PVP provides unpredictability in itself. You're dealing with real people who can arbitrarily decide to do something different just to try it or specifically because you're not expecting it. You can fight multiple 2345 teams with each team playing somewhat differently and reacting to what do you differently, we don't need arbitrarily random game factors on top of that. Watch some fighting game tournaments or starcraft tournaments or even some FPS tournaments and listen to the crowd/announcers get excited when something interesting happens. These games have been picked apart and analysed to the nth degree for years and yet you can still have moments that wow people because they weren't expecting it.

Chess is a game of pure skill. There is no luck involved what so ever. It is, for lack of a better word, the perfect match of skill. Technically every pattern of movement can be known, every outcome, to every move, to every strategy. So, how do people lose?

Time. Most chess games are times in competitive play and when limited people at higher levels make mistakes. If a chess match between two excellent chess players was not timed, it would take hours (Yeah I used to play competitive chess.). However, aside from those of us who have a passion for chess, most people will tell you that its a very boring game to watch (extremely).

Most games that are played on a wide scale, even games where skill is a bulk of the games emphasis, like golf for example, have a ton of random factors (Wind, ground conditions ect). It is the reaction to these random effects+general skill which make things interesting.

Take American Football as a better example. There is a plethora of random events that happen each down. Shotgun? Play patterns? Wind? Sun light? Damp conditions? Cold receiver hands?

Random chance in a game is the thing that offsets two teams..Two evenly matched teams, with the same gear, without random chance, would take *hours* per match..Go watch a 2v2 mirror match, they can take over an hour to complete. Why? because to win both sides either have to 1.) Wait for a mistake (Not likley past 2300+) or 2.) Wait for a random chance.

This entire game, all of it, is based off random rolls..It is not chess, and frankly, there is no way you can make it in to chess. If you eventually took out any random player effects, then normal random things would seem so much bigger. It wouldn't be the team that had the super fear, rather it would be the team that achieved 5 crits from 3 players or the team that consisntly rolled max damage on thier attacks for twenty seconds to kill someone or the team who got all crit heals to prevent a gib.

Randomness permeates exciting games..Seeing someone react and defeat a random event is thrilling, on the same token watching a team exploit a random event is also satisfying. A lower rated team would not be able to exploit a pillar-removing fear as effectively as a higher one..There is a difference between skill levels on how teams handle randomness, and its a part of the game.

Exactly. The only thing that is important is that you have enough of a sample size to counter the randomness and drown it out. Football plays single-game playoffs. Baseball does best of 7. Why? Because baseball is more random. Poker requires thousands of hands to determine the world champion and even then the winner is largely random. Yet there are many professional players and I don't know anybody who seriously claims that poker requires no skill.

If arena was completely free of randomness, it would essentially be competitive ballet. You study your moves and then dance around each other in a predeterimed pattern until one side makes a mistake and deviates from the optimal move at the current point in time.

One of the biggest skills is to deal with randomness. I have lost many, many 2v2 games due to random things going against me. Chain mace stuns followed by chain crits. Blackout proc just as I was getting away against rogue/spriest. The list is endless. What could I have done? I am not sure, but I do know this. Spoh played 150 games starting in the top 10 (ie no free wins from 1500 to 2200) and won 97% of them. So clearly he managed to avoid those bad luck events that cost me games.

Instead of blaming bad luck for a loss, blame yourself for being in a position where bad luck is fatal. It is not always possible to do so, but apparently it is possible at least 97% of the time in 2v2.

Here you go again making all these false and for the most part utterly retarded comparisons that complicate an otherwise simple issue. Football plays single-game playoffs. Baseball does best of 7. Why? Because baseball is more random. Is that a joke? They play best of seven in baseball because it's a 162 game regular season compared to 16 games in football. This has nothing to do with randomness. Comparing WoW to chess is equally retarded. One of the biggest part of WoW "skill" is your reaction time, there is absolutely none of this in chess. Using your sports analogies when the Steelers played the Dolphins on what was basically a swamp, was that enjoyable to watch or play in? Was that a test of skill? When you get intercepted and mace stunned 3 times in a row going from 100-0 without ever gaining control of your character is that fun? I don't care if the chances of that happening are 1 in a 1000 why is it there in the first place.

