Lots of sports are played outdoors, where there is weather. Wind and rain are random, and can easily favour one side over the other.

Also, many sports decide who gets first use of the ball, or what end, by a coin flip. Again, a completely random factor that can impact the match. In athletics and swimming, lane draw plays a similar role.

Any game played on a non-artificial surface like grass will have randomness. Watch tennis on grass vs on a hard court: on grass the ball will sometimes skid through lower or higher than expected because of court wear. In cricket you see a ball hit a crack in the pitch and either take off or roll along the ground.

The balls are also all slightly different. In cricket they certainly wear at a different rate depending on a number of environmental and manufacturing factors. In something like baseball, I'm sure every ball is close but not identical in weight and dimensions, probably enough that it occasionally makes a difference between a home run and an outfield catch.

Along the equipment lines, you occasionally see a bat break or a racket string snap. That can certainly affect a match (point lost, scoring chance goes begging), and again, it's just random bad luck.

Then there's the refs, but that's a huge can of worms.

I think there's a heck of a lot more randomness in real life sports than a lot of people like to admit.

The difference in WoW is that they choose to have let the bats break. The question is if that should stay, and i dont think it should.

Just because there are no random factors in a game does not necessarily mean it is based purely on skill.

Look at Rock-Paper-Scissors: Rock does not have a Rock Stun Specialization, Paper does not increase Scissor's chance to miss by 5%, nor does Scissors randomly beat Rock after a 3 Scissor streak.

Rock-Paper-Scissors does not have any random factors, but picking either move of the three is generally arbitrary, and winning is still based on random luck more than anything else.

As someone mentioned already, poker is pretty popular and has a huge random element. Given that poker is the closest thing to an "eSport" to have gained any sort of audience, I'm not sure that having a random element is in any way holding WoW back. The fact it's dead boring to watch is a far bigger barrier to acceptance.

The amount of times I say to my partner after losing an arena game;
"Sigh. We would have had that if the Warrior didn't proc a Mace stun when I was spamming execute on that stunned Druid."
"Escape Artist resisted and didn't dispel the crippling poison."
"I Cloaked and didn't resist the Fear."
"He resisted every Kidney Shot."
"That guy just Parried my Backstab...!?!?@!?"
"That Mage procced Frostbite every single time I landed a hit on him."
"The Priest got away 'cos he dodged my Shiv."

Blah, blah, blah. It drives me freaking crazy.
As the OP has pointed out, various such elements are being addressed in WotLK, which is a great step in the right direction. I think it certainly demonstrates that developers are in-fact aware of such issues and intend on progressively balancing the Arena game around players' skill and reaction times.

I'm personally excited to see some dynamic terrain/environmental effects added to arena; like ranged classes fighting for that perfect opportunity to get on board the rising pillar & throw down a few free attacks or heals - and the melee's efforts to prevent such events. As long as it's not as stupid as that damned Tornado which was in the Nagrand Arena once upon a time.

I doubt the percentage of times this happens is as large as you remember. We remember the anomalies, it's human nature. It's like when people say 'if only I'd landed that last backstab, we wouldn't have wiped on boss 'x' at 1%'. People tend to blame wipes on the extreme case. That's not when a wipe happens though, every raider knows that. All your eggs being in one basket is player mistake. Removing the RNG would make the game dull.

Here's an example from WWI. In the finals it was RMP vs RPD. The RMP team dispelled Pain Suppression on the FIRST dispel in the 5th or 6th game, leading to an absurdly easy kill on a KSed druid. PS has an 85% chance to not be dispelled at all, so they basically got RNGed by a 15% chance proc.

I didn't see the game but it's probably even more random than that because the dispell has to hit the pain suppression in the first place instead of the half dozen hots and proc effects a trained druid with a priest healer would have.

Read my post carefully, I was arguing that the RNG wasn't a barrier to eSport.

In fact, I think the RNG has the potential to actually make things more interesting. Real sport thrives on drama, any fan can tell you endless stories about that unlucky loss or how they were robbed in a game.

Well it sort of depends on what part of RNG blizzard would want to address to. This whole thread is full of people arguing past eachother rather than against eachother, and both sides have true and valid points;

-Arena without ANY RNG is boring

-RNG can be annoying

But no B -> A and no A -> B doesn't apply here. If blizzard would tweak the "annoying" RNG that breaks matches, we're a long way home. For example, high occurrence chances are _generally_ balanced: poison application rates, poison dispel rates, crit rates (on DPS classes). On the other hand, small chance occurrences can simply be too much of a pain in the ass because they're a) unpredictable b) have too much of an impact upon occurring. Examples here are mace stuns, crazy WF/crit streaks and spell resists.

Now, simply putting all RNG occurrences on a use effect and slapping a cooldown on it is something I cant' see work. There's a reason why on demand stuns were considered good for rogues and not for warriors. An on demand stun is more potent than a random one, particularly, in long matches on demand stuns would make warriors simply too powerful (bit like 4+4/glaive Shs rogues just with 100% crit rates are now ). I'm sure Blizzard has the team to think of something less straight forward to deal with things like making these low chance occurrences less of a nuisance factor. For example, I didn't think being closer to a target lowering your chance to get spell resists significantly was a bad idea at all.

