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:

It seems clear the intent is to add environmental randomness that can allow and encourage people to think and adapt on the fly to the arena around them. As it stands right now, the only environmental randomness is which of the three arenas you end up in. This encourages more situational awareness and "player skill." All sports have elements of environmental and other forms of randomness.

When asked to describe why he considers the long jump to be the hardest track and field event requiring the most skill, Carl Lewis described the randomness of wind factors and adapting to them. Welcome to the world of sport. Real life is random. If you want a fully structured strategy game that depends purely on "skill," go play chess.

Some good points, some too short turns as well though. Amongst them:

Well, sometimes. See, there's things you can deal with and things you can't deal with. RNG generated effects can be both. For example, if you're not a mage, you can't do anything about being mace stunned. You stand there being outplayed by RNG while taking damage. "Bullshit", point taken. On the other hand, the majority of RN generated events can be adapted to by the player and they _do_ enhance gameplay. Some silly examples because I can't think of any good ones would be poison application rates and frostbite procs. These are factors that you can adapt to.

Now it's true that the outcome of a match shouldn't be decided by who had the golden dice, but from an entertainment point of view, it's not entirely negative. Like the guy above me said, if all the maths would be 100% predictable, the game would be pretty boring. Also, everything that's on RNG now being either 100%/0% or an activated ability wouldn't be too great either I reckon. A warrior having a timeable stun is much more powerful than a random one in most cases, and how would things like poison applications work?

Keeping track of your partners, cooldowns, enemy cooldowns, etc. is a huge amount of situational awareness required already. However, perfect coordination and situational awareness loses to merely good coordination, good situational awareness and RNG in high-end arena. There is enough randomness that a player can throw at you to keep you guessing at what the next move is.

If you're at 1382 rating you may simply be ignorant to what I am referring to in high-end or competitive (thousand dollar prize) arena play. Good teams will punish you for mistakes - but they'll punish you even more so for resists. There are a limited to very limited number of outs / things you can do when tiny percent chances come into play, and if you get one or multiple resists on key abilities and your opponents don't, you are hosed with no chance to recover no matter how skillful you are.

If the goal is to keep RNG so that lesser players can win on occassion and good players have to play excessive amounts of matches to reach high ratings, so be it. This fits in with the MMO theme.

But this does not push WoW any closer to being a skill-based eSport, like Starcraft or Counter-Strike. There, the only "randomness" is what the enemy players can do to surprise you, which is clearly more than enough to keep things interesting.

The majority of RNG events do not enhance gameplay. Poisons I think are one of the more balanced and less random things that's in game, since it takes several seconds to both apply and remove - meaning it's a gradual buildup as opposed to it all depending on a single dice roll. However, tiny resist chances on CC are glaringly game breaking from a skill perspective. It usually takes a lot of effort to get CC off versus a good team, and to have all that effort wasted due to a sub 5% chance is frustrating at best, game breaking at worst.

Secondly, players are what make PvP interesting. There are offensive and defensive gameplay strategies, and which you choose has a tremendous impact on how matches play out, in addition to the changes that can be made on the fly. Do you skate the knife edge of putting out as much CC as possible as a druid while letting your partners get low, or do you conserve mana and pillar hump to avoid damage and outlast? As a warlock do you opt for the felhunter for a silence and bigger burst, or switch to a voidwalker to be more defensive?

Just like in Starcraft, do you go for a rush, a fast expansion or a tech strategy to big guns? You keep your opponent guessing by changing your strategy as needed to surprise and eventually overpower him. Random is not needed beyond human intellect and decision making.

Dynamic arena environments are hardly comparable to CC resists and misses.

I agree that the nature of fear, unlucky resists, misses, random procs, and strings of crits add an element of 'bad' randomness, but the "randomness" that they plan on adding are just improvements to add depth to the arena maps, such as having pillars disappearing and reappearing throughout the match.

