Following its hefty day one patch that fixed a number of issues, BioWare’s Anthem seemed to be improving. However, yesterday, players began reporting about a “nerf” to loot drops. As it turns out, the patch had increased the number of drops, and BioWare only recently corrected this.
Over on Reddit, BioWare producer Ben Irving clarified exactly what happened. “In our Friday changes, one of the edits we made had the side effect of increasing certain drop chances,” he said. “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.” Irving also said that the drop rates for rare items in certain chests had “intentionally” changed, but this was clarified in the recent patch notes.
Loot drops, especially in a looter shooter, can be a tough nut to crack. Give the player too much too soon and they may find no incentive to keep playing. Give too little, especially at higher difficulties, and they’ll get frustrated. The high requirements for Anthem’s crafting system when it comes to Masterworks, not to mention the absurd challenges of Grandmaster difficulty and above, make it look like BioWare is falling into the latter trap. Then again, there are also issues with the quality of the loot as players go up into the higher difficulties.
At least BioWare is continuing to address crashes and bugs. For instance, its recent hotfix recently enabled high dynamic range (HDR) lighting on consoles, along with addressing other issues.
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