Mordinm

The exact mistake varies in each blocked kick of course but I imagine that most fall under two broad categories.

The first option is the kicker makes a mistake. He kicks the ball too flatly for example so that it does not go over the blockers reach as it should.

The second option is a mistake on the part of the blockers. There are several people who's sole job is to keep the blockers away from the kicker. If they make a mistake then the blockers get close enough to block the kick.

When you see a blocked kick one of these two things happened. Unless of course the blocker just randomly added 5 ft. on to his vertical jump. Unpredictability comes from 2 main sources, the first is randomness and the second is incomplete knowledge. Simply because you do not know enough to predict a thing does not make it a random occurrence.

 

Whatev

Which is exactly what's going on with the pseudorandom RNG: you don't know enough to predict when it will roll you a resist. I'll say it again: my argument has nothing to do with what the definition of random is. From the player's standpoint, there can be neither the expectation that events are predictable beyond some basic guesses about likelihoods, nor can the player adjust his strategy once the unexpected event occurs to accomodate it. He can only select the course of action that in his judgement has the best expected outcome. Arena is not "more random" than sport in this respect.

 

Beardstorm

Football is not random, WoW PvP is, and here is why I think so:

Taking the case of football. The offense doesn't know what the defense will do, but they have a rough idea based presumably on studying the other teams pervious games etc. The kicker has a rough idea of the wind speed and direction as well as the surface he is kicking from, and the distance and using these known variables he makes his kick. Of course the wind can change direction after the kick or his blockers could turn into marshmallows and he will get pummeled by the defense. These are random elements and don't occur in all cases as there some indoor stadiums and so forth. Weather is random in the sense that you don't know when it will happen or how bad, but once it happens you can react to it - that's one of those things that makes a great QB great. The same thing applies to broken tackles - if it was random then every running back would have the same number (roughly) or broken tackles but this is clearly not the case.

Now we have WoW, where there are in many ways similar elements to football in that you can predict what tactics the other team will use but when you bring resists / dodge / dispell / stun / fear into the equation it is random in the sense that nobody can really do anything to "resist more" or "get stunned less".

When that warrior gets a triple cyclone/roots resist and stunlock, he did not try to do it, neither did you make a mistake. The closest thing to that happening in sport is in racquet sports where the ball pings off the frame or net at an odd angle and results in an amazing shot, however this is just one point of many and the better player will certainly win on aggregate (i.e. the whole game).

So perhaps WoW RNG as annoying as it is, is not game breaking as you certainly cannot triple resist/stun your way to a 2200 rating. However it is fustrating enough for me to not have Arenaed in a long time although BGs are still really fun as the randomness of WoW is less annoying in BGs.

It would be lovely and grand if RNG could be removed from WoW (at least reduced to randomness level of other genres) and the changes to Iron Will and Mace Stun are a wonderful start but stuff like Improved Hamstring and Imp. Wing Clip still keep a bit too random for my liking. I would rather they add the snare element that can be used on demand with an appropriate cooldown. So are the changes good? Well yeah. Will it make me play Arena? No, because the changes aren't quite enough.

 

Whatev

So what you're saying is sports aren't random because there's skill involved and sometimes you get lucky or unlucky but on the whole the better players will win, but WoW arena is too random because there's skill involved and sometimes you get lucky or unlucky but on the whole the better players will win?

I have never disputed that the current incarnation of WoW arena has RNG effects that are too strong. I DO dispute claims that WoW arena should be cleansed of all randomness because it's supposed to be an eSport and should be like real sports which, as everyone knows, never involve any luck at all.

 

solbergb

Sure you can. You can take talents that cause you to "Resist more" or "be stunned less". Or races. That was the BC model anyway. They simulare a kicker who is better able to cope with high winds, or who has a better front line.

But people seem to dislike that effect, and such talents have been reduced to "you get affected, but not for as long".

Given that many talents hose you if you are affected at all, it's a big boost to interrupts/roots/stuns/etc to work this way instead of randomly. It's like instead of being able to sometimes slip a blocker and get at the quarterback, all you can do is take talents to reduce the amount of time you're blocked, instead of not being blocked at all sometimes, and being fully blocked other times. The QB now NEVER has to worry about a guy zipping through the line and sacking him, he can count on a certain amount of time to find a receiver.

 

Aware

As a former 2200+ S3 Glad I can say that RNG is why I didn't even try in S4. I could have gotten a title, sure. But it's not worth around 20 hours of swearing and frustration.

