Today I was reading over this piece about Hearthstone. The concept of four types of randomness in a game is interesting, but what struck me about the piece in particular is the concept of acceptable randomness and unacceptable randomness.
I’d like to stake an argument about Esports: in order for a game to be an Esport, it needs to have something that is truly RNG. To consider it acceptable or unacceptable seems to ignore the fact that it is necessary.
In the case of most games, the randomness can come from player performance (aim in an FPS, for example). But in a game like Hearthstone, the randomness has to come from more than just the order of the cards drawn for it to be strategically complex. The order of cards does provide some randomness (obviously), but without cards that offer differing levels of variability, the game would become relatively stale.
For example, during our first Hearthstone tryouts, our analysts explained to me that some match-ups were just highly likely to be wins for a specific deck vs. another specific deck. And that eventuality for a game is bad. If competition is skewed by the ability to know that one deck is wildly better than another, it makes for a difficult “sport.”
Watching our most recent Varsity team matches, I can see how the complexity of these random card effects adds to competition. There needs to be an element where you must utilize skill to handle an unfortunate bounce for a game to really seem like a sport.
Imagine how the NCAA Basketball tournament would work if every shot taken from a spot where the player had the right odds to make the shot went in. The game would be radically different, and high seeds like Villanova wouldn’t be nearly as likely to lose. The excitement would be low in many cases.
We need RNG. It’s what mimics life in games.