Eqipment malfunctions or the like do not equate to RNG stupidity. They equate to *our* equipment malfunctioning.
Key sticks or doesn't register.
Mouse battery dies.
Antivirus kicks in and lags you down.

*these* are our bat breaks, racket string snaps, and malformed cricket balls. Having a 1% RNG failure is more akin to that one baseball game where an otherwise home run hits a seagull. I could very well be wrong, but I think they replayed that pitch due to the "you have to be shitting me" factor. Thats what a 1% RNG failure really is.

Even then, 1 homerun in the middle of a game doesn't flat out win/lose you the game. Here, in WoW arena, it will.

Would simply making all Arena games on Live servers "best of 3" resolve some of these issues? The RNG can stay but is evened out over the course of 2-5 rounds in one match. I know it'd suck meeting your counter comp and losing twice fast but you've got to take the rough with the smooth.

Frankly... Where's the fun in knowing that there's a 100% chance it goes through ?

As said above - eSports aren't about perfect skill determination. It's about entertainment. Knowing the outcome from the start is anything but entertaining.

You can see Phil Ivey having an absolutely atrocious evening, getting naught but a suited 7-2 as best hand the entire evening. Does that suck for him ? Yes. Does it make things more interesting than knowing who will win the second you know the line up ? Hell ye.

Is it fun knowing which team will win the second you see a RRD vs a PMR ? Not at all.

People are mixing up two different things here;
1) eSports for the participants (who dislike losing to a RNG - never heard anyone complain about winning due to one)
2) eSports for the crowd watching it.

Simply put - no.2 is far more important if Blizzard wants to make this Arena eSports thing a success.

If all rng are rounded to either be 0% or 100% wont that change arena from skill+small rng kills to an enitre counter comp game? If poison sticks EVERY attack let me just laugh at anything but freedom. If frostnova/petnova is unresistable and (what do we do with frostbit? make it stack up 20% each hit and then at the fifth freeze) I can see this causing problems.

Besides the randomnes introduced by dynamic maps is probably not so random. Hell they could make it so the pilars move when triggered by something.

By the way if you need to resisit one 15% silence and one 15 stun to win a match, and do it five times in a row to win the tournament, go play some state lottery. (0.15*0.15)^5 are not the type of odds you want.

It would be either or both. And you'd only have to win 3 of the 5 games.

Hence: 15% chance the first resists, 85% it doesn't. That 85% chance is then split into a 15% chance a second resist, 85% it doesn't. So the odds of winning for the superior team would be (.85)^2 in my example, or 72%.

What are the odds of the 28% "luck" team winning 3 of 5 matches?

The sad thing to me about this thread is that rational, intelligent people are putting forth an argument that the best counter for is "QQ more noob." So you don't like getting screwed randomly. We get that. I think there's more than enough evidence in this thread now that sports has a lot of randomness. I think there's also a lot of good points that say the RNG is the least of WoW's worries when it comes to being an eSport. It's also plainly obvious that the design of WoW in general includes a random element and that is going to stay. So throwing out completely made up statistics and beating this dead horse is increasingly pointless.

Quite frankly, you aren't getting screwed as much as you think you are, that's just a fact of life. There's a simple, fundamental difference between the two sides that can't be resolved. Some of us (and I'd wager most of us, and Blizzard) think that it's a good thing that sometimes, by the roll of the dice, you catch a break and get lucky. The OP and those on his side think that luck only means you get screwed and it should be removed completely. You don't seem to care that those dice fall in your favor just as often as they fall for the other side.

A wise man once said "I don't want life to be fair. If life was fair, it would mean I deserve all the bad things that happen to me."

Some people are assuming that if "bad" events happen, there's no way the team can win.

Well surely there's no way the Lakers can win the NBA championship without their MVP center Kareem and having to start Magic, a rookie point guard, at center?

Surely there's no way Michael Jordan, who can barely walk to the timeouts because he's so sick with the flu, can win a finals game on his own back?

Surely Tiger Woods, with a ruptured ACL and multiple stress fractures in his leg can't win an 18 hole playoff?

The against all odds victory is what makes sport memorable. Nobody remembers the superior team steamrolling, except perhaps fans of the team. The overcoming adversity to triumph anyway is the ongoing theme of many a memorable sports story.

Besides, I don't think people realise how much real life sport can be viewed like a RNG.

Take the 85% chance being talked about: that's what a very good NBA free throw shooter shoots. If he's fouled at the end of a game and has to shoot two free throws to win, it's basically luck whether they go in or not. 72% of the time they do, the other 28% of the time they don't. Shooting free throws is very much like a hit or miss melee roll: sure, you can practice and get better at it (like you can add more +hit to your gear), but ultimately a game may come down to a single crunch moment, and then it's basically dumb luck. You don't get infinite chances in sport for you to even out your performance to your average level.

