On November 11 2014 10:27 MarcoBrei wrote: I don't get this guys complaining about Ragnaros RNG. You can play around it, save a removal for big units or fill the board with small minions. It's not because in some games you get very unlucky that the RNG is bad. You should analyze the outcome of several games together. That's way different from "Battlecry: give your other minions windfury, taunt or divine shield (at random)". What's the point of such card?
Rag will often 50/50 on the turn it is played and the game is decided on a coin flip. -> bad RNG where there is nothing you can do to win because it is a very large swing either way.
The battlecry will give you an advantaged depending on how it rolls out and how your adjust your strategy once you cast it. -> good RNG because you get control after the random effect and your strategy depends heavily on what happens and you are in control of how the game flows from there.
You start your game decisions just when Ragnaros enters the field? When I said you can play around it, I'm saying that you can be already prepared to it when it is played. Instead of using a Hex in a Black Night save it to Ragnaros. If you are at 8 health and there is one minion on the field, the game is 50/50, of course, but you could had avoided this situation before. The random battlecry I mentioned is bad RNG because it is not that reliable to fit in some strategy of a deck, this card just exists to create "awesome" situations, but not in a solid strategy to win. About your argument of getting control after the random effect, what you would think about a spell that reads: "Fill the both sides of the board with random minions". Adapting to the outcome of that is strongly related to skill? Is this a good RNG?
The turn rag hits the board it does 8 damage to something. Lets say you are fighting against someone else's rag, if your rag hits his, you win, if not you lose. There is nothing you can do otherwise. Rag is just going to 50/50 this shot. Everything else is prayer. Even if you have removal, its still a 50/50 on it. If your rag does get hexed your Ysera or Cairne does not. If your rag hits, you are so far ahead of the game it doesn't matter as long as your opponent doesn't get as lucky in some way. You have no control over what your rag hits so in that 1 play, you are relying on a 50/50 to win a game.
The other point is exactly it, you are given things to work with and your skill depends heavily on how you make use of it. To be in a situation with all these different things will give good players a chance to test their problem solving much more than praying for the 50/50.
@Awesomecalypse, Just wanted to say that i liked your input here. There's shit tons to talk about, but its probably best saved until the expansion is actually released. Anyway, just wanted to say that since the HS community basically likes nothing better than to crap on and disagree with every other persons input (or say nothing at all) that it would be worth it to say that for once, someone in the community agrees with you and appreciates your input and I think you made a good point. toodloo!
On November 11 2014 10:27 MarcoBrei wrote: I don't get this guys complaining about Ragnaros RNG. You can play around it, save a removal for big units or fill the board with small minions. It's not because in some games you get very unlucky that the RNG is bad. You should analyze the outcome of several games together. That's way different from "Battlecry: give your other minions windfury, taunt or divine shield (at random)". What's the point of such card?
Rag will often 50/50 on the turn it is played and the game is decided on a coin flip. -> bad RNG where there is nothing you can do to win because it is a very large swing either way.
The battlecry will give you an advantaged depending on how it rolls out and how your adjust your strategy once you cast it. -> good RNG because you get control after the random effect and your strategy depends heavily on what happens and you are in control of how the game flows from there.
You start your game decisions just when Ragnaros enters the field? When I said you can play around it, I'm saying that you can be already prepared to it when it is played. Instead of using a Hex in a Black Night save it to Ragnaros. If you are at 8 health and there is one minion on the field, the game is 50/50, of course, but you could had avoided this situation before. The random battlecry I mentioned is bad RNG because it is not that reliable to fit in some strategy of a deck, this card just exists to create "awesome" situations, but not in a solid strategy to win. About your argument of getting control after the random effect, what you would think about a spell that reads: "Fill the both sides of the board with random minions". Adapting to the outcome of that is strongly related to skill? Is this a good RNG?
The turn rag hits the board it does 8 damage to something. Lets say you are fighting against someone else's rag, if your rag hits his, you win, if not you lose. There is nothing you can do otherwise. Rag is just going to 50/50 this shot. Everything else is prayer. Even if you have removal, its still a 50/50 on it. If your rag does get hexed your Ysera or Cairne does not. If your rag hits, you are so far ahead of the game it doesn't matter as long as your opponent doesn't get as lucky in some way. You have no control over what your rag hits so in that 1 play, you are relying on a 50/50 to win a game.
The other point is exactly it, you are given things to work with and your skill depends heavily on how you make use of it. To be in a situation with all these different things will give good players a chance to test their problem solving much more than praying for the 50/50.
