What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Randomness is a part of gaming - whether you’re playing an eSport or a board game, and the
same goes for League of Legends.
When most players here the word random, they assume the worst, which makes sense because
it often can be.
What a lot of people don’t understand though is the difference between types of randomness,
and how it can actually be used to keep things fresh without stopping you being in control
of what’s happening.
Riot Ghostcrawler made an awesome video on the topic sharing Riot’s perception of randomness,
and we wanted to break that down and give our own thoughts about variance and things
that we think Riot needs to address.
And if you enjoy the video definitely hit that
like button
The first thing we should definitely address is that Riot definitely knows that randomness
that interferes with the game is a bad thing - no one wants their players to feel like
they did everything right, just to find out that the game has rolled the dice and decided
they don’t deserve to win.
At the same time, some randomness is necessary to keep the game fresh and stop things being
repetitive, and it all comes down to the two different types of randomness.
Ghostcrawler refers to input and output randomness as the two forms of variance in games.
Input randomness refers to random things that happen before a game, or at least before you
act on them.
A good example of this is the Elemental Dragons - you know which one is going to spawn, so
although it’s definitely random, it doesn’t have a bad affect on the game.
That’s because instead of affecting your gameplay, you build your strategy around it
and adapt to it in order to decide what to do during a game.
Let’s say for example, you play two games - one of which has an Infernal Drake spawn
first, and one of which as a Cloud Drake spawn first.
In the first game, you might decide with your team to try get that first dragon, and play
around it.
In the second game that would be less important, so you might be the focus on lane objectives
instead.
Even though you’re playing two games of League of Legends - hell, maybe even with
the exact same players and champions - but because the drake has been automatically generated,
it will change the way players approach the game.
That means instead of playing the same game twice, things will probably go way differently,
and you avoid the feeling of it being repetitive.
This is what input randomness provides, and although it can definitely go too far, you
can consider it the ‘good’ type of randomness.
Another good example that Ghostcrawler provides is a comparison to Texas Hold’Em Poker - you
have information that you know about, such as the cards in your hand and the flop, which
is the first three revealed cards on the table, while the fourth and fifth (turn and river)
cards are hidden, so it’s essentially random what they could be.
That doesn’t make Poker a bad game, in fact it introduces a ton of strategy because players
have to adapt their strategies based on those random factors.
Being able to adapt your strategy based on random factors is part of what it takes to
master League of Legends - you’ve got things like mechanics, map awareness, or counterpicking
in draft phase for example, and adapting your strategy to different things like random pre-generated
things is just another part of the game.
On the flip side of the coin, you have output randomness.
This is where people really start finding ammo to criticise a game, and it’s easiest
described by the player making a decision, and then the game pretty much rolling the
dice against them.
If a player does 100% of the things they had the power to control perfectly, it shouldn’t
be possible for randomness to just ruin everything for them - that’s output randomness, and
it fucking sucks for the victim.
A game well known for a lot of output randomness is Hearthstone - I mean sure, over a large
number of games played, the number of games ruined by randomness isn’t enough to stop
good players being good and bad players being bad, but players aren’t invested in a hundred
games at a time.
Players care about the game they are playing as they are playing it, and losing a Hearthstone
game to an ‘RNG’ factor that is outside of your control and was essentially just blind
luck for your opponent is super frustrating.
That’s not to say all output randomness is bad for games, some genres like tabletop
D&D are actually unplayable without it since you need to roll dice to play the game properly
- and some actions will inevitably pass or fail.
That being said, D&D isn’t a competitive game where you are trying to demonstrate your
skill, so the same concerns don’t really apply.
Riot have said they want to keep output randomness to an absolute minimum to avoid the feel-bads
you get when it happens, which is good to hear, although it does make you wonder why
critical strike are still in the game.
Crits are pretty much the definition of output randomness - say for example you decide to
start fighting someone when you are favored to win, but the game rolls the dice on his
10% critical chance and you get hit with two crits in a row, and die out of nowhere.
It doesn’t always happen, but the fact that it happens at all can really ruin the match
for some players and it’s definitely not as healthy a form of randomness like the elemental
dragons, or even plants!
