I hadn't seen this tweet
I approve! Make it real. Shotguns should be shotguns.
You are probably right. I'd like to know if the rng is fair. But I do also remember many times in nightfall the lowest player gets the exotic. I've also only seen a handful of exotics drop in crucible, always one of the lowest scoring players. It's all anecdotal evidence though.
RNG is not remotely close to fair because the concept of randomness is completely divorced from the concept of fairness, which is inherently nonrandom and based on subjective human nuances rather than math. I could counteract your anecdotal evidence with my own of having received a Hawkmoon and a Gheleon's Demise in the Crucible/IB in matches where I was the top or nearly the top scorer, but both sources of evidence would be totally missing the point.
It's all too easy to conflate how a non-weighted random distribution looks with a huge sample size, wherein i.e. rolling a die 100,000 times will result in somewhere around 16,500 rolls for each of the six possible outcomes, thus feeling "fair" to an observer, with an individual's experience of the sum of their X number of rolls of their lifetime playing the game, which will show wild variance when compared to nearly any other individual player.
I have received 15 Monte Carlos since I began playing Destiny. Thus far, I haven't encountered anyone else who has experienced this result. I spoke to someone else who said they had 11, but that's the closest I've encountered. Yet unlike many I speak to in the playerbase, I don't assume this is the game logic intentionally and insidiously throwing Monte Carlos at me with malice aforethought. I interpret it as a simple statistical anomaly that is well within the realm of possibility when dealing with random numbers on the scale we are in a game like this. There might be, say, a 1 in 3 million chance of having received this many Monte Carlos over the total number of drops I've received since I started playing... but there are
well over 3 million people playing this game. Any individual player is fairly likely to have experienced some crazy (from our perspective) statistical anomaly because of how many different possibilities for this exist. The math doesn't care how unfair it is.
If the system were designed to be fair according to our standards there wouldn't be "good luck" or "bad luck," every player would have the same luck (effectively eliminating the notion of luck altogether of course). Everyone would get the exact same amount of drops at exactly the same rate, which always sounds phenomenal to the individual. But unintuitive as it might seem, lots of behavioral science experiments have demonstrated that more esoteric reward schedules involving at least some degree of random chance (variable-ratio reinforcement) are much more effective at evoking high, stable, consistent response rates.
I know from experience that I stand very little chance of convincing anyone on these topics and I understand why, psychologically. But I'm still going to give it a shot every few months.
