The RNG gods giveth, and the RNG gods taketh away. Tis the season for those who have been lucky enough to obtain the elusive Heartbreaker to post screenshots on Twitter and those who haven’t to make rants about the terrible unfairness of RNG on the forums. A recent WoW Community Council post takes the latter approach and proposes the need for “bad-luck protection” for the unlucky with the notion that this would be fairer: The X-45 Heartbreaker: a rant about randomness.
Since we cannot comment directly on these posts, I wanted to share my thoughts here and offer an opportunity for the rest of the WoW community to ponder the nature of fairness and the RNG gods. On the surface, the OP’s opinion feels right: bad-luck protection, we all want that, yeah? But when it comes to cosmetic items, is it fairer than blind chance?
First, let’s talk probability. The OP notes that if something has a 1% drop chance then after 100 attempts you’re “statistically” guaranteed to get it. But a drop chance is better thought of as an average. Let’s take the Heartbreaker for example. Wowhead states the drop chance is 0.03%. Therefore, on average, players obtain the mount after 3,333 attempts. The OP suggests that once reaching the 3,333th attempt, bad-luck protection would kick-in. However, you’re not in bad luck territory, statistically speaking. You are average. To be “bad-luck”, you’d need to be at least 3 standard deviations above the mean if “bad-luck” means “outlier”. Indeed, the OP seems to suggest that by the mean attempt, you’ve likely already received the mount and so this should impact only bad-luck players. This makes the drop rate sound more like a maximum than a mean.
So what about bad-luck protection for those outliers? Would this make the process of mount farming more “fair” and give the player a means to defeat the evil RNG gods? Actually, I don’t think so. For one, bad-luck protection is not “pseudo-deterministic”. It is deterministic. Now, each attempt increases the probability you receive the mount because you are getting closer to the bad-luck protection cap. Thus, for players that can dedicate 3k attempts will always get the mount, whereas those who can’t become less likely to receive it; previously, regardless of how much time you put in, everyone had an equal chance each attempt at receiving the mount. That’s the thing about probability: it’s actually the fairest way to distribute a rare item. The RNG gods may seem evil, but they’re actually just indifferent.
The OP makes an important distinction between items that are rare because of a low drop chance and rare because they require some feat of strength. By removing the drop chance component of the first, all mounts become obtainable by mere feats of strength. There becomes no difference between Ashes of Al’ar and the Shadowbarb Drone: just do your grind and you’re guaranteed them. I think this does two negative things: 1) it punishes players who can’t invest the time for the number of attempts necessary to get the mount (remember, because they literally have a lower probability of receiving it than others because the probability increases with each attempt if there is an attempt cap); and 2) it removes a source of rarity from the game. All mounts become homogenized into the “feat of strength” category.
This post is in no way meant to diminish the struggle of the OP. I too have spent a great deal of time grinding mounts and transmogs (I killed over 4,000 hexthralled mobs in Drustvar before I finally got my Terrified Pack-Mule). But I contend RNG is both fair and an important category of rareness in the game that without we would lose the diversity of mount sources. It may be heartbreaking to be at 4k kills and still no mount, but it is fair.
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