You say the game won't be unpredictable? As long as each player has more then one thing he can be doing in each situation it will in fact not be predictable. Is that priest going to mana burn or heal or go for a mind control. Am I going to get counter spelled if I try to heal right now. Are they about to target switch and blow cool downs trying to gib one of my players. All of these are more or less moments of unpredictability and it is how you react to these situations which should decide whether you win or lose. Not if I'm better at rolling dice then my opponent.

Do you know why baseball plays 162 games? Because it takes that many to firmly establish who is best. Why does it take so long? Because the game is more random.

How many teams in baseball have over 90% wins or under 10% wins at the end of a season? The answer is, none. The highest win percentage ever in baseball was 76. And that was over 100 years ago.

I was unable to make out a point in the rest of your post so I will leave it at that.

Going to go ahead and say they play 162 games because their bodies are physically capable of it and their owners will make more money if they play more. But yea your theory could be correct right?

Complaining about random factors, as I've previously posted, is logically flawed. Over a large enough sample size, everyone gets wins and losses from random factors, removing randomness from having any meaningful effect on your overall win/loss ratio or your team rating. This thread is over, in my opinion, unless someone actually wants to debate something concrete.

Also, crying about mace stuns seems to be the flavor of the month, but most classes have something like it.

Priests - Blackout
Mages - Frostbite/Impact
Hunters - Imp Concussive Shot/Imp Wing Clip
Warriors - Mace/Sword procs
Rogues - Mace/Sword procs
Shaman - Windfury procs
Paladins - Haste procs/the talent that makes you take half damage from some attacks
Warlocks - Nightfall procs
Druids - Starfire stuns (this one is narrow, but until you've played a gladiator caliber Moonkin you won't realize how good this one is)

The relative strength of these can be debated forever, but the point is that everyone has something. I've lost a significant amount of 1v1 situations in arena where the hunter just seems to dodge every hamstring. But I don't cry about hunter dodge rates, I try to realize what went wrong before it was down to a 1v1 situation with me and a hunter.

Can we talk about something else now?

That was never the point. The point was that existing professional sports have various degrees of randomness. The fact that football has more randomness than chess does not prevent football players from being paid more than chess players and it also does not make football less attractive to watch. If anything it is the opposite. Games with no ramdonmness tend to make poor spectator events.

P.S.: My analogy was always that baseball could not get away with having a 16 game season as the end of season standings would essentially be random. But they fixed that problem by playing more games. Same with WoW. Yes you may lose an arena game or two, but over the course of a season can anyone seriously claim that bad luck significantly altered their rating? If not, what is the problem? As long as WoW does not have 16 game seasons who cared if you lost a single game due to a triple mace stun proc? This is not college football where one loss might end your chances at a championship for good.

I disagree with the first two points there (fun is subjective, and I've said before that there's a huge amount of skill in adaptability and quick reactions to random and unpredictable events), but the third I'd have to agree with to some extent. The level of randomness in arenas works primarily because a loss is always recoupable (it may take an hour, but what about that time where your team fluked a win and got 30 points? You _saved_ an hour there). In tournaments however, if one team does get that fluke 0.001% 47 crits in a row with every single one proccing windfury and executioner and every opposition's CC being resisted while your fears last 10 seconds and never break despite 40,000 damage etc then yeah, that's much harder to recoup because you're playing best of three, or even worse sudden death.

Still, skill will always be a much larger deciding factor in games than anything else.

Randomness is bad. It does matter if it averages out over time. Every game should be decided on skill/reactions/strats, not the RNG. Also your comments about sports are completely flawed, baseball is not more random. It just isn't. If you are going to make a claim like that, please back it up with something.

The enjoyment in competition comes from using your skills in a way that defeats your opponents. Having a random element that turns the tides that has nothing to do with the skills of the other players is very frustrating.

It is way to late to change what I see are the fundamental problems in WoW PvP. Randomness and abilities that take control away of the character from the player.

And like I said all of those skills should be removed or reworked, not once did I single out mace skill besides to use it as an obvious example. This thread was over before it started most debates are inherently useless because no one is ever going to compromise or admit they are wrong which leads to a series of retarded posts that have virtually nothing to do with reality. But yea I'm pretty tired of repeating myself so this will be my last post for this thread

I absolutely agree.