The game is supposed to be fun, or at the very least, challenging. Things that still combat both fun and challenge? Let me list a few of the ones I'm concerned about:
- Crits and incredibly high bursts (Ret pre-recent-beta-nerf, Frost, Enh Windfury Weapon bursts)
- Cooldowns lower than the trinket that can single-handedly end games (Blind, HoJ. Additional abilities, such as AoE fears, I would also consider problematic in light of the ridiculously high burst we're seeing from most classes. 5-10 seconds is MUCH longer than it used to be.)
- No significant increases in survivability. No real, reliable talent changes with WotLK.
- Inability to remove racials from arenas. I mean, what the hell? How hard is it to remove AoE stuns, silences, free trinkets, fear breaks, snare breaks, etc. from arena? It is impossible to balance classes without uniformity in arenas.

There are simple ways to fix these:
While it may lead to a "lack of customization" inside of arenas, I do not believe this to be a bad thing. Make the only gear usable in arenas PvP gear. For fresh 70's (or 80's), start them with a default set of green or blue pvp gear which they can upgrade through BG's, world PvP, and Arenas. PvP gear would be equipable and useable outside of arenas. However, no PvE gear allowed inside an arena.

Dramatically increase the amount of health players have in Arenas. I'm thinking 50 to 100% increase. This is taking into account the incredible burst we are currently seeing. Healers have been made useless inside arenas because they can be killed too quickly without outside healing from another player. Simply add a buff to all players inside arenas. Incredibly easy to implement.

Remove random procs such as Blackout. Remove defensive abilities with a <10% chance to proc. Remove the innate 1% chance to resist spells. Improve talents like Cloak of Shadows to 100% resist.

Finally - for the love of all things good and holy.... Remove racials from Arenas. They add nothing and frustrate players who don't want to reroll or roll a certain race based upon their class. Racial abilities will NEVER be equal or balanced.

WTB Benefactor achievement.

 

callidas

Comparing with real sports is a bit tricky, but anyway:
The penalty kick in rugby is much like the field goal in american football, however there is only the kicker involved, and the ball is simply placed on the ground and kicked over the posts. Good kickers can obtain very high percentages, especially allowing for extreme range (>50 yards) and weather conditions. However no-one has enough skill to both accurately predict the dynamics, and accurately control their bodies to guarantee success. The miss% is not random, it is simply the statistical side effect of a lack of skill. Some people have more skill than others, and a higher conversion rate than others. A 95% kicker can have bad days (something on his mind, an injury, a crucial game whatever) and good days. The number of possible things that could have an effect on any one kick is massive (someone in the crowd shouts an old school insult at the exact moment and puts him off - whatever) so there is a degree of luck involved (their kicker is going through a divorce, ours isn't, GG) but what determines the outcome is skill (Our kicker crumbled, theirs can handle the divorce and kick just fine).

The RNG is simply, only and just that, a RNG. Two identical teams could play each other, one priest could have every single SW: D resisted, the other could crit every time. (This WILL happen given enough games) The difference between the two teams would be massive, exaggerated by the fact that you often cast it when one of you opponents is low on health. This could easily score the game one way or the other, and has no reflection on the skill of the priests - they both waited to the opportune moment and pressed their X key at the right time. One had his do nothing for 800 mana (or whatever) the other did 3k damage.

In high ranked arena games skills like Deathcoil and Blind are massively important as they have a significant impact on the game, and both teams will have included them in their strategies. To have one side be completely negated since it 'randomly' got resisted and the other not is just stupid.

Once the most-obviously-game breaking RNG is dealt with, then there is the unbalanced RNG, then the simply unfair RNG. Finally we are down to the plain old Unlucky RNG, once that is gone it will be skill based

Two identical warriors mashing the same buttons should do the same dps. The 'unpredictability' comes form wondering which buttons they will press, not what happens when they do.

 

Whatev

Oh, come on. This is just a rehash of the argument we've already had. In any event, Blizzard changed all % to resist talents (except for chance to resist dispel! How wonderful it is to be a priest) and furthermore eliminated the 1% minimum resist chance, rendering the argument completely moot--unless you also want to eliminate crit and avoidance, which would probably result in the entire class mechanics forum becoming pointless.

 

Taja

The racials and PvE gear issue are tough nuts to crack. For simplicity's sake racials should be removed from arena. More interesting would be a glyph like system for racials where you can a major and 2 minors. Lorewise this wouldn't be to great.

I think PvE gear should be allowed in arena (mind you I don't raid), simply because you want to use PvP gear outside and in PvE, but you want to force PvE-ers to get a second gear set to have fun with PvP. Ideally you want perfect itemization on PvP gear so the PvE-gear becomes less attractive, or at least at a far greater sacrifice.

The last flaw with current PvP gear is how you can customize it. With a full set of gear (as mage) you only have 8 gems and a meta gem to fill. Considering in PvE there are so many different items to get in every slot you can pretty much get sockets in every slot. Just lower the stats slightly on each item without and add sockets to legs, gloves, rings, belt, boots, cloak. This way we are still wearing the same gear but we have the option to either gem offensive, defensive or a mix.