It can definitely be frustrating with crits in the game, and a lot of players are advocating
removing crit for a different mechanic, but they do have the benefit of adding variance
- which is the main reason Riot wants any form of RNG in the game at all.
Variance is a word that Riot uses a lot, and you can think of it as a scale.
At one end of the scale, you have the worst possible outcome for any particular feature
or mechanic in the game - for example, an ability being used but not getting anything
out of it.
At the other end you have the best case scenario, for example, the perfect dragon spawning for
your team to take advantage of, or landing a 5 man stun instead of just hitting 1 person.
There’s a few different ways Riot adds variance to League of Legends, one really easy example
is the use of skillshots on abilities instead of making them targeted.
Let’s say you were designing a champion, and they had pretty high damage abilities
that you needed to balance.
If you had a high damage nuke ability that was targeted, so the player only had to click
on an enemy to basically guarantee the damage, the variance would be super low and it would
be seriously powerful.
Unless the rest of that champion’s kit was really bad, the champion would be kinda overpowered.
The solution is to introduce variance - for example, turn that ability into a skillshot.
Now it’s no longer a case of point and click for a ton of damage, the player has to predict
where the enemy will be, correctly aim the ability, AND the opponent actually has the
opportunity to evade the ability to dodge the damage.
Hell, teammates could even flash in front of it now to skillfully save low HP teammates.
Instead of having an ‘always best case’ effect because it’s targeted, the ability
can now either be a powerful nuke, or a waste of mana, which balances it out nicely.
It would be kinda boring if every time you played against a champion, you were guaranteed
to get smacked around by a high damage targeted abilities, but that variance keeps things
fresh, and gives you a chance to play differently from game to game.
There’s more than one way to add variance though - and another one is, as you probably
guessed, randomness.
Having at least some form of input randomness as we discussed earlier can help keep the
game fresh for the same reason that skillshots keep the game fresh - they introduce variance,
things that force changes in your strategy if you want to be successful.
It’s all about provoking players into doing things differently, to react differently to
each game rather than just being pre-programmed to know what to do.
Imagine if in every game of League, you just played the same champion and built the exact
same items because they were the only ones available for your champion.
Instead of being able to react to the enemy team and pick up something like a Zhonya’s
against Assassins, you were stuck just having to build AP and couldn’t do anything when
you were getting targeted and instakilled.
It’s important that players have the tools they need to make decisions IN game as well
as before the game, and that’s something that variance, and to an extent randomness,
can actually introduce.
A few seasons ago there was a popular strategy to use Fiddlesticks to rush a super early
dragon, back when Dragon would give gold to your team, so a lot of players would try do
that every single game, which is super repetitive and annoying to deal with.
Elemental Drakes are actually a good solution to this, no one knows before the game which
dragon is going to spawn first, so you wouldn’t just pick a team comp that could cheese an
early dragon.
You might load into the game and see that an Infernal will spawn first and decide with
your team to take it early, or you might load in and see that it’s a Cloud Drake and not
worth your time - either way, immediately there is variance in the game.
It takes tuning to make sure the randomness isn’t too overwhelming, but the aim of it
is to keep things fresh and avoid things being repetitive.
From that perspective, a little bit of input randomness is actually really good for the
game - it makes it way more playable and gives people a reason to play more than one game
a day, or to keep playing long term, simply because you’ll never get the exact same
experience twice.
Going back to what we said about critical strikes, you could actually argue that they
add variance to auto attacks - but as Riot themselves had said, the real
question is can they be tuned to the point that the randomness isn’t influencing things
too much, or do they need to be removed in favour of an alternative form of variance
for auto-attack focused champion - and that’s probably a topic that’s often discussed
by Riot themselves!
Anyway that just about wraps everything up on randomness and variance in League of Legends,
we really hope you guys feel like you learned a bit about RNG and how Riot approaches introducing
randomness to the game - personally I feel a bit more confident in Riot now after Ghostcrawler’s
video on the subject, so hopefully they do a lot more like that in the future!
And it looks like that’s gonna be it from me, if you enjoyed the video drop a like,
subscribe if you want, thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys next time!