I’m one of the first players who will call nonsense on people calling the game rigged; the Devs have to rig nothing to make you lose; they just raise the MMR when you win so you lose easier next time and they lower the MMR when you lose so you win easier next time.
But I’ve noticed way too many times how a loss streak which inevitably brings worse opponents ends up to another loss not because anyone rigged it or because the opponent was amazing but because the opponent was just very lucky with their draws or discovers.
I’m also very aware the game is a zero sum game when it goes to randomness; basically you lose some you win some; your luck today is your unlock tomorrow and so on.
However in order for randomness to be a zero sum game you have to play a lot of games so if you only play a few: the game feels like a roulette game very obviously.
It balances out in terms of wins, but not in terms of basically anything else (skill expression, fun, etc). If you play 2 games, win 1 you deserve to lose, and lose 1 you deserve to win, it balanced out in terms of wins but who cares? Rng just ruined 2/2 of your games. A skill-based game is a game that’s decided by skill even with a small sample size such as 2-3 games, not merely a luck-based game played hundreds of times.
That’s not a bad argument. Even when randomness is a zero sum game: it may keep an obnoxious taste that way too many games were decided on random luck. Since the effects of random luck in this game can be very powerful: you can very obviously notice mistakes winning a game or avoiding mistakes not causing a win.
It’s probably a side effect of way too much power creep over the years; they think old players would get too bored; so they release even more powerful cards and many of those are just random power out of discovers or just the draw.
They probably overrate the importance of power creep: sure it might be dull to have the cards of 2014 but you can create more complex cards than 2014 without them being that powerful on top.
There is an easy fix to this issue, start playing a deck with clear cut win conditions like aggro or combo decks. Problem solved. Enjoy your legend rank.
I know what you want to say because I was Legending with aggro paladin. But it does not really solve the problem because you can still be very lucky or very unlucky.
Also it does not solve the problem even more for the wider game of combo decks with dozens of Discover and Draw cards in the decks.
How you literally shut them down before they are able to play that discovered cards?
Aggro doesn’t really rely on luck at least for the aggro pilot part, but for the opposing part there is nothing you can do, if it’s a loss due to opponent’s good luck it’s just one game
This is very untrue. They often have some of the more consistent decks due to the low curve, but they all have power cards that spike their win rate that you can get long dry periods of not drawing (ticking pylon Zilliax, for example).
You can absolutely brick draw as aggro.
And as you said, there’s a lot of luck on the opponent’s side regarding what answers and recovery tools they get and when.
Overall, there’s no escaping luck as a major factor in a card game. It’s inherent to the whole deck shuffling thing. It’s a bit worse on the hearthstone ladder experience due to being best of 1 game against each opponent.
Skill is definitely still a major factor, regardless of how random your deck or the meta. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t see the same people at the top of ladder this consistently. But even for them, it’s not uncommon to have overall historic win rates of like 52-55%. I’m currently at 53.5% over about 22k games.
Hint there is a new card that costs 3 mana and tutor up to two spells to reduce your reliance for card draw in standard format, which makes aggro arguably are less luck reliant than other type of decks
RNG is a necessary evil in games like Hearthstone because you need to introduce variance to have a fun game. To start with, draw RNG is an inescapable aspect of pretty much any TCG. If we reduced all other RNG to zero, games would still be decided by a factor of deck matchup wr and the variance of your draw luck. To reduce the impact of draw rng you can either limit deck size or increase draw pace (something hearthstone has done in recent years and that I personally welcome).
If you try to fight any source of RNG, you will have to deal to another fun-killing threat to the game, which is uniformity and predictability. Whatever you do, you will have a meta; and in a hypothetical 0 RNG meta, you would see things like 0% wr matchups. On top of that, you would be able to 100% predict everything your opponent is going to do next, there would be no variance in every game you see and if you ever have a mirror matchup, whoever goes first or second would always win, provided you know how the deck works. There would actually be pretty much no skill expression or decision making involved in the outcome of your games. Either you did X play in Y turn or you didn’t play the deck correctly. A bot could play every deck.
Even in competitive games with no RNG like chess, a sense of variance is introduced thanks to the seer volume of different possible game states and moves that could ever occur, but since this is a fake or fixed variance, computers have long since surpassed the skill of humans.
So TLDR: RNG is good for the game. While it is true you need to strike a fine balance between variance and skill expression to not have a frustrating experience and seemingly random game outcomes, eliminating RNG entirely would actually make almost every complaint worse.
Randomness isn’t as explosive on simpler decks but it’s still there very noticeably.
E.g. the best card of aggro paladin currently is probably Flash Sale.
Well it may not be drawn at all …and it needs support before that.
Sure, but the balance is off. Basically if you play like 10 games the typical routine is to think “ok from those 10 games at least 3 were just random luck either by me or the opponent”.
It gets explosively random the fewer the games you play per day. You need to play consistently around 10 or more games daily to start feeling RNG is a zero sum game.
