Originally Posted by rayijin

From WWI:



This statement has me outraged. Does Blizzard even care about WoW as an eSport? Do they not realize how RNG-based matchups at the high end already are? Right now, the entire eSport designation for arena play makes me roll my eyes, simply because of how winning/losing is already based on randomly generated numbers as much as player skill. So why does Blizzard insist that the backbone of the competitive eSport game continue to be randomly generated?

As it stands, arena is an exercise in frustration for a skilled player. The RNG plays a bigger factor in determining wins than player skill. Resists and critical strings (in spite of resilience) are often what decide a match. Between players with a perceivable yet small difference in skill, the primary determining factor in winning and losing is the RNG.

There are many ways to outplay an opponent: luring him into more favorable positioning for your team; better debuff/rage/mana/cooldown management, fake casts to draw counterspells, coordinated CC and burst, abusing line of sight and perfectly timed spell reflects/vanishes/ice blocks, to name a few. This is what makes WoW eSport worthy: game mechanics that rely on player skill and team coordination.

Things that do not take player skill into account whatsoever but sway matches much more than the above list: Resists/misses in general. Missing kicks/pummels on a mage (5% chance through talents), blind missing/resisting, fear resists, nature’s grasp resists, stun resists (5-20% chance with a meta/racial/talents, though blizzard IS making stun resist talents be a duration reduction in the expansion at least), random procs (mace stun, improved wing clip, blackout to name a few), critical streaks (4+ crits in a row with 20% effective crit after resilience), mortal strike being dodged by a healer (3% chance).

So what has Blizzard done to address randomness playing a huge role in arenas?

The change to cheat death removes a lot of the randomness (since currently, cheating death at 30% is extremely different than 10%). The change to the stun resist talents (and racial, hopefully) will remove the random factor from stuns in the next expansion. The addition of resilience was not to lower damage output in PvP as much as it was to reduce the possible burst (and hence randomness). The move of some buffs to non-magic, so they cannot be removed by random dispels. I applaud Blizzard in taking these steps to help make arena PvP more skill based and less RNG based.

What still needs to be addressed?

CC. Having a small chance to resist fear / sheep / blind / cyclone in arena is one of the worst PvP mechanics, especially for a supposed “eSport”. The random direction fear will send a player in is another. All procs need to be looked at and evaluated. In my opinion they should be removed and replaced with other skills/abilities that can be used consistently. Resilience doesn’t do enough for crits, crits need to be lowered further and class damage mechanics based on crits need to be re-evaluated. Dodges/Crits/Parries may need to be removed entirely or changed to have a smaller variation (like a dodge/parry being 75% of baseline damage, a crit being 125%). Another example, evasion/cloak should be 100% dodge / resist chance respectively, as opposed to a 5-20% chance of getting hit while they are up. Individual spells should either be pushed back by every melee swing or none, 50% or 70% pushback resistance needs to go. Dispels should not prioritize randomly. Poisons having a non-0% and non-100% application and dispel resist chances.

The counter argument: "But randomness is what makes arena take skill, because it's all about reactions!"

Bullshit. There's so much you can do even if you remove all randomness from the PvP aspect of the game. Basically, believers in this argument think that reacting to the RNG rather than your opponent's moves make PvP "interesting". Imagine if in basketball the shot clock was randomly set between 5 and 45 seconds. Would this make it a more interesting and skill-based game because you have to "react" more? That's what this argument claims happens with resists in WoW. The variety of things your opponents can do to try to beat you is enough randomness.

Conclusion

WoW arena PvP is strongly RNG based. This is extremely detrimental to its consideration as an eSport and the only way to fix it is to remove as much randomness as possible. This will lead to less frustrating, more competitive play, acceptance across the board as an eSport (barring continuing class balance issues) and more publicity for Blizzard.

To end, a quote from my good friend and WoW MLG Pro Tour commentator Robert “Voice” Simpson, in a discussion I was having with him before the recent 3v3 tournament. It is something that shouldn't even be on the table with an eSport: