Over the past couple of seasons, Fallout 76 keeps creeping towards more grinding against worsening RNG. The current season leans hard into hiding the best items behind things that take some people hundreds of hours to luck into. To make things worse, others hit them early, and brag about it, which doesn’t help the outlook of anyone that is still grinding. To wit: the state of the subreddit is a daily parade of posts like this:
I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I’m chasing the BOS underarmor style plan. It has a 5% chance to drop from two events in the game. These events come and go with some invisible schedule, so I do every one I can. For months now. I’m now sitting at 133 of these events without a drop. If you do the math, that’s like flipping heads nine times in a row. When I bitch about this on the subreddit, I get endless defensive replies that “it’s just RNG!” Sure, it is, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about the way this game is being run.
I don’t think this is a sustainable way to direct the game. As I point out with other data, if I was in charge at Bethesda, I’d be using this data to make different decisions about how the game is structured.
UPDATE: Just for the record, I finally got an underarmor plan, on attempt 154. Again, this was for something that’s supposedly a 1-in-20 chance to drop. The enclave style plan is also supposedly a 5% chance to drop from Enclave events (which there are a lot more of), and it’s also nowhere near that rate either. So I think they’re lying about the drop rates for these things, but I can say, from personal experience, that this is an idea that the subreddit considers anathema, and will not discuss.