I am not here to rage. I want to talk about the design of this game and what I think is the reason why Bioware are "holding back" on the drops. And why it's the worst thing they could be doing with this game. The loot, and therefore by extension the game, is poorly designed.

The simple fact is that the story is lacklustre, but it serves the purpose of introducing the player to the world and characters. As such the "meat" of the game exists in endgame. Especially with this intended to be a live service game.

Games are based on reward structures. This is the genius behind loot driving games and why their design is ideal for live service games. It provides an endless treadmill of rewards to keep the player engaged. There's always something for the player to get or hunt. There's always some reward the player can be given.

This means that Operant Conditioning is the driving force behind loot driven games. The player learns to associate playing the game with rewards. This drives the player to continue playing the game. Play game = good thing happens.

However the sparsity of rewards poses a problem. If the player is actively seeking rewards and fails to get them. This represents a punishment. And this also falls in line with operant conditioning. It means that players learn to associate playing Anthem with a punishment. And I believe that this is why there appear to be so much animosity in this subreddit and in the conversation around the game in general.

Anthem is a game that actively punishes the people that play it.

I personally believe that Anthem is an incomplete game. This is not a criticism. It's just a law of Game Dev "Eventual, you must ship". You can't just dev forever and if shipment day comes and your game is incomplete. You need to ship an incomplete game. I mean, we all love The Witcher 3 right. But by CD Projekt Red's own admission, that game was not finished. Whole features that were meant to be delivered were completely absent. That's just games.

But now Bioware are in possession of a game that they need to support in the long term that is incomplete, and in order to deliver a solid game. They are now going to have to prioritize. They are going to need to decide what needs love and what needs to be triaged. And that will likely require some more "production time" before dev can recommence in earnest. So they needed a treadmill, a time sync to keep players going until those releases are ready. And this is why I believe the loot drops are so sparse. I believe that they think that it is sufficient for players to chase Legendaries and they want that chase to last until the next big content drop.

But the problem is that this runs counter to the game's design and to operant conditioning in general. Due to the guaranteed masterwork drops of strongholds. Once A player reaches endgame. They can build a masterwork Javelin in a day. However after that the player's "reward" is Legendary drops. And any time the player doesn't receive a Legendary drop, they view this as a punishment.

At this stage, most people I know only log in to run their contracts maybe a stronghold to see if they get any good drops. Outside of that, they have no interest in playing the game because they have learned to associate playing Anthem with a punishment. And that's not them being toxic or problematic. That view is baked into the very design of the game. Anthem has taught them to view it that way.

It has gone: This is what you should care about. But if you play the game, it will not give you what you care about. Anthem is conditioning it's playerbase to not want to play the game.

The thing is, before we had inscriptions that had nothing to do with the item it was found on. But no-one would care about that if drops were regular. In fact, that enables you to really go all out min-maxing builds. Instead,Anthem has ignored some of the founding principles of game design. And I think it's done so because it didn't have the time to think about those decisions once it realised that it had to meet a deadline.

But the sad fact is, if someone can play your game for 100 hours and get only 1 reward. Your system is broken. Fundamentally. Not only will your game fail to grow if it punishes players. but it will eventually push the existing ones away.

Again, there's no anger here. It's just... well it's a fact