How much RNG is ok in WoW? I think it depends on how you play the game.
If you are a mythic raider then you probably want as little RNG as possible.
If you are a world content player or a someone who dabbles in all forms of content then RNG doesn’t bug you as much.
There has to be a certain level of rng. Otherwise people would grind out their bis build, have nothing to play for and then quit until the next patch. That in turn makes it harder to find groups which leads others to leave etc.
In the early days of the game there was much less rng and people would no life the game and after 6 weeks or so they had nothing to do other than come to the forums and make endless “content drought” posts. Rng slows down the consumption of content and ideally would be paced to match Blizzards ability to produce content.
Sadly Blizzard uses it in place of new content and has the players on an obvious treadmills doing the same things endlessly. The newer expansions have much smaller worlds and much more rng than the early versions of the game.
In essence they are slowly poisoning the golden goose……
RNG is fine, if you have a way to escape it.
Back during MoP we had this beautiful thing called Badges of Valor. If you did Heroics or any sort of Raiding, you got these Badges.
If you went through a whole wing of LFR, or did several Heroics and got nothing, you still had the Badges for some guaranteed progress.
That’s the big, huge, key to all of this. Guaranteed Progress.
If I go into LFR today, I can waste 2 hours of my time and just get a piddly 200 gold and a pat on the bum and a “have a nice day”.
No fricken thanks. My time is more valuable than that.
That’s why during MoP I did daily heroics and LFR. I knew that even if I got no gear, I still got badges and I could eventually buy gear or use the badges to upgrade a piece of gear I already had.
Too much RNG can be a pain for world content players as well. Say you get a quest where you have to get 2 things but the drop rate from mobs is 1 in 8. On average you would have to kill 16 mob characters but if RNG is not on your side that day it could end up being a grind.
What you actually want is a curve with a low standard deviation so there is some variation but it’s not all that great. In the example above a low standard deviation might mean you have to kill 14 to 18 mobs rather than 8 to 24.
What I HATED RNG in, is World Quests.
Words cannot express how much I hate the World Quest system. Not only does it outright stink to get 1 quest here, 1 quest 5 minutes worth of travel over there (Revendreth pre-flight… /puke), but you also had to deal with the fact that you only got Order Resources and … I forget what that other currency was that you were searching for all the time, oh yeah, Anima (I haven’t played since Korthia, sue me).
Gear? Once in a blue moon something decent was on offer. Half of the time, it was off-spec if it was a trink or a weapon. Yeah, I need that 1H Healer Mace as a Ret Paladin with Prot set as my other spec loadout. /eyeroll
And sometimes you would wait 2, 3, 4+ days in a row and not see a single quest with anything you actually want, and since the quests only gave 75rep each, most of the time I wound up skipping all of them except for the easiest ones to pop the daily Emissary.
It was even worse back in Legion… “What, your main weapon wants Iron/Fire/Arcane? Here, we’re gonna offer you shadow, frost, and life gems for your weapon!” /eyeroll
Well the idea is that you are the champion that has been called upon to solve what ever crisis is rocking Azeroth and it’s associated universe and outer realms.
The reward isn’t gear, the reward is victory !!!
I want so much RNG that its mathematically impossible to figure out what’s the best and worst
Sometimes you’ll kill a mythic raid boss in 30 seconds cuz of good rng, othertimes you can’t beat the dps check of a normal raid boss
The problem with that is, you can’t really SEE this victory you are supposedly winning.
The world very rarely changes due to your actions, so even if you do kill a boss, it’s still there the next day you log on, and there’s not really any indication that you ever killed it at all.
And evolving zones? Only occasionally they do stuff like that, and they never have a “fully fixed” version where everything goes happily ever after and you solved all the problems there.
Like, IoQD was 15+ years ago. I can go there right now and they are still fighting the same perpetual battle even though I got Exalted with them, even later went to Sunwell and cleared it several expansions later.
There is no “victory”.
Yes there are victories, but the victories are personal. Others have to walk the path themselves.
You want to use about a half cup, but anything more than that and you’re playerbase is going to get burnt out and it will become super bitter.
Rather than “how much” I think the more important question is “how many layers”.
I think it’s probably fine if most of the things available in-game are gated by a single layer of RNG. When things get frustrating is when you’ve got multiple layers — a good example of this was with corruptions back in late BfA, where when gearing up through M+ you’d have:
Stack all those up and chances are, even if you get the item you’re after it won’t be the good version. That’s frustrating no matter how you slice it.
IMO that should be kept stupid simple. Make drops like they were in Vanilla: for the most part, one layer of RNG on all items, with lots of almost-as-good alternatives to BiS items across various content that players can roll the dice on without inducing fatigue.
Yes, players should never feel like they’re walking away empty handed. A simple currency that acts as a stand-in when your drop of choice doesn’t drop does wonders.
Nah, it still bugs me a lot.
If you have an in-game project in the open world content and the reward could take you anywhere between 20 minutes and 20 years to achieve because of dumb luck with RNG, it’s discouraging.
Hence why FFXIV embraced the idea of Badges and went in whole-hog and it did wonders for that game, while WoW walked away from it and alienated lots of casuals.
XIV, I can do Experts anyday of the week even near the end of a patch cycle or expansion and see <15min queues. Why? because people want their badges (or, Tomestones in that game).
In WoW? Last time I Q’d for a heroic, I saw a 35 minute wait time. Tried LFR, 45 minutes.
Needless to say, I didn’t bother.
If my luck is good, RNG away. If my luck stinks (as has been the case since vanilla) then less is more.