RNG – Why Random *Isn’t* Fun

I have always made comments that the Random Number Generator (RNG) hates me. I love DKP systems as they mean I don’t have to rely on the RNG to get items I need and want. This brings me to the first “Bad Designer – No Twinkie!” moment I had when playing a game like World of Warcraft. Random is not fun.

You and four other players have valiantly battled to the end of a dungeon and slain the evil dude. And he drops… a rather nice piece of plate gear… for the three clothies, one leather, and one mail wearer. It’s like getting a birthday cake with that nasty red icing. Or even worse, your grandmother gets the sugar free variety. Yuck. It is a random loot table with drop percentages that are not weighted or adjusted in any way.

What does it matter? You can run the dungeon again. Well not always. In WoW the best gear drops from raids that have 1 week lock outs. I have on more than one occasion watched a player run the same raid every week for *months* waiting for a single item to drop. It is like rooting for the underdog sports team. After time it becomes the entire guild’s crusade. No one would even think of rolling on that item if the player was in the raid. It becomes the unspoken rule. If the watch drops, Brutality gets it. Period. The sad truth is, he never got it. It always seemed to drop when he wasn’t in the raid. And we would give it to someone and say, “If you tell him you got it, we’re going to hack your account and shard it.” All the other purples he acquired during his raiding days were insignificant once he had spend months working towards a single item he never got. All his memories of Karazhan are replaced with a sense of disappointment and loathing because of a single item.

Blizzard has gone some lengths to fix this, like using armor tokens for tier drops so that fewer items go to waste, but it is hilariously funny to have 2 warlock/mage/hunter tokens drop and only have one player who can take it.

Hatred of the RNG has never been greater though since Blizzard introduced the Achievement system. There are dozens of achievements that can only be won through sheer dumb luck. The most frustrating of these are tied to the meta achievement: What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been. Essentially it says “Participate in every holiday and get an awesome mount.” How awesome is the mount. Well it is a 310% speed mount as opposed to a 280% speed mount. It goes faster. Alot faster. Previously the only way to get one was to be a hardcore raider or a hardcore pvper. Now you can get one for being a hardcore… casual player, as silly as that sounds.

I loved this idea, on principle when I first saw it. A way to reward casual players for participating in holidays. What Fun! Until I saw some of the achievements. Many require you to be max level. Well, okay, you really can’t use a flying mount before 60, and they should include things that require all three expansions, but forcing players to do Heroic Dungeons? Those can be rough for casual players. Capping flags in EotS or capturing a location in AV? Really rough for non-pvpers. But you have two weeks to do these achievements and usually the first day is so filled with the people anyway you can wing it and be okay.

Then comes the sheer dumb luck achievements.
Toothpick – For the Halloween achievement you are required to get a toothpick from an innkeeper as part of the trick or treat, which you can only do once an hour. Doesn’t sound hard does it? Well my first year I trick or treated like mad to try and get all the masks. Every hour on the hour while I was awake, even at work. I got the tooth pick exactly once. After 2 weeks of trick or treating? I got mine early so I really didn’t think about it until someone is my guild was practically in tears because that was all they needed. And they had been getting up every hour of the night to trick or treat.
Roses – Not only does this achievement to get a bouquet of roses require you to run dungeons, but to do so until you get the bouquet! Which might require running them 10 or 15 times! Luckily they drop 100% from certain bosses, but still you could have a bad run of rolls. For most people it is a matter of begging others in their guild who already have it to run with them.
Sinister Calling – Another Halloween one. Originally both items only dropped from the Headless Horseman and both had low drop rates, then they hotfixed it so that both would drop from treat bags as well. Unfortunately those bags only drop about 60% of the time. The rest of the time it is costumes or tricks. Even if it is a bag it can be candy, a wand, a toothpick, or any one of the 20 masks. Needless to say this one is worse than most because even farming the Headless Horseman and getting bags every hour you could statically miss out on your mount because of the RNG.
Be Mine!RNG strikes TWICE! That’s right. This Valentines achievement was the first one I thought I might not get. Originally, when I got it, it required you to get all the candy hearts. First you have to RNG to get the treat bag, as opposed to the pet, basket, candy, dress, arrows, rockets, or rose petals. But just getting the bag wasn’t enough, you had to draw the right candy from the bag. You can only get the gift once an hour, just like trick or treating. Oh right, and you only have 4 DAYS to do it.
Now according to WoWhead and the other sites the Lovely Black Dress and Peddlefeet pet both had lower drop rates than the bag of candies, such that they removed the Lovely Black Dress requirement from the Meta Achievement because it was “too rare”. By Saturday evening of the event, I had not yet gotten my *first* bag of candies, but I had gotten 4 dresses and two pets. I proceeded to do the unthinkable. I set my alarm for 55 minutes and work up every hour that night to try and get the bag of candies. No luck. Sunday, now into the third day of the event, sleep deprived and frantic, I did not leave my computer for more than 20 minutes, activating the gift every chance I got. I got one bag and 6 of the candies, but remember at the time I needed all 8. So here we go, into Sunday night. Now you imagine explaining to your raid leader why you *have* to hearth back to get a gift. In the mid of the raid I got my second candy bag, but all 10 charges only yielded one new candy. The event only had 6 more hours. I was literally crying on vent about how horrible I felt. I was exhausted and my raid leader stopped giving me a hard time about going back. In fact he called a break on the next hour. Several members of the raid who had their Love Fool title switched them to something else. Everyone felt the pressure and depression of what was supposed to be a fun game, with fun achievements turning sour because of one person’s bad luck. You can’t trade candies so the people who had extra bags couldn’t help, but just had to watch me suffer through the pain of wanting this one stupid candy. By 2 am I was mad. I was exhausted, having just spent my weekend, instead of resting, logging on every hour for some stupid RANDOM achievement. Oh and I wasn’t the only one. The forums were full of other players in the same boat. One stinking candy away from a violet proto-drake. At 3am, with only 2 charges after the one I was about to activate my husband came out of the bedroom and asked me if I got it. I said not yet, and if I didn’t he was to take my accounts, change my password and delete all the characters. I got my gift, and there was a bag of candy. The very first charge dropped the candy I needed and I got my achievement. Then I logged off and didn’t play again for 2 weeks. It took me 2 weeks to get over what this stupid RNG had done. Oh and my count of dresses was 17 and 9 Peddlefeets.

Random isn’t fun. Playing the game is fun. Leveling is fun, getting new gear is fun, getting crazy achievements is fun. Not fun – spending a weekend trying to get one stupid item. Esp. considering it is supposed to be the casual achievements. Even now that I have the achievement, and even the mount, I think the RNG achievements are horribly unfair. At least give the player some form of “grinding” towards it. Brewfest has tokens, why not have Valentine’s tokens? If you are lucky, you get the drop from the innkeeper, if not, you spend 75% of the holiday farming the tokens and get the achievement anyway. You still participated. You still deserve the achievement. Weight the drops appropriately. In the end they adjusted the achievement, but it doesn’t help much to those people who lost a weekend to it. Remove the randomness, make it achievable through perseverance and you will make a great number of people happy.

Leave a Reply