing up is that people are just dumb and sharding the wrong rolls. This is not (necessarily) the case. The stats being presented here have largely not yet been affected by their underlying rolls being dismantled.
Beyond that, the pattern is still clearly visible on many weapons that are well beyond the 2 week dismantle window now, going back to weapons added in The Final Shape and prior. While the drama has been raging for a few days now, I had largely decided to just stay out of it as I had no interest in being the tool the community uses to lambaste Bungie. However, once I saw the pattern that @kneewoah had started to see in his crowdsourced stats, I decided to test if my larger population presented the same pattern. As you might've guessed, I found a similar pattern. The stripes are there, and they are not just on Revenant weapons.
A: Crafted rolls do still exhibit the same pattern to a degree, but obviously with players having some say over what perks they have access to, it is less visible. I've provided a checkbox to hide crafted weapons for this reason.
A: The same reason Bungie doesn't offer a database of all of the items in the game themselves. Building software in a corporate environment is slow and expensive. I churned this page out in a few hours. If it can help now, great. If it can't, it's not like I've wasted a ton of resources on it.
A: First, please just calm down. As I said above, it's very hard for me to believe any of this is fully intentional in a world where Bungie provide the tools to catch what they're potentially up to. I know people have been upset with Bungie and the decisions they've made, especially with all the layoffs, which I have been one of the most vocal in the community to criticize them about. However, let's just give them a chance to look at what we're seeing and determine why it's happening. The pattern is happening too many times on too many weapons on too large of a timespan to be purely coincidental. I'm sure they're already looking at it, and I'm sure they're going to have a response soon. Let's just wait for that before we start sharpening our pitchforks.
My hope is that from here we — and they — can look at the data being presented here and:
I definitely appreciate all the trust the community has in me and the tools I've built, and at the same time I'm obviously tremendously grateful to Bungie for making all of this possible. I'm coming at this from a place of trying to help both groups of people come to what we all want - a determination of what's going on and a solution to make it right. Hopefully more folks in the community can join me in that approach until we're given a reason to do otherwise.
A: The order is purely the order they appear in the API files for the weapon. The top axis is the 3rd column, the left axis is the 4th column (ignoring intrinsics). On weapons that are craftable, I did have to add a rule to hide the 'empty trait socket' perk that is used as part of the crafting flow.
As for the shading, the color is determined by the percentage of the total number of rolls that have that specific combo, up to a maximum of 10%. The lighter the cell, the more common the combo is. The darker the cell, the less common the combo is. Each cell shows what percentage of all rolls for that weapon have that specific combo. The 10% cap is to prevent cases where the most popular combo is significantly more popular than everything else from making the rest of the chart unreadable.
A: Enhanced perks are rolled into the values for their non-enhanced counterparts. Remember, unless the weapon is craftable, you had to have the non-enhanced perk in order to get the enhanced perk, so for the purposes of this tool, they are equivalent. Go back up and read the part on how crafted weapons play into this if you're still confused.
A: These stats will update daily, early AM in US Eastern time.