The simple fact of the matter is that that sort of thing really does not happen. At 35% crit rating vs. 400 resilience, out of 250,000,000 attacks made, you have a 50/50 chance of seeing a string of 5 crits that each proc WF, much less any other procs or a longer string, which would make the chance more easily expressed in scientific notation (what you described, even just the crits already is below 1*10^-39, when I tried to factor WF procs on all 47, the calculator lost the first significant digit and returned 0.) I'd bet one person on a team is more likely to get disconnected by far than see that happen.

Considering that is something wholly beyond your control that can't be fixed at all, and that will impact your rating just as much, someone may as well be bitching about the game they got disconnected during. There will always be something that can happen to cause you to lose points you shouldn't have lost, but you can get those points back too. Sure it takes ages, because all these teams are lower than yours, but you can do it. So basically what I am hearing here is that any team should be able to farm lower teams indefinitely without ever losing a game despite being able to make up lost points if needed?

The chess example was to display a game with no random elements. Nothing in chess is random..I never compared it to WoW. Before you call something retarded, you may want to work on reading the whole post.

And chess is completely predictable, chief. Players who play the "best" chess in the world follow set patterns based on their oppositions movements. There can be millions of patterns but there is only one best one. This is in essence why is it is not random. This is why the IBM super-computer can beat the worlds best chess players in a timed match.

The game also doesn't come down to dice rolls, your exaggerations are absurd. The odds of a single random element deciding a game are very small and often times have more to do with random elements that combined together, elements that no one complains about (Like damage calculations/crit calcs). The fact is that it is how a random element is exploited or compensated for that often wins games, which is skill, not rolling the "dice".

With many of the mace stuns that's simply not the case, they're so powerful, and so unpredictable, that you simply cannot plan for them. And when they occur the place you at a massive disadvantage. What do you do as a healer when you take the first pummel/kick and would heal safely in the following cd, only you get stunned, and the interrupted again after that stun? It wasn't any skill that cost you that game, and it wasn't because you made a mistake necessarily. And that's the problem.

The unexpectedness and dynamic aspects of play come from player decisions and reactions, they don't need to come from ridiculously devastating procs that require no skill or planning from any of the participants.

And lets all step back from the hyperbole that's taken hold in this last page, there's still some good to be had here.

I think one of the best arguments for removing randomness in the spirit of marketing WoW as a potential e-sport is something else that Blizzard itself made: Starcraft

Warcraft had randomness insofar as a Grunt swinging for 28-35 damage, but a Zealot would ALWAYS deal the exact same amount of damage every single time, and you could count on that when you knew that an unupgraded Zealot would take three swings to kill a Zergling, but that would drop to two and always two swings once you upgraded his damage.

There was no such thing as resists either: If your Protoss opponent got his Stasis Field off, you had better have a backup plan ready, because none of your Battlecruisers would ever be spared.

Even though I played a Paladin, I actually would have preferred 2.2's Stoicism bug where it would not affect Mass Dispel's effect on Divine Shield. If your team was skilled enough to force the Paladin to bubble while your Priest is in a perfect position to cast it, you deserved to have it removed every single time, no exceptions.

If those procs are so devastating then why are top teams able win win at near 100%? I am not sure if Spoh/Serennia ever lost a mirror last season (and if they did it could have been only a very small percentage), and I am sure the other team's warriors were also mace specced.

With a top team win rate of 95+%, this game compares very favorably to say poker where even the best players are lucky to win one big tournament a year (and poker tournaments these days have a much higher scrub percentage than highly rated ladder play).

What randomness ultimately does is lower the margin of error. Without random events, any half decent druid could get away from any warrior 100% of the time. If you buffed warriors enough to compensate then no druid could ever get away. Why? Because once you factor out random events, there really is not much to warrior kiting (kiting with a second guy interfering is a different story). You would drastically lower the skill ceiling of druids by taking away the thing we fear most - chance. Getting chain mace stunned in caster form can get you killed. But that does not mean that it is skill-less. The skill of the druid is to never be in a position where you could get chain stunned in caster form. The skill of the warrior is to put himself in a position where a lucky stun can get the kill.

