The details on the exact workings of the Loot system are unrevealed. Bungie wants us to figure it out on our own because it is part of the experience. So here is a quick tip on how to acquire better loot and a simple explanation for why the terrible player got all the loot. This is not information I have researched but rather the understanding I have come too, knowing what an Individual Loot System is and testing this theory has been pretty successful. I have shared this info with many friends and they too have had a lot more success. A group of us spent all weekend testing this and it seems to work. (Most of the time) If anyone has time to run some tests and post some numbers please do so and share it with us. The Loot system has been personalized (Bungie’s words not mine). What does that mean exactly? First off let’s stop and wrap our heads around the concept that Bungie wants us to explore the ENTIRE game (Also there words), which means if you don't play it or use it than that's where the loot is. If you thumb through your guardian info on Bungie.net (You can’t see enough info on the Companion App so you'll need to look at the website), you will see the various types of missions: Story, Strike, Raid, Patrol and Crucible. Look at your bar graphs to find out what you do the least of. For me I don't like PvP so I don't spend much time in the Crucible. Think of each bar graph as odds trackers. My crucible is lowest so I am most likely going to find more loot there, which is also why the guy with 3 kills and 20 deaths gets the legendary. He sucks because he doesn't play much PvP so he doesn't get kills but the kills he does get counts as far as loot goes because that's where the odds are for him. Once again it’s personal and it has nothing to do with his performance against other better PvP players, rather it has to do with what he plays more of. Usually when I do jump into the crucible my first game with a kill yields a green sometimes blue item which just further reinforces this concept. But that's just the first layer. Now look at your kills trackers. I use my scout rifle all the time. I don’t really care for any of the other primaries so I never use them. However, I don’t get many loot drops when I get scout rifle kills and when I do the Loot is never a scout rifle. I would get them for a while but as I get more hours in the game they showed up less and less and now I’m about 16 hours without a scout rifle drop. So using weapons you don’t normally use also yields better results. So what you should be doing is checking your trackers and using you lowest used weapons to get more loot. For me I have zero hand cannon kills because I have never even equipped it so that’s what I need to be using. To further expand on this, engram drops will be weapons you don’t use in an attempt to get you to use them more often. I never used heavy weapons until it dropped a legendary rocket launcher and before I started using those, most of my Loot was a machine gun or rocket launcher. Now I don’t use many snipers so what do I get more of? Sniper Rifles. This covers the basics of it; however, there are a lot more things to consider. We don’t know what parameters Bungie tracks other than the info on your guardian on Bungie.net. They could track more things like close range kills vs long range and so on and so forth. So if you’re having trouble finding loot: -Hop on bungie.net and look at your lowest played game mode -Look at your lowest used weapons and equip them. -Go play that game mode and watch the engrams rain. -Try to change it up frequently to keep it balanced as possible for the most success. -Share this info with your friends so we all can take full advantage of the Loot System Edit 1 For those who have questions or say this is total BS, I never said it was perfect. It does work pretty well. However, our test run on it was over about 50 hours of gameplay and there were 8 of us involved in it. (I know this is not a lot but the game is also new. I hope more people get involved and help build a bigger data collection.) All 8 of us have different play styles and experiences. Some of us are all about PvP while the others are all about PvE. Generally, it helped. It’s like climate vs. weather, people want to watch the weather and say that the climate is all over the place. It’s a matter of patience. We had days of testing before we started making any conclusions. We already know it’s not completely random. As your level goes up so does gear quality. I know that's a simple adjustment but it got us doing some reading. The idea was they supposedly use a personal loot system so we did plenty of research on these types of loots systems which even included some good reads and Q&A from a couple individuals who have designed loot systems in the past, one of which did stated he worked with blizzard on wow on a couple different occasions. I can’t give names or references because those individuals aren't involved in this project. (Sorry if you’re the kind of person who needs proof before giving it a shot. I wish I could help you there). We right off noticed that we tend to get weapons we don’t use which are congruent with a personal loot system. I haven't seen a scout rifle drop since the first week of the game and my scout rifle accounts for over 99% of my kills as far as primary goes. I don’t get anything on patrol probably because I spent about a week at the cave. We applied many of the basic concepts of a personal loot system to the game and found that it makes a lot of sense. The stats that are tracked on your guardian aren’t really helpful for the players, so why is Bungie tracking these stats? Logically, you would have to say they have some sort of importance. But even if it is important to Bungie, why would they go through the effort to make these stats available to the player? Yes, it could be just cool information. We then put it to the test and GENERALLY we got better loot from modes we don't normally play. Of course there are plenty of ups and downs because it still has very random aspects to it. As far as the weapons go we ALL have found that we always get the weapons we don't use and it got worse the more we used the weapons we liked. It seems as though your modes you play affect the engram drop rates and the weapons you use affects what the Cryptarch gives you (I would love to see more testing on this). It could all in fact be coincidental, however, at this time it doesn't appear so because with that many hours trends should start to disappear, and the only way to tell for sure is to get more people involved to compile an larger amount of data. So this guide is the start. I'm hoping this post gets more people actively engaged in testing and discovering the full workings of the system. So far I haven't had anyone who has actually tried this system come back with negative feedback.