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General: Roll the Bones
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In this week's Player Perspectives column, MMORPG.com writer Jaime Skelton takes on the mythical and unseen beast present in every MMO: The nefarious RNG. Yes, the Random Number Generator has been the bane of many players' existence and Jaime has a lot to say about RNG. Read Player Perspectives and then add yours on our forum.
Ultimately, RNG determines all our combat actions (with rare exception, particularly with action MMOs). The roll of invisible, virtual dice determines whether we hit or miss, whether our attacks will be deflected or resisted, and of course, whether or not we'll get the loot we most desire. Random number generators ensure that we have some cap on our personal skill, that we must balance our stats appropriately to account for chance as best as possible, to take control out of the player's hands. It also serves as one of the most frustrating elements of any game.
Read more Player Perspectives: Roll the Bones.
Comments
Man, if seeing pictures of those dice don't bring back fond memories. lol, on the "cursed dice" comment.
I been in RPGs since the mid 80's. I still remember who TSR is and what they created. The trick to "realistic" RNG is understanding bell curves and how they relate to probability vs. how difficult you want something to be. I imagine the same principle would apply to MMOs.
To your point, it's about balance; effort v. reward. I played WoW for almost 5 years, and I think this is one area they could improve on. I can't tell you how many attempts I made at the Mechanar for the Sun Eater (tank sword), or how many runs in Kara I was on and the King's Defender (also tank sword) never dropped. I tanked with the Decapitator as my weapon for all of BC, lol. Believe me, it wasn't from lack of effort.
Find a way to balance the effort v. reward and drop the gear relevant to the raid/ party and I would be a happier player.
Ing the Conqueror
I can remember in the early days of Wow when you spent a hour going through a dungeon only to have a shaman breast piece drop from the final boss which of course was useless to anyone in the group. It is all how the developer uses the random number, some don't take the time to make it appropriate to the party involved.
We felt the same way about the Paladin plate gear in my raids. It was so useless to us. We even began to question why they even allowed it to drop.
Good thing about being the DM in a tabletop RPG is that, sometimes, you can fake dice results. Like when you want the NPC to do -something- but the dice screws you over with a 1.
Anyway, all this talk about RNG reminded me of back in WoW, when I played it during BC, that even though I ran the place every week, the Karazhan bow only dropped for me a week before WotLK. Naturally, by then I already had better; but still, I was pretty pissed to only see it then.
An item should have value to everyone in the party, either for it's properties, its components or (and this will make WOW raiders scream bloody murder) for its resale value. When an item has value to everyone, there's less chance of argument over who is 'entitled' to the item based on a button they pressed at character creation or by arbitrary restrictions imposed by class.
Personally, I find gear-centric design to be the greatest offender when it comes to random loot drops, followed only by the willingness of players to actually consider raid grinding for rare drops to be 'endgame content.'
If individual pieces of hard-to-obtain gear didn't make or break one's ability to compete (or in the case of WOW, even be allowed in certain raid groups) then random rolls wouldn't result in such a disappointment as the items would be of more use and greater value to the playerbase.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I absolutely agree. Items should have value to everyone, even if it's components or resale value.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
It's interesting to see RNG described as something you add to the world to take control away from players ... I tend to look at it from the flip side. To me, RNG is the elemental unknown you start with, the sum of all the mysteries about the past, present and future. As a game develops you are slowly chipping away at RNG by adding layers of puzzles and simulations.
When two warriors face each other, which one will be left standing? What's in the box? What crop should I plant? These are your unknowns. These are things that were never in the player's control to begin with. What the game does is start to give you some control, take away some of the randomness. By taking the right actions you can win the fight. By looking in the right place, you can find the drempt-of treasure. By understanding the ecology and economy, you can pick a better crop to plant.
But no matter how carefully you model your universe, there will always be deeper layers of detail and interaction you could have added. At some point, you simply stop and say "this is as far as we are going for now" and hand the rest back to RNG.
