• Calantus

Honestly I never cared about RNG as far as it affect esport acceptance so while the OP's point was from that perspective I object to RNG purely from a gaming/fun standpoint. I was going to say you were being hypocritical about your stance on RNG in arena before I noticed that you hadn't actually taken a stance on the RNG itself, more that it wasn't a barrier to esport acceptance. The reason is that you and other raiders have complained (justifiably) about RNG in raid encounters. Things like the random factors in the early versions of Mother and parry gibs on tanks have been complained about bitterly by the raiding community because ultimately it sucks that you can do everything right and still lose just because the RNG decided you should. It's also why pugs suck. It's also why crappy guilds suck to play in as a good player. It's just a horrible, horrible feeling to know that you did nothing wrong (rare in PVP, more like "did enough to win this time") but still lose due to factors beyond your control.

Ultimately there's no personal post-mortem you can undertake that will ever eliminate "the other people suck" or "parry gibs happen" or "the counter-spell resisted". I don't mind losing, I don't mind failing. It's not because I like it. Far from it, I want to succeed and I hate not succeeding. But every loss, every mistake is an opportunity to improve and come closer to winning next time. If I can come away with a loss and say to myself (and often my teammates also) "I missed that dispell I'll remember next time" or "I should have LOSd that polly I'll have to watch the mage more closely" then that's a valuable loss. If I come away from a loss and all I can say is "well, we played that right and the RNG fucked us" what have I gained? Nothing. I just wasted time and lost some rating for nothing at all.

I'll give you an example where RNG can and does decide games: Priest/Warrior vs Paladin/Warrior. You cannot outlast Paladin/Warrior, it's just not possible with their massive healing advantage. A warrior will also absolutely kill a priest before your warrior kills their paladin in a straight-up warriors-on-healers fight. Mana burn works, but only if the other team lets you. In this matchup the priest/warrior is the beatdown and the only way to win the matchup besides the other side playing it wrong is to co-ordinate to kill either the warrior or the paladin before inevitability runs the priest out of mana or health. You start off setting it up, getting them into the right positions, blowing their trinkets, etc, but eventually you have to burst down one of them. It's somewhat of a lopsided match as the warrior/priest has to play very tight and pressure very hard to get a kill before paladin/warrior just steamrolls them, but it is possible. The only problem is that at some point you will often have to dispell a BoP or a DS in order to get the kill you need and both of those have a 30% chance to resist. There have been many games, less as we got better but still a few, where we've lost and I've been able to say what we did wrong and try to do better next time. That's fine, it's a hard match and we're not perfect, I accept that. But sometimes we do everything right to secure the victory. Sometimes we will absolutely win if the dispell lands. And then the 30% resistance rears its ugly head and we lose. I've had a number MD+Scream combos hit a resistant bubble, the heal go through, and the match be lost because of that one spell alone. I can't take anything away from those matches at all. We lost because. That's not any fun at all.

And that's why I hate RNG. I don't mind losing, I just mind losing and not being able to take anything from the game. There's no mistake to correct, no way to tighten up the execution to fix the problem. Forget about rating and how it evens out, I just want every game to be worth something, some rating or something to learn from. Give me at least one of them and I'll be satisfied.