This is exactly right. What makes Rag so incredibly bad as far as these cards are concerned is that his effect is powerful enough to end games on its own and is totally random as to whether it does that or does nothing. He's basically a Pyroblast every turn attached to an 8/8. That's crazy good. He can finish off your opponent sometimes, or else destroy some gigantic minion and get a 2-for-1 or better off of that. But, if you flip wrong, he can be incredibly weak and only kill little minions before getting offed by some removal at far below mana cost (or worse, ignored while they smack down your face and end the game). He's a worse offender than Mad Bomber because of that, because although unlucky Mad Bomber rolls can 2-for-1 or worse yourself, they won't outright end the game. Mad Bomber is still an unpleasant card, though, for mostly the same reasons stated above. You shouldn't have to hold onto cards in hand thinking about whether you'll get unlucky and they'll outright lose you the game should you play them.
@Awesomecalypse, Just wanted to say that i liked your input here. There's shit tons to talk about, but its probably best saved until the expansion is actually released. Anyway, just wanted to say that since the HS community basically likes nothing better than to crap on and disagree with every other persons input (or say nothing at all) that it would be worth it to say that for once, someone in the community agrees with you and appreciates your input and I think you made a good point. toodloo!
Thanks! I agree that sometimes the community can get too bogged down in negativity, though I actually think that HS is a bit better than most other games in this regard.
I dont know if I like the poker and hearthstone comparison at the beginning.
In Poker(holdem) you can control your RNG.
In hearthstone you cant.
If I get a 7-2 I muck it, new hand new game next hand.
In hearthstone if you dont like your starting 4 cards, you muck it and then still have the chance of bad RNG after the muck, which forces you then to play the entire game with that hand. Now thats the beginning game RNG.
In-game RNG, and snowballing RNG is what makes this game frustrating. Simple example.
Board: you have a, Leper Gnome vs Knife Juggler. You opponent lays down a minion. This 50% that is about to happen will change the ENTIRE game. Your 2/1 has the ability to trade with the 3/2 next turn and therefore reduce 3+ damage.
I dunno more RNG cards, might make the game even more volatile than it was before. When I play Hearthstone, I feel like a gambler a lot of the time(repeating in the my head please no, please no)
When I play poker, I try my best to play AROUND the RNG, rather than playing WITH the RNG in Hearthstone. I think thats a pretty big difference
assuming you're talking about tournament poker since this would be categorically wrong about cash game poker. the way you 'control rng' in poker isn't by folding bad hands or pf selection or anything like that - its just about playing better than other people and chipping up so that when you have to take a coinflip, you'll have accrued enough chips so that if you lose you wont be out (or that if you win the power of your position is compounded and you can continue pushing small edges aggressively). there's also icm stuff at pay jumps but im pretty sure you didn't mean that either.
i think most of what brode said about comparing hs to poker is right. like poker, hearthstone is a skill game with a large variance component. all card games innately have variance (order of when you draw what). variance is compounded in hs because there are certain cards that, once drawn, can still provide a wide variety of outcomes ranging from situationally worst to situationally best. like poker, one of the edges comes both from knowing the appropriate time (or if you even have to) use said card, and hopefully having earned a big enough lead to the point that you'll still be in the game if you lose the coin flip (or to have given yourself an 80/20 through playing well where other people up to that point would have to be taking a 50/50).
hearthstone has a lot of variance. what that means for tournaments, if it is anything like poker, is that winning tournaments just isnt as impressive as it is in other competitive games. its impressive to be sure, and watching tournament hearthstone for me is exciting as i have a lot of people i like to route for, but anyone can beat anyone on any given day. nobody in poker really thinks that the person who wins the WSOP main event every year is the best player in the world.
i also agree that cards with random effects do produce new situations which better people will find better solutions to more often. having both played and coached a lot of poker, i always felt like the hallmark of a strong poker player was the ability to have never been in a specific spot before and to break down all the individual components quickly and find the best solution.
i think the devs have been pretty candid that this was part of their game design from the start and that the game will continue to go this way. to that point, the discussion of good rng vs bad rng is pretty important as far as the future of this game goes and will hopefully keep some serious offenders of 'bad rng' in check. i dont really want to weigh into which cards fall into which categories though.
the tldr of this all is that at the end of the day, hs is a skill game with an unapollogetically high amount of variance. just gotta buckle up for the swings
On November 11 2014 06:42 Eggi wrote: I dont know if I like the poker and hearthstone comparison at the beginning.
