i really enjoy the gametype so far but it relies heavily on who gets items first. ESPECIALLY if you happen to get lucky and get an assassin team built early game, youll end up being first place for a good while. i feel that while rng should be a thing maybe everyone should be ensured the same number of items? maybe even fit the theme for the class you're trying to build? i feel the game can screw you really early if you dont get items. what do you guys think they should do about this?
The Problem
Yes, the whole problem with TFT is the unmoderated randomness.
I recognize that part of the popularity of the game is that people can blame randomness, so they don't want to get rid of it entirely.
So they can't get rid of the randomness. It gives the toddler and lazy businessman in all of us a feeling that we can win. This is part of the game's appeal:
League is almost pure skill, and TFT is the polar opposite, a game that appeals to (among others) the entitled excuse-makers and gamblers. League is chess or go, TFT is poker...just enough "skill" to feel you can credit yourself with the win, but enough randomness to blame for everything else.
But just like a little vitamin C is good for you, while mega-doses of vitamin C it appear to shorten your lifespan, so mega-doses of randomness are harmful for this game.
What they need to do is what Apple did:
Add simple self-correction algorithms that prevent extremes of randomness, correcting toward the mean.
** The Reason**
Sometimes I get five items from the first NPC rounds. But more often I get ONE item. When I get five, I'm gleeful, but it also puts me off on the game, because I am painfully aware that the next several matches will probably be one or two, and in each someone else will get 5. So I'm losing out far more than winning out.
The odds of my winning are therefore worse than Chutes and Ladders. It's more like Chutes and Ladders where one random player starts the match 80% of the way up the board. That would kill the game's popularity among children and golfers.
And those MANY other times when I get only get 1 item, I am that much more aware of it because of my rare 5 item matches.
The weight of the RNG extremes wears on me so much that I eventually go back to trying to figure out how to script an OverWatch MOBA using their Workshop, instead of playing more TFT.
In the long run, the current amount of RNG will stop me from playing altogether. Which is how I feel after the last couple of matches of NOTHING showing up once I tried to collect it. So I'm here posting, because eff if I'm gonna go pray for a reasonable outcome next time.
The Solution
But the solution is the one Apple used when people whined about Shuffle's randomness causing weird coincidences:
Of course this was actually just apophenia: People who don't understand how statistics work find false significance in purely random coincidences.
But Apple's options were either teach people too slow to use Android or Windows how logic works, or else "fix" the randomness to be less random, avoiding extremes.
And they chose the latter. Now their shuffle watches for accidental patterns and prevents them.
And that's what Riot needs to do:
Write in custom conditions that watch for extremes like a player getting too few items too often, or effing Lucian never showing up for an entire match where the player is collecting Nobles and Gunslingers, and "correct" it toward the mean (which is like the average, but fancier).
But I've run on too long.º
Footnotes:
¹ Either because The Cure recorded almost nothing but emo songs that appeal to depressed people, or simply because hearing The Cure makes any rational person want to escape the sound by ending his own life.
º I'm gonna make this its own post.