It seems as though additions of this sort will result in more interesting gameplay all around.

It was the statement that "It's going to add randomness to player skill in Arenas" that got me, not the addition of moving pillars - in other words, Blizzard is completely out of touch with arenas. RNG is already such a defining point in arenas that it's almost on par with player skill in deciding who wins and loses - and they're talking about adding randomness in like it doesn't exist already.

This really is ridiculous hyperbole. Yeah, there are plenty of random elements in WoW, but it's a rarity when the RNG just decides the entire game. Even in a game where something really random happens, very often there were plenty of other choices you made leading up to it that could have been different. But instead of focusing on those, people are much more comfortable blaming the RNG.

Anyway, it is also obvious that there are some random elements that should probably be removed. The random resist talents are kind of silly (paladins have a few). The dispel mechanics probably need a complete overhaul. Mace stuns are notoriously silly. But other than those and maybe a few others, you are always going to have some randomness in the games, and it is a good thing that can add variety. Moving obstacles might end up being something that is really fun and potentially exploitable by good players rather than just a big pillar that falls on your head and ends the match, which might be what you are fearing.

"It's going to add randomness to player skill in Arenas"

I think that this statement is being taken the wrong way or he worded it incorrectly. I dont think that a more dynamic environment adds more randomness. I would say it actually requires more skill from the players meaning that you now have to make combat decisions based on the changing environment. The changing environment is not random though. Its not the same as a lucky string of crits that either happens or it doesnt. You will learn all the possible ways that the environment can change and you will be able to plan accordingly.

Basically dynamic and random do not mean the same thing.

If this new "random" arena stuff is anything like the tornadoes that used to appear in the Nagrand Arena. Then I feel they have no place in the arena. I think this is a wait and see the finally result topic.

-Codex

You're absolutely right--it's the 5-15% chance things that swing a game that need to be changed. Among the worst are Mace Stun, Improved Hamstring/Wingclip/Entrapment/Frostbite, and fear/stun/dispel/etc resists. These are the RNGs that really swing games, far more than a crits.

Why? Because you can't counter them. You can't fake-heal a mace stun, or move out of a lucky imroved hamstring. What makes WoW close to an eSport is that there are a lot of abilities anyone can use at a given time--reacting to your opponent, and forcing him to react. Countering CC with pressure or Line of Sight. These RNG talents take that concept ( 'react to your opponents' ) away far too often.

Get a reality check, people spend a lot more than your "thousand dollar prize" on games that are based considerably more on luck. Betting, taking risks, and getting lucky or losing it all is a substantial thrill factor for a substantial amount of people. We're not even talking about WoW. Compared to some of the high stakes games people play (in real life and on the internet), the amount of (match-deciding) randomness in WoW is pathetically low and insignificant.

You arent even really complaining about all factors you can't control because obviously, you cannot control other people, nor can you EVER predict with 100% accuracy what they might do. You aren't asking to play chess - you're asking to play with yourself in a corner, where you can carefully control any environmental variables, and nothing can even happen that you dont expect. You just dont like dice rolling, which in the grand scheme of things is a rather arbitrary place to draw the line.

WoW does NOT have a staggering amount of true randomness. Most of it is probability based, and probabilty is something you can plan for and (on average) overcome. I happen to like to randomness, I used to like getting a PoM pyroblast crit on my mage every so often. The fact that it didnt crit over half the time made it all so much sweeter when it did.

I completely disagree with the entire purpose of your post. I am not a big arena hot shot like you. I am the common WoW player. There are millions of me, and that is why what you're pushing for will never come to pass.

This however contradicts what blizzard is trying to do by turning arenas into an e-sport. It doesn't at all cater to their casuals, their main source of money. It caters to the top 5% of arena players, so that they can get publicity to rope in more casuals.


What if, instead of having everything in wow operating on random chance, everything operated "every xth" time. For example, running 33% crit rate, your third swing will ALWAYS be a crit. 5% mace stun, your 20th swing will always proc mace stun. I realise that as an idea, this would need to be very well fleshed out to prevent abuse.