RNG is the bane of my existence, even back in pen and paper role playing when I was younger... I still hated rolling. where no matter what you had a 1 in 20 chance to fail...
In EQ2 we have killed Munzok nearly 100 times and were the first and only guild on our server to kill him during the expansion he was from. Yet we have NEVER had the healer ring off him. Even to this day we try to make time to do the zone once a week and the ring still doesn't drop. Yet we hear other guilds have had it so many times on their servers that they mute it (break it down for raws pretty much.. for those that don't play EQ2).
Good article I hope the RNG used in modern MMOs continues to decline to the point that random can become fun again, rather than something so frustrating it makes people want to quit the game they enjoy.
In EQ2 I have watched items drop that fit nobody in group, the problem so many classes. Certian things drop in certain zones.
I just roll greed unless its for the toon I am on at that time.
I have seen pallies roll on heater items, I saw rangers roll on tank items. All of them going well I have an alt.
I dont mind a greed role but not a need role if your doing it for an alt.
From a loot perspective, the issue is lack of content. In order to make sure the game developers don't have to actually work too hard to create content, they create raid content where each boss drops one or two items from a table of 20-30 items at each kill. This guarantees that a raid of 10 or 25 people will have to keep coming back over and over and over in order to get the drops they really want.
If we went back to tabletop days, you heard a rumor of a nasty monster that had a particular treasure, you went on a quest to find that monster and slay it for it's one singular item, and possibly an unforseen bonus item or two along the way. This would require an encounter for each piece of armor for each class at that level. The devs will never stand for creating that much content.
(looks around sheepishly, then posts what he meant to say below.)
Ing the Conqueror
Well said.
Ing the Conqueror
Honestly I really like the RND of any event in games. How boring is it when you expect to be handed an item. Such as already knowing what you are receiving for your birthday or Christmas. One of my most memorable moments in gaming was back in EQ, plane of fear. A whip dropped for the bard epic off of some trash mob. Lo' and behold I was the only bard on the raid. I couldn't stop giggling for an hour! It was as if I was walking down the street and saw a $100 bill laying on the ground with no strings attached. It was one of those rare RND items that you don't really expect to ever get but keep hoping each time you do.
To expand further on it's roll (pun intended) in raids or instances, most games seem to have RND backward. Ideally everyone that puts in the time and effort to clear a dungeon should earn a reward. But most games randomly pick a few items to drop, and the raid hopes someone present can use it. It might be a coders nightmare to figure out what each player deserves for each loot drop based on performace, attendance, current gear, etc. But there has to be a more efficient and exciting way to distribute loot. Balance reward for work and add that element of suprise. IMO the best current system is when the static boss drops static loot with the occasional rare item and then RND useful trash mob drops. What some games do is require you to kill a boss x number of times to complete an item, say looting 10 ores to forge a sword. Sometimes a boss may drop a wand that's pretty good for the level of the area. Then along the way through the instance the raid picks up items that are only found in that dungeon, say extra healing potions or crafting items.
Reminds me of the first time I played DnD. I couldn't seem to roll anything but 1s. Fumble! Fumble! Saving throw! Oooo, sorry, Madi, you're dead. Want to roll another character? We'll let you.
Nah, I think I'll go over here by myself for a bit.
My bad luck didn't hold, and eventually I stopped flinching every time someone handed me a 20 sided, but still...
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
I agree with some aspects of this, but I don't enjoy the feeling of relying on chance in order to receive a decent item. The balance I like is when there is a decent reward for doing x (eg quest reward for killing the boss) with a few random pieces added in the mix which aren't essential to progress through the game. So, equipment that you need to progress would be available as quest rewards/crafted items, and loot which relied on the RNG system would be optional extras. That would be my ideal model.
It's incredibly satisfying to complete an instance or such with really good teamwork, and it feels quite deflating if, at the end of the run, the focus shifts to who (if anyone) will receive the much-needed item x in the loot roll. The focus then shifts from a shared feeling of cameraderie, to an edginess as people begin to argue about who has need rolled inappropriately.
