You guys know professional poker is a thing, right?

Barkley·7/17/2019, 7:01:25 AM·5 votes·748 views

You guy know there are professional gamblers?

You know that professional hearthstone and MTG are things, right?

You know professional speed running in games that are LOADED with RNG is a thing, right?

There’s this cool thing about RNG, no matter how prevalent it is — you as a player can react to it. You can choose how you play your hand.

In all these other examples of RNG I’ve given, there’s always a handful of people at the top that STAY THERE.

If RNG was such a deciding factor in their chosen sport/profession/game that it made it “a joke” or “not competitive” then those top players would fluctuate violently — but they don’t. I’ll expect to see the same happen with ranked TFT.

Because like it or not, even with RNG — there are good players and bad players.

8 Comments

Dead Anime Dad7/17/2019, 7:11:08 AM3 votes

Okay, then there's no longer an excuse for Aram not to have ranked.

PrismalDawn7/17/2019, 7:33:45 AM2 votes

You guy know there are professional gamblers?

Gamblers rely on body language more than RNG as well as probability of certain cards popping up. Plus the amount someone bets is a good indicator of whether or not they have a good hand. A professional gambler would demolish any backyard Poker match because of this, even if the cards "are chosen at random," but statistically speaking, they are not, to a certain extent.

You know that professional hearthstone and MTG are things, right?

Decks arent that all random, there are many cards that allow you to go against your luck of draw to get the cards you need to play faster. In some cases, multiple copies of this card are allowed resulting in a -X amount of cards in your deck.

Say your deck consists of 40 cards. 3 of which allow you to gather cards faster. Those 3 cards are really 6 cards (assuming they let you grab one at a time) and it lowers your deck to 34 cards instead, increasing your chances of getting the cards you need faster. Which these are only 3 of the same copy of cards, you can have multiple cards with similar effects.

There’s this cool thing about RNG, no matter how prevalent it is — you as a player can react to it.

This literally goes against the definition of RNG.

In all these other examples of RNG I’ve given, there’s always a handful of people at the top that STAY THERE

Bad examples, because they know how to work either against or with it. Most gamblers winnings are won through making a series of low bets with bad cards and decent bets with good ones. If gamblers bet the whole pot each game they'd be out of a job.

If RNG was such a deciding factor in their chosen sport/profession/game

It's not, as I just laid out.

Because like it or not, even with RNG — there are good players and bad players.

Yes there are, but in the cases you laid out, randomness can be controlled in your favor or you can "read" people to help yourself out.

The Ecdysiast7/17/2019, 8:13:37 AM2 votes

You can't pretend not to have certain champions and items in TFT. That is the main strength of poker. The opponents can't see your hand and must react to your expressions and actions. It's not about getting the highest hand if you can make them think you have the highest hand. But even the best poker players in the world lose out if they're called on a bluff by an opponent who got a royal flush.

You don't get to make your team beforehand and have the only randomness be up to how poorly you made your deck (because any decent deck in a tabletop card game is designed to leave as little to chance as possible).

And in professional speedrunning, at the highest level things actually are decided by RNG. The person who gets the best luck on a perfect run will have a lower time than someone with the same run speed aside from the random events.

You've made zero comparisons that are actually comparable to TFT.

Let's see how the examples you're attempting to use would actually look like, if they were to be made similar to TFT:

You always show your full hand in Poker, and there's no option to fold.

You have to use random cards in Magic. And yes, there is tournament style people do that in, but to add a mechanic similar to items we'd have to also have you start with a random amount of life between 1 and 20.

Any failed random encounter adds an hour to your time, regardless of the actual length of time the encounter took.

Those are fitting comparisons to TFT for the games you used.

NTrumpWeTrust7/17/2019, 9:54:04 AM2 votes

Professional poker doesn't have a system where a player randomly gets 2 less cards for the rest of the game. Imagine playing Hearthstone, and half your deck disappeared because rng randomly decides how many cards you get. That's what this game is. The champion rng is fine, because it's quite literally a card game in that respect, but having a system where there's a chance you have no access to a system (items) which makes the game playable, is absolutely trash. Not sure why this is such a hard concept to grasp. Put a cap on the max items someone can get and guarantee at least 1 drop every pve round. Let us play the fucking game.

SEKAI7/17/2019, 10:07:07 AM2 votes

You know Hearthstone's competitive scene is the biggest mistake in the history of humankind next to anime?

I'm joking ofc, but you get the point. And yes, Hearthstone's competitive scene is way bigger of a mistake than anime.

Hearthstone's RNG is absolutely bunkers (think Unstable Portal being the prime example), and its competitive scene can only be described as comical; comically farcical, I mean. It's even more so since the game also fundamentally requires an EXTREME commitment both time and money to really get anywhere in the competitive given its prerequisite of having all the cards to be relevant (which are printed with the speed of how US prints bank notes).

Sire Hippington7/17/2019, 1:06:58 PM1 votes

Those are poor examples and not directly compareable. The reason for that is simple: There is a big difference in the amount of RNG-systems involved, the impace of it, and the amount of options to interact/react on it.