I think this would introduce new levels of co-ordination and skill. Co-ordinating with other players when you're going to crit. Watching for burst when other players are going to crit. Using imp hamstring / mace stun to cc. Making the abilities skill based, rather than randomly sometimes winning/losing games because of it.

Or possibly apply this to procs only, rather than on crits for spells/abilities/white damage.

It would be possible to enable this system in arenas only (or battlegrounds + arenas) I'm sure, if this was deemed necessary.

Thoughts?

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.

I think they're still in the stage of figuring out what dynamic elements to add, and whether or not they are on a timer.

Dalaran Arena - "Arenas will introduce new "movable" objects, changing the line of sight of the battlefield every few seconds in the arena. For instance pillars might go up and down randomly, on a timer, etc ..."

but on the Orgrimmar Arena - "There might have objects dealing damage to players, pillars moving up and down based on a timer. There will be visual signs on the battleground to warn players before something happens. Triggered objects will deal damage to players, for example when the pillars go down spikes will come up."

It can really go either way at this point, but at least it's something they're looking at. And since there seem to be triggered environmental effects in development, I think this could make for a much more interesting set of arena maps. In a way, this kind of reminds me of bomberman, with your vanilla map where pillar humping is just as viable as it is in wow, but maps later on having conveyer belts and pipes bringing spice to the game. It also looks like they're trying to apply the idea of shrinking the playing space when the match draws out too long; hopefully they can apply this to all arenas and not just Dalaran.

Source for the quotes is mmo-champion.

I completely agree with this.

Pyschologically speaking, Amera is also completely right. I will completely go insane when I fake out a warrior on a heal, get him to waste his pummel, proceed to cast a heal on myself, and have the warrior mace stun the next two spells - however, when I resist two kidney shots in a row with my 15% chance resist chance, I probably don't even realize this.

The other thing is that random elements, if placed intelligently, defently emphasize skill. Let's say that the arena has dynamic geometry - being able to adjust more quickly to a change in geometry is important.

The problem is that while over the long term, random factors even out, if you look at single games instead of longer series, very often the elements of random do play a large role. Perhaps arena matches should be changed to be best of 3s?

You guys are continuing to not understand why WoW RNG is bad, imagine the following real life examples.


-When a pitcher in baseball pitches the ball, and the batter hits the ball with a perfect swing, perfect stance, perfect everything, give a 20% chance the ball passes through the bat for a strike.

-When a quarterback throws a 50 yard pass to a wide open receiver, despite perfectly catching the football give a 20% chance the ball melts and is automatically incomplete.

-When in soccer Ronaldo shoots on a wide open net because he faked out the goalie, give a 20% chance the ball is blocked by a random wall that pops out of the ground and deflects it.



How is any of that fun? Would you continue to watch sports competitively if any of that happened? In EVERY major sport, the chance that something random like the above happens (bad umpire calls, etc.) is kept to a MINIMUM (<0.5% chance), to NON-existant, or is expected and counterable and is considered part of the game (Snowing in football, Windy in soccer).

That's precisely the problem with WoW. You can COMPLETELY win and lose based on RNG (If you claim otherwise watch a friend play, watch WCM).

Competitive sports play based on who is the better, not who is the luckier.

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To better prove the point that RNG is a hugely deciding factor on W/L, here are a few games we lost either totally or largely to RNG in the ~100 game last week glad grind stretch that i frapsed:
2 games: 5% chance to resist frost nova with surefooted. (Double melee CC training non targetted melee, unexpected uncontrolled melee kills)
2 games: Counterspell resist in a crucial moment
1+: 5-35% chance to resist pet frost nova (~35% is based on warlocks and warlock pets, pets get 0 spell penetration despite however much i wear, and the spell is considered binary.)
3+ games: Mace stun, either on our rogue in double melee, or our healer.
3+ games: Kidney shot resist in a crucial moment
1: Blind resist

I also won by the RNG at times, many times in fact won by the above when they happened to me. I can accept a little RNG (Frostbolt hitting for 1350-1550).

