The Solution to the Teamfight Tactics RNG Debate
The Problem
People are correct that a bit problem with TFT is the extremes of randomness. But the solution isn't to eliminate, or even appear to reduce, the randomness, because that's part of what makes the game successful.
Part of the popularity of the game is that people can blame randomness for losses and ignore it for wins. Riot obviously knows this, so they built it in on purpose.
- Essentially, the game is like Chutes and Ladders or Candyland is for a little child: There's so much randomness that "anyone can win", no matter how bad they are. This is similar to golf for an adult, where even Tiger Woods at his peak could never get a hole in one on purpose. So feeble white collar types can play golf and count on having an occasional "good day" and ignoring that it was luck, while blaming the far more common "bad day" on random factors.
So Riot 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 of Legends is almost pure skill outside of pickup matchmaking, and TFT is the polar opposite, a game that appeals to (among others) the entitled excuse-makers and gamblers. League is chess or go; is winning almost purely up to you and your opponent, while TFT is poker; just enough "skill" to feel you can credit yourself with the win, but enough randomness to blame for everything else. And poker is way more popular than chess.
But just like a little vitamin C is good for you, while mega-doses of vitamin C 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 quietly prevent extremes of randomness, correcting toward the mean.¹
** 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 try again right away and pray for a reasonable outcome. And the time it takes for me to forget and go back is growing each with incident.
The Solution
But there is a simple fix, the one Apple used when people whined about Shuffle's randomness causing weird coincidences:
- Users who don't understand statistics were starting to come up with conspiracy theories that shuffle was sending them weird messages, like playing The Cure three times in a row to tell them to commit suicide.²
Of course this was actually just apophenia: People who don't understand how statistics work find false significance in purely random coincidences. That's right kiddies, Hearthstone isn't maliciously making your net deck work worse than average, nor sending you secret message with your draw pattern, it's a coincidence intersecting with your apophenia.
But Apple's options were either teach logic to people too mentally lazy to use Android or Windows, 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, even though this actually makes it less random.
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.¹
Footnotes:
¹ The "mean" is like the average, but fancy.
² 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.
