There was an interview some time back where Fatshark stated that V2 was designed for about 100 or so hours of play, and they were surprised that a core group of people played it way beyond that, into the multiple hundreds to thousands of hours. (edit: found it)
There was a survey in 2021 for V2 that apparently a lot of people who answered wanted an itemisation system that would last longer.
Those two points combined makes me think they are going for an itemisation system that you still have to interact with… forever. But tuning an itemisation system to do that meant tuning it so that getting something “perfect” was mathematically insignificant. If they want 1000 hour players to still get something after 1000 hours, it means not giving them that thing for 1000 hours +/-1000 hours because they are relying so much on RNG.
Also they give the perception that either they didn’t know how bad it was (different people doing different parts and not communicating, failed stats/probability, didn’t listen to the staff statistician, if they had one, whatever) or it was ignored deliberately:
They didn’t even crunch the numbers until a while after release.
Like individually each layer seems ok on paper. Base rating, stat distribution, 2 perks with 4 tiers, 2 blessings with 4 tiers. But then the acquisition was stuck behind timers, mitigation had it’s own RNG and hard locks to permanently ruin items. Stick them all together and we have this hellhole of a system.
Despite the quote, I don’t think they’ve truly done anything to rein in the lottery feeling. You’re still playing to get currency and mats to buy more lotto tickets. Armoury was full RNG lotto vendor ON A TIMER with weapon type, stat distribution, blessings and perk RNG (don’t forget blessing appearance was nerfed fairly recently), Brunt’s removed the RNG of weapon type but shifted the RNG to blind boxing the base rating and stat distribution (at least armoury lets you see the stats first) and the locks are almost universally reviled as bricking an item because of RNG meant you had to start over the RNG treadmill fresh, actively wasting time and “effort”.
Someone at Fatshark honestly thinks RNG can replace game and system design and user experience without the knowledge or skill to know when to moderate it or put in checks or more deterministic systems to lessen the swings of pure, unmitigated RNG.
If they wanted to make a looter shooter, they failed to make itemisation interesting, and if they wanted a horde shooter they made the itemisation too punishing and lacking in player actionable progression.
Even gacha games have better odds and systems to get what you want. Darktide isn’t a gacha game, but then why does trying to get what you want feel worse than one?
So far with everything they’ve done since release till now, they very clearly still don’t really know why people keep playing their games. It certainly wasn’t for any of their itemisation systems.