Originally Posted by Siddown
You are taking an off the cuff statement at a Q&A way too literally. If he had chosen the word "dynamic" instead of "randomness" at this non-scripted event, would you be so upset? Basically he's saying that players can't just pillar hump because the pillars will be disappearing once in a while. How this can outrage someone is beyond me, if anything it will help out a few classes that get completely screwed by LoS making the Arena more interesting. Not sure how this is a bad thing.
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I certainly hope this is the spirit in which the statement was made. Dynamic is good, random dynamic is bad. If you can predict something or know of it in time to react to it then it adds another layer of strategy. The WF/sword proc/crit string that kills you isn't something you can react to and is thus not good for the game. The pillar you're humping randomly disappearing and getting you blown up before you can adjust would be bad, knowing the pillar you're humping is going away very soon so you need to compensate is fine.
I'd also like to point out that the sports examples thus far have been missing the point. The RNG is not anywhere near the same as differing environmental factors day to day, or even changing environmental factors. Today the wind might be blowing hard while yesterday it was not, but this can be factored into the game by the players. The RNG equivalent would be a random gust of wind suddenly blowing down a random player a few times every match. Umpire mistakes sure are fairly random but I don't know any sporting code that would not eliminate umpire mistakes yesterday if it was possible. Cricket has the third umpire, rugby league has the video ref, and both are there to try to mitigate the random bad calls by umpires. I don't think we should be trying to emulate the parts of sport that the sports themselves want to be rid of.
The rest of sport is hardly ever random. Sure the ball can bounce in weird ways or someone drops a catch they should have taken but it's almost always deterministic or as a result of player actions. All the variables are there and the players are aware of them, it's just hard to figure it out on the fly. If a player had an amazing mind he could predict exactly where the ball was going to land when he kicked/hit it in a particular way at any given moment, and the only reason they don't is because they lack the skill to do so. It emulates randomness but it comes from player actions instead of random, arbitrary variables, and ultimately PVP and sport is about competition between the players. That's why there is good random and bad random. Missing a counter-spell because the player juked their heal is good, missing a counter-spell because your 1% chance to miss reared it's ugly head is not good.
I used to watch sport as a kid and think to myself "how can that basketball player miss a free shot? He's been playing and practicing every day for years, surely by now he'd be able to hit the basket every time" but we know that humans aren't perfect. We aren't robots who can pull off the exact same maneuver every time. You're going to miss that counter-spell sometimes. You're going to be late on noticing a switch. You're going to step a little too far out of cover and be blown up. And you will always, always be surprised by how another player reacts to your actions because people react in different ways. It's the way we humans work and it adds its own randomness. In PVP it's all about the players on one side versus the players on the other side, the game should do everything it can to not get in the way of that. The best game of football is when a ref doesn't have to do anything but officially mark goals/tries/touchdowns. The best game of arena is when the game doesn't have to do anything but handle player inputs.