In Poker(holdem) you can control your RNG.
In hearthstone you cant.
If I get a 7-2 I muck it, new hand new game next hand.
In hearthstone if you dont like your starting 4 cards, you muck it and then still have the chance of bad RNG after the muck, which forces you then to play the entire game with that hand. Now thats the beginning game RNG.
In-game RNG, and snowballing RNG is what makes this game frustrating. Simple example.
Board: you have a, Leper Gnome vs Knife Juggler. You opponent lays down a minion. This 50% that is about to happen will change the ENTIRE game. Your 2/1 has the ability to trade with the 3/2 next turn and therefore reduce 3+ damage.
I dunno more RNG cards, might make the game even more volatile than it was before. When I play Hearthstone, I feel like a gambler a lot of the time(repeating in the my head please no, please no)
When I play poker, I try my best to play AROUND the RNG, rather than playing WITH the RNG in Hearthstone. I think thats a pretty big difference
Eggi, not a great example.
I am a semiprofessional cash game player. Of course you muck 2-7 off. However, if you're playing 8 handed on the button, utg raises 4x, and you're in a late position and see 3 people flat, depending on the characteristics of the table of course, you can play suited connectors, which in my estimation is playing with the RNG. You play the percentages. Holdem, like many other games, is not separable from RNG.
Randomness is what allows bad players to win. If there is less randomness, players who make mistakes will win less often. Poker is so popular because bad players can still win a significant percentage of the time. This allows those players to convince themselves they are better than they are. This is why people play poker even though they lose money. Without losing players, poker wouldn't be worth playing.
In Hearthstone, randomness can serve the same role.
With respect to the specific discussion I commonly see on this subject, I find it highly amusing that people don't acknowledge how randomness already plays a huge role in HearthStone. Sure, which minion Rag hits is random, but so too is whether you draw Rag on turn 1 or turn 8. Randomness is a large part of Hearthstone - accounting for that randomness is part of the skill in HearthStone. Taking the randomness out entirely makes the game easier.
On November 11 2014 05:19 MarcoBrei wrote: How hard can it be to understand that some limited RNG enhances the game, but a lot of RNG is just frustrating? This argument comparing "no RNG at all" against "some RNG" to conclude that "the more RNG the better" is immensely dumb.
There are card games with limited RNG.
You can find them on Google somewhere.
Why do people that play HS play it instead of those boring games?
There is some strategy to dealing with a situation in which webspinner gives you minion X instead of Y.
There is no skill involved in a Ragnaros coinflip winning the game, or a Deathlord summoning Ysera on turn 3. A lot of major tournament games were decided PURELY through Rag RNG. That's the bad kind of RNG.
Blizzard is making the mistake of releasing completely broken and overpowered cards, and then "balancing" them by adding RNG, which doesn't work at all.
And whats skilled about a ranom hitting a nut flush out on the turn and the river? Nothing, but Poker damn sure is a super popular game.
It has variance in it, get over it or play a game with none.
Or a game like Magic or YGO where all the top players cheat
What do you mean by that? I don't know anything about Yu-Gioh, but Magic players who cheat get caught and banned. And with all of the the top matches being recorded now, they will get caught. Pretty offensive to label the entire pro magic scene cheats dude.
On November 11 2014 05:05 awesomoecalypse wrote: He points to the example of Chess as how too little randomness hurts a game. Chess has no randomness at all, meaning games can play out identically to each other if players simply make the same series of optimal moves throughout the early game, and as a result Chess has essentially become a game of memorizing shitloads of openings (a problem which pushed the famous chess master Bobby Fischer to actually propose a version of chess which would randomize the positions of pieces)--at the highest levels it goes beyond that, but for the vast majority of players the number one thing they can do to improve their play is memorize openings and positions.
Hi, I've played chess for over 20 years.
To quote Brode, who did seem to know what he was talking about, "At the very highest levels of play, Chess is often about memorization." What Brode didn't say is that the "best" moves that are memorized actually branch at several points into alternatives that are considered to be of similar quality. That means that a top player picks and chooses various sets of moves to play, as their own judgement of which is the better guides their decisions. If that judgement and effort in pre-game analysis is stronger than their opponent's, it leads to an advantage in the game. Consider also that if you can predict your opponent's choices, you can more easily analyze the relevant moves before the game. Almost all top players try to be "moving targets" in this sense. You could say it's like picking a class and deck in Hearthstone, except that the decision is made gradually and with responsive awareness of your opponent's choices. At the highest levels of play, that is to say roughly the top 0.02% of players, these choices are likely to be similar and so there is a perception that no thought goes into it at all. Yet weaker players who copy these decisions find much less success because either the knowledge will shift (like a metagame), new moves might be discovered or old ones revolutionized, and even barring that, the player must understand all the reasons for a given move or else fail to respond correctly to their opponent's replies. But I digress...