I'd like the instance to end on a feeling of satisfaction. Actually, once I realised about this game mechanic, I stopped going to dungeons specifically to get a particular drop and tried to get the item another way, or do without, because it spoiled the whole atmosphere for me given that the focus became on the end-result rather than on the experience of an enjoyable joint enterprise.
Thumbs down on RNG. Its a problem looking for a solution.
Two things: Can't help but to disagree and what's the alternative. Anyone can write a post and bitch about something, but what's the alternative?
I like the fact there is randomness in games. Being an tabletop player, I understand its necessity. Not being a programmer, I don't fully understand the how's and why's of it in an mmo. But, one thing is for certain - players need surprises. To feel heroic, sometimes the little hobbit has to have a chance to beat hurt Shelob and scare it away. Sometimes, you need your cocky fighter to take a bashing from a "mere" wolf. To me, that's half the fun.
I thought LotRO did a great job of tackling this problem with the Rift. Each boss dropped a token that could be turned in to class specific barterers in order to get the next item of a set. Players knew that Boss X would drop a boot token, Boss Y would drop a chestpiece token, and so on. There was still an element of randomness in that the bosses could drop more than one token, and they would drop other rare loot besides. As a result, it was rare to walk into the raid and feel like you accomplished nothing. It also appeared to be well balanced -- it was easy enough for pugs to enter the raid, but they had little hope dowing more than a few bosses. Each boss was fun to fight, and the last few bosses even seemed to provide a satisfying challenge to experienced guilds.
This was a far cry from my WoW tier 0 experience. Sure, I got my leggings from the Baron on the first run. My cap was the next to drop... after the 48th run in Scholomance. By the time I got my chestpiece to drop from Drak, the hatchlings were calling me "Dad" (well over a hundred completed runs). And I can tell you my luck was far from the worst.
I don't think anyone wants to do away with the randomness completely. Unfortunately I know many of the programmers have never taken a statistics class and don't understand the nuances, and thus fail to properly implement the "randomness" that they hope to achieve. This brings to mind the Monty Hall problem.
This is a VERY interesting topic,one i have read about several times when playing FFXI.
This is one of the things that separates FFXI from the rest.FFXI does not use normal RNG,it uses a curved mathematical formula with set parameters.There has also been some interesting discussion on the RNG,as it in reality does not operate like a normal dice roll.I am not the math wizard or enough of a PC wizard to explain why it isn't but there is articles on the topic out there.
Sorry i am a bit tired/lazy right now or i would dig up long lost FFXI discusion on this very topic to aid the discussion along,maybe i'll look for them later on
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Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
same thing just different type of dice bro.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Dice rolling is skill, RNG is not >.<!
LOLz
I had a player from a table top session shake and throw a d4 into the air and it landed on it's point! I swear this to be a true story. 10 other players could back this up if I were still in contact with them. The old crystal dice d4s were flatened at the tips. When this d4 stuck the landing, it was on it's tip!
If it were skill, he could do it again. =P
BTW, I resisted the urge to flee the table in fear in of what was an obvious intervention of the supernatural (never in my 20+ years of table top have I ever seen that happen before nor repeated after). Rather I granted the PC an automatic death blow over his oponent. I will never forget that roll, haha.
Ing the Conqueror
Wow. I can't believe anyone could write, let alone publish, such a meaningless pile of fluff journalism.
A random number generator generates random numbers. It's like rolling a die. End of story. Stop trying to personify it. Instead of complaining about the random number generator that is just doing it's job, maybe you should look at the algorithms built on top of it that weight the decisions, or even the possible decisions themselves.
Luck is the excitement of bad math.
Ever play poker? How much fun would it be if you played with an unshuffled deck?
I believe it's called chess.
Quite a fine column, but I think one thing worth mentioning went unmentioned, the aspect of MMOs where RNG is often your greatest enemy: PvP. Could've taken a look into that. Anyway, a nice article.