Ever worked in a large organization? If you have, it is [i]easy[/i] to see how something like this happened: poor communication. The jobs in large corporations are very specialized (otherwise you get chaos and confusion over who is supposed to be doing what). So effectiveness depends on clear and careful coordination between people doing certain things. So here’s how that accidental nerf can happen. 1. Bungie is making lots of changes at once. But the people making the changes (Sandbox team) aren’t the same ones who created this new weapon (Weapons Design). So they change the code to alter one weapon and don’t realize (the game has millions of lines of code) that it shares code with the new weapon. 2. Someone tests a change, but forgets to remove it and therefore doesn’t tell anyone about it. It not the job of anyone else to look at what the damage numbers are...so they don’t catch it. 3. Bungie is trying to streamline their changes. So that means making testing faster so their is less time and less opportunity to catch unusual events or problems. 4. COVID-19. Meeting and communications that once happened face to face and in real time are now happening virtually and point-to-point. (Messages and intentions get distorted). 5. The issue isn’t quality testing. By the time the gun gets to QA testing, that is about making sure the weapon WORKS and isn’t breaking the game in some unexpected way. I highly doubt that job includes making sure it’s doing the right amount of damage. That’s the Sandbox Teams job...see points 1-3. 6. Bungie grew extremely rapidly as a company, going from 200 employees to almost 1000...with a combine workforce of almost 1500 in about five years. So they had to formalize a lot of things that can be handled in formally in an environment where everyone knows each other...and had to do it while the size and complexity of operations exploded. TLDR: mistakes like this are usually the result of communication breakdowns in a large organization. Either because of human error. Or because something unusual happened that the system didn’t allow for. So either no one picked up on it, or no one felt they could safely act upon it. In some toxic organizations (I used to work in one) you’d get punished for doing the right thing simply because it was done in the “wrong” way. So sometimes people will let things break, instead of risking themselves to intervene.