Statistical analysis supports this view of real sport. Close games are essentially random. Certainly in basketball and baseball (and maybe in other sports) it's been shown your previous season's point differential correlates more closely to your season's wins and losses than your wins and losses for the previous season. Fans make up stories about clutch play or being cool in the crisis to explain it, but the evidence shows the best teams win a lot because they rarely play close games, not because they're any better at winning close games.

The RNG certainly has a place in Arena. But FT% explained as dumb luck is a horrible analogy. It has nothing to do with luck. It would be based on lucky if 15% the time a cover appeared over the hoop preventing the shot to go in. Whether or not a FT goes in is in your sphere of control.

Just nitpicking, but I would disagree. That's a matter of physics, where the angle of the bat and the split-second timing made the difference. This is a random dice roll, one that neither the attacker nor the victim can affect.

When I go to apply a sap, I expect it to not miss, not be resisted, and last the full duration (with the exception of a Warrior using Berserker Rage). I base my opening strategy for the game on landing this CC ability, it shouldn't be a coin flip whether I have to revamp my strategy when I use the ability while in range, in line of sight, and the game decides to let my opponent keep running around.

As people have said, most of the real world sports analogies aren't good representations of randomness. They're often deterministic based off the choices of those involved.

However, I'd put forth that there's just too much randomness in WoW for it to all be removed without making it some other game entirely. Beyond simple talented stun resists, procs, and spell resists there are also things like:

Dodges
Parrys
Entangling Roots breaking itself off its own damage
CC breaking early in general
Fear's random break chance based on damage
Fear's random movement direction
Random variation in damage of attacks
Random variation in healing of heals
Randomness of pushback resistance talents

That's just from a few minutes thinking, I'm sure there are more. If you remove and standardize all that, you're making Warcraft Arena, a totally seperate game from World of Warcraft.

But why not? There are already different rules for PvE and PvP (for example, Rogues ideally need 363 hit rating in PvE, but only 79 in PvP), why can't we change the rules on CC breaks? How about Fear?

Fear is already a crappy subject in the small-group PvE realm in that a badly aimed Fear can send a mob up into the next room, into another group of mobs, often resulting in a wipe. Yes, I'm looking at you, Priestess Delrissa's room.

If you make resilience not work in instances, you make World of Warcraft a totally seperate game from Warcraft Arena.

Oh wait.

This argument is invalid. It's completely possible to have different rulesets for different parts of the game. There have been a large number of changes to talents and spell mechanics already that only make a difference in arena, as Blizzard pushes it towards broad eSport acceptance (as counterstrike and starcraft are now).

Positions of people in the thread:

1: RNG is bad for a sport.

Supported by real sports analogies of balls randomly melting in people's hands and walls randomly popping out to stop shots being the best possible comparison to how the RNG plays a role in WoW pvp, with no alternative (Tiger Woods was able to win that last match despite his injuries due to great mental/physical fortitude or "skill" caused by years of practice and daily physical training, not because of a RNG).

2: Neutral: eSports are more entertaining if they are somewhat random

Statistically speaking, given a significant amount of matches played such as at a tournament and a large number of "dice rolls", the better team will win more games overall. In other words, it's not a problem.

3: QQ more

This is just a whine thread, stop crying, get better at PvP or reroll chess as it's the only game that doesn't have RNG.


Correlation is not proof of causation, but if you're looking for a fun exercise, look at a player's stance, then their arena ratings. There's an obvious breakdown.


This is a different subject than what I originally talked about, but since the RNG vs eSport discussion doesn't seem to be yielding anything new as of the last few posts and I doubt there's much uncovered ground, I wanted to explore this as it is highly relevant to WoW as an eSport and probably belongs in this thread:

What will it take to make WoW arena as an eSport popular / fun to watch?

WoW has a subscriber base of over ten million players. This is a large, untapped audience who could be interested in watching such events. As the whole point of any eSport is to make money through advertising, the challenge is getting enough of this audience to want to watch by making such events highly entertaining.

There are currently a large number of problems with WoW as an eSport - and the largest isn't the RNG. It's how difficult is is to explain what is going on to an "average" player, or someone who doesn't even play the game - which is the target demographic. The main one being, buffs and debuffs play a huge role, as do life and mana bars. These are not apparent by just watching the players run around an arena and animations on the screen, and a "good" method for display has not yet been found (although improvements in viewing and commentary are a step in the right direction).

If WoW is to become a popular eSport, something has to change, but as the game has more abilities added and becomes more complex, it will get even more difficult to explain to the casual observer. Compared to the other two widely accepted esports (counterstrike and starcraft), things are non-obvious on screen. In counterstrike, the vast majority of people understand "you shoot someone, they die", and highlights such as one person taking out many are the norm. In the current state of WoW, one great player will never be able to defeat two good ones regardless of what he does. This makes WoW less exciting to watch by comparison as you don't have "stars", matches rarely come down to "last man standing" and comeback victories are all but non-existent.

Unfortunately it does not seem as if a solution short of completely overhauling the combat system would have much effect on making things easier to understand or more fast paced, although there have been tremendous strides in "balancing" the PvP game in TBC. While some would argue there are some glaring imbalances, there is definitely a measure of skill/competitiveness in WoW as an eSport. The challenge is how to translate that into an eSport fanbase and making money.