If you took reacting to randomness out of the skill portfolio of this game you would leave a pretty big hole. Could that hole be filled? Sure - see chess. But I do not think that the game currently is equipped for that, and unless they do a drastic overhaul in WoLK it won't be for a long time.

Who is your partner?

When my partner gets a mace stun after a pummel I immediately intervene and disarm. I, in fact, save my disarm just for a series of bad mace stuns (Or when my priest goes to 30%).

I am by no means a top PvPer, but you can't point to yourself being unable to compensate in a team game..Your team mates have counters to random elements, too. If you have the ability to react and compensate for that stun and then later, when your "random" element goes off (Every class has one), if they don't, they thats a win and the win was decided mainly by skill.

Granted, it depends on what your composition is..but even in 2v2, most compositions have counters to even the worst random chances.

Also, I understand your point, yeah, I have been in games too where the other team just got so lucky that it was stupid..But really, in the course of dozens of games, I can count those games on one hand. In most games where I thought "wow, what shitty luck", when I think about it harder, there was usually something I could have done to prevent/prepare for the event which lead to our loss but my reaction time just wasn't good enough.

This random discussion has gotten way over limits. Isn't a bit silly to be against randomness when half of every class talents have a random factor in them: dispel resistance, crit chance, hit, miss, dodge.. WoW is a game based on random mechanics. The damage itself is random (within range). Mace stun proc is just one of those, admittedly a very annoying skill, but still it's no different than any other interaction with chance to happen. I've often lost games when my dispel was resisted by a Warrior with BoF on him passing over freezing trap. Should we write pages about it?
Now, on to the stuff I really think should be reworked:
- Fear pathing
- Cast+drink
- Mana/Life drain when you effectly LoS it after it started casting.
- Multishot "bug".
- Pet mechanics (the fire and forget moment)

Add "Sit macro+Drink" and I think everything is covered. There are other little things, as well as class/spec balance in general, but those are class specific not necessarily arena specific and could seriously impact PvE.

What you're doing here is just assuming that mace stun won't proc, and then getting annoyed when it does. You have to base your actions around the assumption that there's a chance that following a pummel you'll get mace stunned.

You can't look at it from the perspective of "what do I do once it happens?", instead you have to focus more on preventing it from happening. Deny the warrior rage, have your team mate focus on killing / disrupting / snaring the rogue or warrior that's on you, kite, etc.

I think I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but I feel it needs to be restated. As far as I can tell, what most people are complaining about here is the ABILITIES themselves, not the "randomness" of them. I would much rather face a warrior with a random mace stun proc than one with a free heroic-strike type ability that guaranteed a 3 second stun on his next swing, assuming the cooldown was designed to give the same potential procs per minute.

I don't know, there's probably some psychological term for it, but with random abilities with relatively low proc rates, people just seem to assume that they won't proc, and then when things do line up and they get unlucky, they blame the randomness. Would it really be so much better if the warrior could GUARANTEE a mace stun proc in between pummels as soon as you dropped below 40%?

No, what most people (well, at least some people) are complaining about is the stupidity of back-to-back(-to-back) procs of those abilities. A single mace stun is annoying, but what's absurd is when you lose a match because you were hit with Intercept > mace stun > mace stun > mace stun. Random chance of 4 seconds of stun? Obnoxious, but you can plan around it. Smaller chance of 7 seconds of stun (the difference being time for another MS, a white hit, and probably execute)? Certain death on the off-chance it occurs.

The same could be said about other similar class abilities, as was listed. I've won matches because I got 3 consecutive Nightfall procs and simply nuked someone to death.

And I maintain that I would MUCH rather have the current random-proc mace stun than one controllable by the warrior/rogue (assuming it retained its free cost, separation from the GCD, and separate DR timers of course).

I'm happy to lose a game a week to a freak triple mace stun proc, because I know that the rest of the time I can quite easily deal with most warriors in most situations. If the warrior suddenly gained control over his stun, then I'd be in a lot of trouble, because he could guarantee that it would land when I'm most vulnerable, something which doesn't happen currently.

I'm not saying that mace stun is fine -- I hate having to deal with it. But the randomness in this case is a very, very good thing because it swings both ways. We just notice it a lot more when it swings their way.