 

Ryanb

I'd really prefer this personally but it would have some logistical problems on live servers. Has anyone else played a 45 minute match between Rogue Druid versus Hunter Druid? I've played several of those myself. Also, I tend to notice that as ratings get higher, the que times get longer and also the matches that are played out take longer. I can beat a Warrior Druid in 30 seconds at 1500 rating but if I play a Warrior Druid at 2000 rating I'm looking at a 10 minutes long match at the shortest. I think it's implied that the ratings change would take place after the best-of-series, so theoretically having to wait in the que for 15 minutes to play a 1.5 hour long match for 5 points is certainly not very appealing. (I'm assuming pre 3.0 here as well)


I really like the new "hidden" cooldown mechanic that was implemented in Burning Crusade. Warglaives Proc, Scarab of Infinite Cycle Proc, etc. Procs that have a HIGH chance to proc, but only last for a short time and then won't proc again until the cooldown has expired. Why couldn't Blizzard implement something like this with mace stuns?

You could even go one step further. You could probably code it so that abilities could only proc based on certain events - and in triggering those events it would greatly increase or decrease the proc rate. The best example here is the mage shatter combo - an extremely high chance to crit with Frostbolt if the target is also Frost Nova'd. I don't think anyone will say "Darn that mage got a lucky frostbolt/ice lance crit on me" after he is killed from a shatter combo. And from an entertainment standpoint - everyone likes big crits and shatter combo is exactly that. It's a controllable random element that is also fun to watch.

Imagine if Mace Stun could not proc immediately after Intercept Stun, but it had a very high chance to proc once your target was hamstrung. And then after that, your target could not get Mace Stunned again for 30 or 45 seconds or so. Shatter combo is already somewhat limited by this in Frost Nova's cooldown. What if Orc Hardiness had a high chance to resist a stun but then you could not resist another stun for 1 minute? Or even made it a "clicky" ability and give it a 2 minute cooldown on use that instantly removed a stun.

If a lot of things (not all) were like this, it would add another element of skill into the game while still keeping some of the fun moments. I liked the change to windfury and sword spec that made it impossible to get chain procs one after another. Why can't this be applied to critical hits in general? If you knew that the warrior had already procced his mace stun, you could more freely try to juke his pummel and it wouldn't feel like you're rolling the dice on whether or not that heal actually goes off.

Poison Application is another example of "good" RNG. It has a very high chance to proc compared to other procs, yet rogues also have another ability that has a 100% chance to land a poison if they choose to do so.

 

Kjallstrom

I just wanted to reiterate Mearis' point about random distributions. They are completely fair... with sufficient samples. A single arena match is probably short enough that one player's toys could all proc, and one player gets mostly misses. That's an extreme outlier, and it would be very rare to have a match end up being that unbalanced due to the RNG.

For some reason, most people's intuition of randomness is just wrong - we have this sense that "random" events should be evenly distributed in time. If you end up having a long delay between successes, you start to complain, even though that's not improbable. You only get a nice bell curve over many, many arena matches. I remember seeing this in the forums for a Settlers of Catan java applet - players would complain about how they never rolled an 8 in one game, and therefore the virtual dice weren't fair, when of course the distribution of 8s is correct over 100s of games (and 10s of thousands of rolls).

I think maybe it's harder to trust a black box RNG than it is to trust dice that we rolled ourselves?

 

MasterDinadan

Player skill matters, and randomness plays a key element in games.
In games of perfect information, there is a single dominant strategy for either side to play given a certain set of conditions. Tic-tac-toe is a simple example which has such a small decision tree that anyone can figure out the optimal strategy for either player. Chess is a more complicated example, which has such a thorough decision tree that only a computer could possibly play a perfect game.

This is all good and well, but how interesting is a sport if you know the team that does better is going to win no matter what. They might as well not play at all. Now, randomness in most sports is almost entirely a product of human error. A human may be capable of making a shot from halfway across the court, but he is unable to due so CONSISTENTLY. He always has a chance of failure, and though his success rate is dependent on some part of skill and effort, no amount of skill and effort will give him perfect results.

But this physical feat requires far more coordination than controlling a character in a computer game. Certainly, humans can make mistakes in arena matches, but how realistic is a battle in which the only errors that the fighters make are strategic errors? People aren't perfect and neither are our characters. What you CAN do with strategy is give your team the highest probability of winning. This is fine, as it still encourages each team to play their best in order to maximize their chances which makes for an interesting sport. There is a definite correlation between skill/effort level and probability of winning.