In no way does memorization have anything to do with the quality of play of the vast majority of chess players. Indeed, there's more to chess for the top players than memorization, but that's where it is most and not least relevant. For at least 95% of players, memorization is one of the most useless and overestimated methods to improve their play; often cited as an excuse by weak players as the reason they lose games. Once you reach the top 5% of rated players, memorization begins to be a serious factor in success. It's fairly analogous to the RNG whines people constantly make about this game. Please correct the OP accordingly.
For those interested, the World Chess Championship has begun and continues until Nov. 26th. The current WC is Magnus Carlsen, 23, known for his refusal to play the memory game by avoiding the most popular variations. The challenger is ex-WC Viswanathan Anand, 44, comparatively known for his strong team of Grandmasters that help him prepare openings for games. The score is tied after 3 games.
On November 11 2014 06:42 Eggi wrote: I dont know if I like the poker and hearthstone comparison at the beginning.
In Poker(holdem) you can control your RNG.
In hearthstone you cant.
If I get a 7-2 I muck it, new hand new game next hand.
In hearthstone if you dont like your starting 4 cards, you muck it and then still have the chance of bad RNG after the muck, which forces you then to play the entire game with that hand. Now thats the beginning game RNG.
In-game RNG, and snowballing RNG is what makes this game frustrating. Simple example.
Board: you have a, Leper Gnome vs Knife Juggler. You opponent lays down a minion. This 50% that is about to happen will change the ENTIRE game. Your 2/1 has the ability to trade with the 3/2 next turn and therefore reduce 3+ damage.
I dunno more RNG cards, might make the game even more volatile than it was before. When I play Hearthstone, I feel like a gambler a lot of the time(repeating in the my head please no, please no)
When I play poker, I try my best to play AROUND the RNG, rather than playing WITH the RNG in Hearthstone. I think thats a pretty big difference
I heard his dumb argument before. You can't compare a competitive game to a non-competitive one(a cash game).
If you are going to compare HS with Poker, compare it to tournament play which has an extremely high amount of variance.
You keep "mucking" 7-2 over and over you're getting blinded off and are super far behind. Same deal as HS...you get a bad mulligan you are far behind. The difference is poker is extremely, extremely volatile and Hearthstone isn't.
If you get super far ahead you are probably staying ahead barring shenanigans where as in poker that lead can disappear extemely quickly and more brutally than any game in existence.
On November 12 2014 16:39 Zampano wrote: What do you mean by that? I don't know anything about Yu-Gioh, but Magic players who cheat get caught and banned. And with all of the the top matches being recorded now, they will get caught. Pretty offensive to label the entire pro magic scene cheats dude.
I got out of the TCG scene years ago but the entire scene was littered to the brim with slight of hand artists and "stackers".
The first thing they teach you when you become a major pro is "stacking".
This is basically manipulating the deck so that you move certain cards to your opening hand.
Especially in YGO where the game was completely broken and certain starting combinations of cards would literally nearly instantly win you the game, major tournaments were won entirely with this tactic.
Some small amount of RNG can enhance the game, but to claim that RNG improves skill and makes the game a lot more enjoyable is absurd.
Hearthstone is already 50% luck, 30% card build, 20% skill. Adding a ton more RNG and luck into the game will skew it even more from skill and even card build and into luck territory.
They should be focusing on removing RNG and not adding tons more.
On November 12 2014 17:14 BillGates wrote: Some small amount of RNG can enhance the game, but to claim that RNG improves skill and makes the game a lot more enjoyable is absurd.
Hearthstone is already 50% luck, 30% card build, 20% skill. Adding a ton more RNG and luck into the game will skew it even more from skill and even card build and into luck territory.
They should be focusing on removing RNG and not adding tons more.
On November 12 2014 17:14 BillGates wrote: Some small amount of RNG can enhance the game, but to claim that RNG improves skill and makes the game a lot more enjoyable is absurd.
Hearthstone is already 50% luck, 30% card build, 20% skill. Adding a ton more RNG and luck into the game will skew it even more from skill and even card build and into luck territory.
They should be focusing on removing RNG and not adding tons more.
EPT