I’ve generally been feeling the opposite lately because there’s just so many tutor and draw effects in the game that more often than not decks are pulling off what they are supposed to do.
The problem is that the thing they are supposed to do are largely things you can’t do anything about, like Dungar, or Cycle rogue giants into incindius, or shaman filling a board with enough minions to kill you with bloodlust.
The meta has hyper polarized experiences, but they aren’t super reliant on luck.
Just about anything I have ever played in Hearthstone can brick.
And sometimes it’s just match up specific. For example, maybe you’re playing a handbuff deck against a faster deck and don’t draw any lifesteal minions to buff.
Just because you didn’t draw all high cost cards and die in four turns doesn’t mean you didn’t miss.
With all due respect, I vehemently disagree with all of this. I’ve played a ton of ccgs (most of which have far less randomness than hearthstone) and not once have I ever thought like any of them had an issue of being too non-random. Some of them do in fact feel a lot like chess (and I can’t say I’ve ever wished for more randomness when playing chess either).
You could argue that for a ccg that gives you sufficiently many options, it’s the same “fake variance” that chess has, but that doesn’t really change the actual presense of absence of luck. The less luck matters, the more skill matters. The complaint about insufficient luck remains entirely hypothetical: this community may love to say “if there was less rng, it’d be too skill-based” but no one ever seems to say (in this or any game) “there currently is too little rng, this is too skill-based”.
Hmm seems you have came all the way around in a couple of days… haha. Not here to tell you told you so. Its because of the excessive card draw imo. Jumped into this conclusion. In a 30 card game , a card that can draw 4-5 has no place.
I would appreciate an example of this (just for reference, not arguing with this point at all).
Sure, but I’m sure we’ve all found many CCGs that are more boring and one-dimensional than Hearthstone. I think variance has a lot to do with that. Variance can be introduced in many ways tho, RNG-heavy gameplay mechanics are just one of them. And I will 100% agree that too much RNG quickly makes a bad game. I have recently played Pokemon TCG Pocket a little bit and that’s a clear example, imo, of a game that feels awful because it introduces variance with literal coin flips. Funnily enough, it also reduces the weight of draw RNG to the minimum by making decks small and draws almost free. Which relates to the point I was making: either you have draw RNG or some brutal kind of variance, but a game with no randomness is kind of a non-game. It’s a necessary evil.
True, that’s why I am in favor of having a lot of draw in Hearthstone and change it for more resource generation. It shifts the decision making from: ‘do I spend 3 mana and draw 1 in the hopes to get the answer I need from the pool of cards in my deck’, to: ‘Do I spend 3 mana to choose a spell out of 3 options in this certain pool of spells that has a high chance to include the answer I need’.
To many players, option A is less RNG and more skill, when in reality option B is what is actually giving you variance by giving you more options (even tho with a degree of randomness). Option B introduces more variance, making less samey game experiences, but also more decisions to make, which is an opportunity for skill expression. It’s what I think makes Hearthstone a more fun game than many competitors.
Discover RNG is more desirable than draw RNG imo.
The thing is I don’t think many players identify the presence or absence of variance to make it responsible of feeling bored with a game. They’d just say: ‘this game is kinda lame/boring’. We all have this notion of RNG= bad, which is also why the idea that a game is boring precisely because of the lack of variance (any form), more unthinkable.
That said, I do think some competitive games may replace any form of RNG with simply a gameplay design with so many possibilities that effectively achieves the same level of variance without any randomness - like chess. But this is out of reach to most TCGs, if not all.
Anyways this came off as a bit of a rant but I don’t hold the truth, this is just my opinion lol.
Some discover can spice up games, but decks built around it are awful in a different way than pure draw rng.
There have been rogue decks where their own cards were only there to copy and discover new cards, making each game uniquely stupid. It either hit hard and your opponent felt robbed or whiffed and you felt cheated as the rogue. Either way, someone hated the game.
The one I’d say feels the most like a chess game is monster crown tcg (though there are other low variance ones, such as undercards, birthright, duelyst, and d-spirits).
All ccgs have card drawing as a mechanic (except zatch bell I guess, which may or may not be part of why it failed) but card draw variance isn’t always equal. If some of your possible draws instantly win you the game or at least give a huge advantage, and others are useless (or even worse), then you have a ton of card draw variance. If most or all of your possible draws improve your position in different but roughly equal ways, there’s little card draw variance (without having to mess with the card draw mechanic). In general I tend to strongly prefer the latter and consider the former to be a symptom of either bad deckbuilding or bad ccg design. For instance, mtg’s land system: wouldn’t touch it with a 39 1/2 foot pole, and if mtg came out today I don’t think it’d ever catch on.
It is not randomness getting out of hand. It’s consistent overpowered lacking counterplay OTK and Aggro, which only fight with each other, while real Control, and smart decks, are dead. Braindead Aggro and braindead overly easy OTK is out of control, especially in Wild.
Have you tried not sucking at the game? Get better decks and stop crying about “randomness” beating you. You opponents just played better than you, get over it.