Xendran
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EDIT: I swear to god this wasn't a wall of text when I started. Well... it is now.
Luck itself isn't the problem, it's a lot of factors that go into it that make it both worse than it should be, and then feeling even worse than that.
The primary factor involved with why luck is so swingy in this game is that matches are so short. This means that while your luck will average out over the long course of the game, within any individual fight the luck is much more likely to be extremely skewed.
Arbitrary Example:
Fight 1
Turn 1: Block
Turn 2: No Block
Turn 3: No Bock
Fight 2
Turn 1: Block
Turn 2: Block
Turn 3: No Block
Fight 3
Turn 1: No Block
Turn 2: No Block
Turn 3: No Block
Turn 4: No Block
Sure, your RNG averaged out in the end, but you got screwed in the last fight and your opponent got screwed in the middle fight. The shorter matches become, the worse this problem gets.
I understand i only provided one random example, but it should get the point across as to why short matches cause this to happen. The longer the match, the more likely you are to even out RNG.
This combined with the fact that there is no compensation for first turn advantage (a guaranteed unmitigated luck factor), and that you only take 1 action per turn is what really skyrockets it.
If you do something and it gets hit with RNG, you lose almost your ENTIRE turn, bare minimum you lose half of it.
Combine all of these things and you get nastiness like going second and then getting blocked. Congrats, you're now 2 turns behind in a 3-4 turn fight. Even if you had a plan, you have no time to catch up and are SO far behind that you would need to make optimal plays while your opponent simultaneously makes terrible ones. Even the amount of RNG you would need to come back from this is ridiculous, considering you have no time to recover and take advantage of this.
As a counterexample, the game I'm currently working on is split into 9 Action Points (similar to how Hearthstone has turns separated into 10 mana, instead of playing 1 card per turn), and a match is meant to last around 10 rounds.
This makes it INCREDIBLY unlikely that you lose an entire turn to RNG, unless you take a calculated risk and spend all of your AP on an ultimate. Combine that with longer matches, and you see RNG impacting fights in much more regular ways per battle.
ED gives the RNG no time to average out over the course of a fight, and forces you to do the equivalent of spending 10 mana on 1 card every turn in Hearthstone.
Another issue is the inconsistency of the application of these elements. Block and Deflect are the primary offenders here, as they are too specific. It's borderline impossible to accurately predict how players are going to interact with these mechanics since you can completely play around them.
This brings in another issue with epicduel which is counterplay based on what RNG elements work against your damage, rather than counterplay against strategies and actual plays.
Dex build? Just don't use blockable stuff.
Tech build? Just don't use deflectable stuff.
Then comes the fact that while deflections are meant to cover what blocks don't, they do not work on skills for some unknown reason??
Then some skills are arbitrarily unblockable and whatnot to bandaid fix certain meta shifts. It's just all a huge mess.
There's just so much inconsistency and layered mechanics and decisions that have contributed to RNG in this game feeling so terrible to interact with, even when you're on the winning side of it.
What's worse, is that I'm not sure the devs have even put this much thought into why people dislike the RNG, but instead only focus on how they *think* they can fix it. Can't fix something if you don't know why it's broken. This is why I've been saying for years that EpicDuel needs a designer on their team. If they have put this level of thought into it, they clearly either came to a different conclusion or assumed it wasn't a problem (which it clearly is).
They have the skills to make the game function, they have the skills to make it look good, and they have the right ideas.
Problem is, ideas are worthless unless you have someone specialized in executing those ideas, analyzing why they do or do not work, etc., something that 2 fulltime programmers and artists do not have the time or qualifications to do.
This is why EpicDuel has all these updates with great ideas that just flop: They don't have a designer to make the ideas more than just ideas.
Anyone can think of a game ideas, or a combat idea, or a skill idea. It takes a designer to execute on them. This is why Designer is it's own role in game development. This is why people are hired specifically to do design.
The state of epicduel right now is equivalent to the state a painting would be in if a person with a beautiful idea but no artistic training was painting it.
In the end, RNG elements should feel like an extension to the way your build works, not something that swings a fight.
Also, regarding games in general, and i say this not just to the devs of this game but to any other developers out there, indie or otherwise:
If a player has a problem with your game, they're probably right that there is a problem.
However, 99% of players have absolutely no idea what that problem actually is. They THINK they know, but they don't. The ones that do are the ones who are also developers.
It's your job to dig in and find out what the actual problem is in a system.
RNG is a good example of this. People don't like RNG. They think its because there is too much. When you look at the raw percentages though, it's really not an egregious amount when everything gets averaged out.
Therefore, you need to look at the core problem in genera: Something is wrong with RNG.
You give it some thought and analysis, and you end up coming to the REAL answer. Not that there is too much RNG, but that.. well.. everything I said in my post.
< Message edited by Xendran -- 2/20/2016 7:29:55 >
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