Quote Originally Posted by Hulan View Post
Someone on the dev team really loves Skinner Boxes. That being said, my suspicion (and I'll admit, it's entirely a hunch and has no grounding in fact), is that they are doing everything they can to keep the 1.0 game going and populated with a skeleton crew while the rest of the team works on 2.0. Skinner Boxes are the fastest and easiest way to artificially keep someone playing a "game" for a long time, so it's no wonder they would be over-utilizing it to keep people around until 2.0.

If that is the case, hopefully we will see a substantial decrease in pRNG based content in the future (read as 2.0+).
I would say the purpose for frustrating drop rate and steps required is to prevent people playing in 1.0 having too much of a head start in 2.0. In the E3 interviews Yoshi-P mentioned everything (how I read it) in 2.0 including Hamlet will be moving to token systems.