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A while ago, while talking to a friend about game design, I had the realization:

Players will quit over issues they see in a game, even when in actuality those are non -issues.

That's the thing, you can't ignore how a game feels to the players. In Artifact's case, it has a lot of very up front RNG, but on paper, it's balanced. It just feels unbalanced because people mainly remember when they lost because of bad RNG, not when they won because of it. One of the designers for MtG talked about it, and said that trying to fight human nature in game never works. It doesn't matter how many stats and formulas the designers have that shows that the game is balanced, if it makes players feel bad, they overwhelmingly won't like it.

I think Jeff Kaplan said something about that, maybe in a GDC conference? About how even perceived imbalance should be fixed even if the numbers show things are balanced. I think players just don’t have the words to describe what is bothering them, so its just “broken”, “unbalanced”, etc

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