If you had every arena team play every other arena team and drew a scatterplot of number of wins vs team rating, the positive correlation would be obvious. You could not draw a line to fit it perfectly, and that would not be ideal. Teams at the same rating may have varying results due to "RNG." In statistics, we called that error or noise. Observations at a certain level will follow a specific distribution. They aren't all exactly the same value. Data in the real world looks like this. Sports data looks like this. If you don't find this acceptable, well then you are going to have a lot of problems in the real world.

 

h3r1n6

RNG is not the only factor that in my opinion makes WoW a bad e-sport.
Certainly it plays a factor, when matches are decided by artificial random variables, it takes away from the influence of players. Imagine your (or your favorite) team in the finals, they played well in a Bo5, the score is 2-2. In the last game they get an advantage, but then the rogue misses an important blind and the mages counterspell resists. They played a good match, but random elements in the game turned it around. On the other hand players making mistakes are not random elements like they exist in WoW. If the mage casts his counterspell into a faked cast, that is not a random element, that is a variable completely controlled by the players. You cannot compare the random rolls in WoW to the mistakes players make. While seemingly random, those variables are still controlled by the players, WoW itself puts an additional layer of artificial randomness on the game, which is just bad for an e-sport.

There are more factors that all contribute to WoW not being a good e-Sport.
This is an RPG, so it has gear. However, if high level players want the gear they want, they can get it. This is not entirely based on player skill, but also who can equip his character better. A bigger problem of the game are the classes. It has 9 classes, soon to be 10, and you can use every class in PvE and in PvP. An obvious goal of every e-sport game is balance. This, however, is impossible with that many classes.
Starcraft, as a popular e-Sports game, has 3 distinct races and is probably the most balanced game out there. On lower levels, everything can be decided by player skill. On a professional level however, everything matters. While the game is balanced, there are certain maps, which one race can abuse. If you look at maps like Katrina (TLPD - Map Information - Katrina), it has a 25-9 record in Protoss vs Terran. Point is, even one of the most balanced games, Starcraft, needs balanced maps.
In Starcraft there are 3*2/2 = 3 possible matchups. In WoW 1v1 there are 10*9/2=45 possible matchups. WoW 1v1 is not relevant, as it is a team game anyway, but that just adds to the complexity. This combined with players playing PvE and PvP and different classes scaling better and worse with gear means, that WoW will never be balanced. There will be certain team set-ups that dominate, and others that do not. For the player side, this might not even be too bad. It might really hurt them in case of a rock paper scissor system. Team setup A beats B in the semi finals, and then B loses to C in the finals, but A would have beaten C, all because of imbalances. Professional players will use every advantage they get, and so we get an endless stream of the same team set-ups batteling it out.
This is where the mostly overlooked, but most important, component to e-sport kicks in. The spectators.

An e-sport has to be good for spectatating. What it has to offer first is visual clarity. The observers have to know whats going on. If you look at a game like soccer, it's basic are very simple. There are 11 players for each team, trying to get a ball into the goal. In Starcraft you see players building bases, and building armies. The armies fight, and even non-SC players can tell whats happening. In WoW you have a mess of 6 or 10 players being all over each other with flashy effects and then one of them dies and the game is basically decided. Even I, with WoW experience, found it hard to exactly follow whats exactly happening in a 3v3. How can a non-WoW player do that then?
It also needs to have diversity. The same match-up every time is boring. In Starcraft terms, imagine an all Zerg tournament. You will see only three different units in all the matches, which makes for a bad tournament, because no one wants to see that. When WoW is an e-sport, the higher the level of competition is, the more imbalances will determine the game.

Now to a point where I am not too sure about. Skill differentation. This is needed for a competitive game. Everybody can play Tic Tac Toe on the highest level. A game needs to be demanding on the players in order to be competitive.
There are several ways in which a game can be demanding. On a single player, it can have a strategical and a mechanical component. Poker is solely a mind game, counting chips faster won't help your game much. Something like speed stacking is a pure mechanical effort, mind games don't get you far. And there is the teamplay component, which dominates most team sports, for example soccer.

Now the question, how demanding in WoW on the player, and is that enough to make a good e-sports game?
When I compare it to Starcraft, it seems like a really easy game, on both the strategical and the mechanical part. I never played arena, because back in the day when I hardcore raided, there was none, and now I just came back to the game. Is the teamplay enough to make up for the lack of mechanics in the game?
Let's look at 2 FPSs, Counter-Strike and Quake 3. Quake 3 is a 1v1 game at its core, and allows for great competitive play. Counter-Strike does not have the 1v1 depth of Quake 3, due to the missing movement and system and lack of items for map control. It is however a great team game. Is the teamplay part in WoW deep enough to allow the highest levels of competition? I can't tell.

I conclude this here, by saying I don't like WoW as an e-sport. Though the one thing it has going for itself is that it has a huge player base, a prerequisite for every e-sport.