Comment by cc439 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cc439 | Hacker News Reader

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This might be one of the reasons I've always tended to prefer games that trend toward or actually are simulators. It's very hard to notice a "luck" mechanism designed by a skilled and thoughtful developer but those are few and far between. The more experience one has with a game, the more apparent things like the holy "RNG Jesus" become apparent.

The greatest enjoyment I derive from games is that of accomplishment. To me, there is no greater feeling of accomplishment than placing well in an iRacing league race or having a great dogfight against a human opponent in a DCS server. I don't even need to win the race or shoot them down to derive a sense of satisfaction as the outcome is entirely determined by skill and one can always strive to improve their skills.

I've always subscribed to the line of thinking that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. Whatever "luck" one experiences in a simulation type game, whether or not it is in their favor, is still something that required skill if it was to be taken advantage of. If I skip a yellow flag pit stop and make a fuel mileage gamble, I still have to have a feel for how far I can stretch the tank and how skilled the other drivers are as if they race clean all the way to the finish I'm going to still be a lap short. Sure, my opponents might say I "got lucky" but my luck was a result of a calculated gamble rather than an artifact of a lucky roll in the game's algorithm.

I'm probably the outlier but I think there's something to be said for games that refuse to introduce artificial luck. They aren't for everyone but they deliver an experience that can't be matched any other way.

I think this is partly the reason games like Rocket League, League of Legends and Counter Strike are doing so well these days. They're just pure team-based competitive games where the only things that affect the outcome are the rules of the game, the game's physics, and the skill of the players.

There are very small elements of luck, just enough to stop the games from feeling sterile or unnatural, but nothing big enough to decide the outcome of a match without being completely overshadowed by the strategic decisions leading up to it.

This idea is covered really well in Richard Garfield's book Characteristics of Games.

The metaphor he draws here is what he refers to as the skill chain. Each link in the chain reflects the point at which the player on the lower link is unable to defeat the player on the higher link above some small percentage. The longer the chain the more skill is rewarded by the game.

However this has a downside for an online game that isn't as popular as the ones you mention, you will be unable to find interesting games without having to wait for a long time for the correct opponent to appear. And it makes matching up well against your friends less likely.

Randomness can be used as s tool by a skilled game designer to shorten the chain and allow for more player to compete with each other. It also gives the player an element outside their own weakness to blame when they lose and that can make the game more enjoyable.

So it's something pro players tend to dislike but is typically accepted as the price of having diversity of skill in the player pool. (Poker vs chess for example)

This is only somewhat true. Most shooters rely on the concept of a shot pattern - that where you place your crosshair is only statistically the center of where your shot will land.

This is actually exactly what real life shooting is like. There is RNG in the process.

What a developer CAN do is control just how tight the shot pattern is. One example is to have a wide shot pattern when the player is standing, tighter when crouched, and really tight when prone. Or use an "iron sights" mode for tighter aiming.

But in real life you can tighten your shot pattern with practice

I've just started playing CS:GO, in that you can tighten your shot pattern with practice too -in a different way. Continuous bursts spread in a predictable trend (a different trend with different weapons), shot interval feeds in to spread as a multiplier.

I've not worked out yet whether higher rank/XP and health status (HP) are also factors on shot spread and the progression of spread under continuous fire?

League of Legends originally had a lot more luck elements, but they wisely phased out those uncertainties over the first couple of seasons.

The Dark Souls (Demon's Souls) series did this very well I think. You essentially learn the physics and limitations of the game to beat it. You are put in tough situations, and only through trial and error can you learn the best way to exploit the situation. That gives you skills moving forward to use on later situations. Not much of Dark Souls comes down to luck.

http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/blueblood-sword

Could not help myself.

Most multiplayer games still have sizeable luck component, at least when considering the results of a single game, because game designers found that having an element of randomness makes the game massively addictive because it forces players to play the game for longer to get a reward, trudging through losses or mediocre results in order to finally win a victory or two and be able to go to bed happy. In League of Legends the other team might pick characters that just wreck your team's. In SC2 your opponent could blindly pick a strat that counters yours 90% of the time. And anyway in most ranked games you're matched up with people of equal skill (via ELO systems), so there's an emergent tendency to win/lose ~50% of the time. Even though the result is determined by skill, it's still basically a coin toss who wins :-)

Don't even get me started on Hearthstone.

In the XCOM games, one interesting aspect is to mitigate bad rolls and stack bonus to increase your chances to hit.

So with enough skill, you can remove most of the luck aspect from the game.

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