Lats look at some examples:

Poker(Texas hold 'em): you basically have two RNG systems, the hand you are dealt and the cummunity cards. your hand is unknown to others, so you can bluff and this is basically the core part of poker, it's less about the cards but more about psychology. Sure, it helps to know probabillities to asses how likely it is for someone to beat your hand, but it's just as much if not more about reading your opponents and their body language. This is enabled by face down hands and analog play with direct contact between the palyers. It's not about what each player has, but about what each one MIGHT have. And your options to interact with it is to fold, pass or raise. Another imortant factor is that the RNG fully resets after each round, it doesn't matter what cards were dealth in the round befor, each round is fully independent, reduceing the impact of RNG in a single round. You got bad RNG? just fold and cut your losses.
MTG: The only RNG(exept for very few card effects) is the start hand and the cards you draw each round, and with mulligan there even is a mechanic to mitigate the start hand RNG, while building your deck properly and haveing tutor(search) cards reduce the RNG impact aswell, so you can manipulate the RNG. You also have incredible much options to play(what cards if any at all, what targets, who attack, who blocks, what effects to use and so on, and since you don't know your opponents hand(usually) and often not even their deck, there also is the psychological factor and the potential for bluffs. Unlike poker, the cards stay on hand/on the field for etendt periods(sometiems even till the game ends) and thus the imapct of the Early RNG carries on the entier game, which usuallly gets a bit mitigated by playing best of 3 matches.
Heathstone: Basically MTG, but with an huge extra layer of RNG on MANY card effects(main reason I prefer MTG by far), and less psychology as it's online so you can't see your opponents face to read expressions.

In TFT we have:

RNG elements
First Shared draft it's random what pieces are in direct reach for you, sometimes you have a strong item/champ combo directly in fron't, sometimes it's the Negatron braum...though that could be fixed by proer balanceing
Items and champs in shared drafts
your personal drafts
The amount of items from creeps
What items those are
Many of the in fight effects like crit, dodge and glacial
All but the in-fight RNG do carry on till the game is over, if you have less/worse items than someone else early on, that most likely stays that way till the end, especially since the changes that make low/no items in later round less likely. If i have less items then some one else past krugs, that will not change till the game is over.
Interactions:
what champs we take from the draft(if any)
how much gold we spent on xp, which with the above leads to manageing our gold overall
what items we grab from the shared draft(lets be real, 90% of the time you pick the item and not the champ that carries it)
whom we give what items
how we place them on the field

So comapred to the card game examples, you have no option to bluff, you have MUCH more layers of RNG, each of the interactions have low impact compared to the RNG. What champions we take from the draft is heavily influenced by what we get to choose from, what items we give whom depends mostly on what items and champs we get, so strategie mostly comes down to menaging your gold and a bit about setup building. Tactical decisiionmakeing would be adjusting hte placement of your team, but that only is a relevant decsion IF you know what your up against, which till it's only 2 or 3 players left isn't the case. And unlike Tradeingcardgames, you have no deckbuilding to manipulate the RNG and no mechanics like mulligan to reduce the RNG impact on the oppening hand.

If you'd translate TFT in it's current state into a Tradeingcard game, you'd have heathstone(lots of infight RNG effects) with a random sizestart hand(how much items you get from the first creep waves), and between 1 and 3 start mana(reflecting the power of the first units you draft) and on top of that you don't built your own deck, but both players use the same class with the same deck which isn't any optimized to mitigate RNG. In hearstone, you usually have 15 different cards X2 in your deck, so after drawing half your deck you can make a good guess on how likely it is to draw a specific card. In TFT, you have over forty different cards with ~half of them beeing stacks of over 30, so even with it beeing a shared deck between 8 players, the chances to get a specific piece stay really low all game long. All you can say is that the chance to NOT get a certain piece is quite high especally on high tier pieces. If some one has a lvl 2 yasuo, you'r chances of getting a lvl 2 yasuo yourself are pretty damn low. Doesn't mean you changes to get yasuo are 'high' if no one else has one, just not as close to zero as in the other case.

in terms of texas hold'em, it would be with randomly between 0 and 4 cards as a hand, and you can't fold or bet but always pass, and instead of haveing the comunity cards count for all, it would be N+2 cards(N is the number of playeers) and each player would grab one of them, and after X rounds, each player chooses 5 cards from his hand and goes all in.

TFT has alot of potential, but right now you have to little options to properly and impactfully react on the RNG, and it's just WAAAAAY to much layers of RNG with basucally no atempts on mitigation for any of them.

Kanzler7/17/2019, 1:12:48 PM1 votes

In your examples, yes, you can play around it. Poker has bluffs, in Hearthstone you build your own decks so you know what's there. You have a modicum of control.

This is not the case in TFT, If you get bad RNG in TFT, you will lose, no matter how well you adapt. You cannot "outplay" the guy with 2 level 2 champs and a built item after just the minion round if you simply didn't get anywhere near the same item or champ drops.

How do you get back into the game while losing early? Hope you get lucky later. That's it. There isn't much "outplay" you can do besides try to build a comp.