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Despite the initial success of Borderlands 4, a sense of discontent is gradually growing within the community. Browse the game's subreddit, and you'll notice multiple posts discussing just how bad its dedicated drop rates - the chance that you'll see a specific item from a specific kill - seem to be. Now, one player has used their playthrough for science, proving once and for all that things might actually be as bad as they appear.
In a post on Reddit, Borderlands 4 loot scientist ForeignLettuce977 has documented their drop rate data across 3,000 boss kills - a feat that took them 150 hours in total. Playing as Vex on the game's highest difficulty level, they eventually concluded that the "dedicated drop rate for any individual item is about 5%."
That varies slightly: the data is very favorable around the Inceptus boss, which is slightly bugged and dragged that dedicated figure up to 30%; elsewhere, the Rippa Roadbirds also appear to drop more than they're supposed to, and ForeignLettuce recommends players "take advantage of that while you can because I expect it to be fixed."
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Gearbox doesn't tend to advertise its drop rates, but now that the 5% figure has been deduced, our Borderlands data scientist is advocating for a change. They believe drop rates should be doubled up to 10%. Part of that is to match the rate in Borderlands 2, which they note "is the gold standard for most people," but there's also a mathematical answer behind that decision.
Talking to IGN, they say that adjusting the drop rate from 5% to 10% "isn't just doubling the chance, it's reducing the worst possible outlier outcomes." In their example, they explain that while farming Fractis, it took 96 attempts to get a single grenade drop. At a 5% rate, the odds of that happening are "about 1 in 137," but at a 10% rate those odds would shrink dramatically, to almost 1 in 25,000, "reducing the worst possible outlier outcomes by a factor of 180." They argue that it's those outliers that cause people to quit the game out of frustration, suggesting that limiting them is good for the overall health of the game.
Broadly, they admit that there's an element of preference. While some players are intent to play for hundreds or thousands of hours just to look for the one 'perfect' weapon, that's not an approach that many others are interested in chasing. ForeignLettuce says that based on their findings, they are "pretty much done with the game for now" from a solo farming perspective, at least until a major update drops. While other players might be prepared to commit to a deep weapons grind, the discourse about drop rates so far - and the revelation that they're far below the 10 or even 15% rates that were initially hoped for - means that the majority might be quicker to move on than expected.
I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.
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