I cannot accept WoW as a competitive e-sport until RNG by and large gets changed until it's on par with other competitive sports. You get the best referees and umpires available to you instead of run of the mill umpires and referees for a reason.

Just as an aside, I think soccer with random walls popping up around the place every so often would be pretty entertaining ^^

Asking for the removal of random numbers from WoW arena games is a ridiculous thing to do.

If anything needs to be done at all maybe Blizzard need to take a lesson from online gambling sites and have their RNGs fully accredited. That is, ensure they are properly seeded and fill certain performance criteria concerning the distribution of randomness over an appropriate sample size of calls.

That way, much as in poker, the players who rise to the top are the ones who can control the amount of influence luck has over their game. If Blizzard can mathematically demonstrate that their RNG treats everyone equally, then nobody has grounds for complaint. Like the poster said above, if your game is hinging on a single RNG roll you've probably got bigger problems than a few kinks in the RNG anyway.

I understand all the concern on RNG but surely if the end goal of the Parent post is for eSport acceptance and overall fairness of gameplay and balance, then the first thing we should all wish for is that tomorrow morning Blizzard patch in a small fix that as soon as you zone into an Arena all racials are disabled (active and passive). That alone would make more of a difference than any adjustments to the RNG could ever do.

Kick/Kidney resists come to mind. Priests generally have ~20% resist chance for stuns depending on meta, and 15% resist against kick. Resisting a kick at a crucial time can turn the game from a kill to something completely different. Playing a 2dps team in 2s currently, getting those resists really can lose us games easily. As an example a few days ago we played our spriest/rogue vs discpriest/rogue. I was getting the kill on the priest, but then both my kick and kidney get resisted, leaving the priest open to cast a few flash heals, giving his rogue plenty of time to finish off my partner.

If Blizzard's RNG was not producing proper distributions, we would certainly see larger discrepancies from DPS models which are all founded on the assumption that the RNG is adequately random.

Getting to a point where a resisted counterspell would lose the game is pretty damn common, especially in DPS stacked teams. If getting to a point where a single resisted CC/interrupt being missed/dodged/resisted/whatever will lose the game is a fail strategy then 2v2 2dps might as well just not play. Getting into a situation where you have a 99% chance to win is actually pretty damn good situation to be in.

All this "it all works out in the end" is actually getting pretty annoying. We all know this already. We ALL know that it evens out in the long run. It doesn't make it any less of a pain in the ass when you get to a point where you get screwed out of a win because of RNG. I don't think it hurts me in the long term, I vividly remember times I've resisted a KS that would have sealed my fate if it landed. It's quite possible I've won more games through RNG than I've lost. But I don't care about that. It doesn't make it any less bullshit, any less annoying, when I get a resist at a bad moment. The rogue deserved to land the KS and kill me just as I deserved to land whatever spell it was I casted. If you get in a situation where your actions have sealed victory, it should not be then passed on to the RNG to see if it wants to fuck you over or not.

To those pointing out poker: it's a red herring. You can't take randomness out of poker any more than you can take the ball from football. Poker IS random. The whole point of the game is to take that randomness and run with it. Every other game that's not wholy about randomness tries to limit randomness as much as possible. Sports spend millions to train and hire umpires, put in cameras, and tend to grounds so that there is as little randomness as possible. Saying that poker does well with randomness so WoW should be random is like saying football does well with a ball so maybe we should work one into WoW. Or bats. Lots of bats in sport. Fishing is a very big sport too. Maybe we should have fish-off at the beginning of every arena to see which team gets to call the coin toss that decides who gets to start with the ball and bat. Also, the bat has a 10% chance to stun.