Comments on: Randomness in E-Sports

By: Quineloe

Quineloe — Sat, 16 Aug 2014 21:27:27 +0000

cronotik, if anyone is a troll here, it’s the one posting hostile one liners (you)

By: Janez Kranjski

Janez Kranjski — Sat, 16 Aug 2014 15:16:57 +0000

Matchmaking, tank compositions, positioning can vary/matter more than those +-25%, and let’s not forget about 30 essentially unpredictable brains. For consistency you have WT, which is pretty boring and easier as a game compared to wot, yet it still has some RNG, (turnfighting derp galore in AB and autist climb to space in RB,SB), and let’s not forget level of it’s “realism” such as spotting mechanics etc. If you would have less RNG it would become closer to some first person shooters because even now many pro players rarely miss.

By: Janez Kranjski

Janez Kranjski — Sat, 16 Aug 2014 15:10:38 +0000

Well that “good rng” “bad rng” evens out if you play a lot of games. If you do smart positioning (positional warfare) you can do more than if you just rush into enemy and rely on RNG to kill him. It’s not that hard to have near 100% hit rate or at least 75% consistently. Main trick is to have chance to fire enough shots so that you are not that dependent on single shot.

By: Alexander Carlsson

Alexander Carlsson — Sat, 16 Aug 2014 01:56:00 +0000

I would like to point out a distinction that the video didn’t make. The reason why, say, card games are the way they are isn’t because someone decided it’d be a good idea to incorporate randomness into the game. The reason for the randomness, is because it is inherent to many, if not all, card games. Whereas the randomness in WoT is artificial. There is nothing that says that the current situation is optimal.

I for one, couldn’t care less about WG’s aspiration towards “realism” in this regard, and would much rather have consistency.

By: Rokra

Rokra — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:31:47 +0000

The problem with WOT is that we have:
. Shell disperse RNG (main problem) plus
. +-25% damage RNG plus
. +- 25% shell penetration plus
. if modules are damaged or not

For a single person that is too much already, and if you put in a scenario that player A had bad RNG and player B (enemy) had good RNG, the different outcome is HUGE.

A little Randomness is acceptable, but the way WOT is right now is a big game of luck. Like i always say, for you to play WOT well all you need is experience to understand how it works and don’t be stupid, that’s all, you don’t have to be a genius. Skill help but it is capped. Once a player is good, the difference between him and a VERY SKILLED player is not that big.

By: Ofiara_WG

Ofiara_WG — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 15:39:54 +0000

>implying i’m from WG staff
this make me giggle xD (BTW my nick means “WG victim”)
i’m not trying explain to game mechanics (which sucks IMO) – i want only source of this information:
“This 2nd algorithm use to not be in place until some entity in the player base cracked the original RNG and made an aim bot for it that would put 3+ shells into the exact same hole on a tank 400 meters away”

By: Janez Kranjski

Janez Kranjski — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 15:20:46 +0000

The only reason that most teams are playing is for gold/rewards. If you can’t win it you just loose time and loads of credits in this case, do you want to pay 1 milion+ credits and spend hours and days of “booked activity” for a tournament, if you want to play at a serious competitive level, or just for sake of your goodwill or tournament promotion? Even few 100k are a lot considering how much time you spend getting them back. In summer tournament or what was it again, you had qualifiers and then top teams from qualifiers played in groups against each other (every team against each team in group, and top 2 which had highest score in group proceeded to fight winners of other groups). I mean everyone had 6 chances there to qualify to group stage, I think that is more than enough tries.

By: Janez Kranjski

Janez Kranjski — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 14:49:50 +0000

Belief in existence of “good” and “bad” “RNG” is just your poorly constructed belief, based on incomplete understanding of the game and statistics, and trying to find some emotion based external rationalisation and patterns, that don’t exist and you invent, to compensate for your poor performance. How can game even influence, in a way you are implying, what players and you are doing? Do you imply that game doesn’t allow you to have free will?

By: Warstore

Warstore — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 14:40:19 +0000

The video says a little randomness is not a problem. But World of Tanks has far too much randomness.
RNG starts affecting the game at the moment one pulls the trigger. First it will decide if you hit exactly where aimed or if the shell will simply overshoot and even hit an ally on the other side of the map.
+/-25% affects 2 things at the same time. Affects whether your shell will penetrate or not a target and then how much damage it will deal. After that, we have things like module damage, which can vary from nothing to a ammo rack explosion.
And l won’t even go through the worst aspect of them all, which comes in the form of sky cancer.

By: Janez Kranjski

Janez Kranjski — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 14:38:56 +0000

Video does not talk about RNG, but randomness which is more general (RNG is random number generator used to modify parameters of game like armor penetration, damage, accuracy).

You have many more unique things with random components in world of tanks, such as positioning of team members on map with respect to time (arguably the most random thing in wot), and uniqueness of tank lineups, player skill, when they fire each shot, where turrets and hull are turned at which time, exactly how player will dive over terrain at any given time, what crew skills player and module damage player, state of upgradedness of modules, what each player ate for launch, irrational beliefs of a player brought on by his brain chemistry, general faults of being a human manifesting themselves at an inconvenient time etc. … There is a lot of randomness in [real] life too (team sports), random components are even present in some well tested physical theories (Quantum mechanics) so on basis of that you can argue that a lot of world is random too. Implementation of RNG is computationally cheap way of attempting to simulate that.

If you wanted to know if MM is rigged, game is turned against you, or something, you shouldn’t be relying on your beliefs (brains beliefs and memories can be faulty, unreliable and too subjective), you would need to preform statistical analysis (for MM weight for example) accounting for a lot of variables and see how it deviates from a sample that would be random.

One of game developers acknowledged that you can get harsher MM (but this is not a big obstacle for extremely skilled players) if you win a lot of games in a row or if you platoon. But even with that it’s still possible to have 60%+ solo and 70-80% in platoons or very high win rate session (~95% in almost 50 games in something that is generally not considered a good tank with only 1 platoonmate), that is if you play for win rate only, which is only one of possible styles of playing (playing for higher average xp is harder).