Randomness has been a part of most computer games since the beginning because computers can do math very quickly and randomness is exciting. Oh, is it ever exciting. After all, who doesn’t like to watch a big critical hit pop up when fighting a boss, followed by the boss dropping exactly what you want on your first run? It’s gloriously satisfying. The down side, of course, is that it’s random, and you could just as easily fail to even hit the boss randomly.
And sometimes random chance is just awful. Like with Final Fantasy XIV‘s randomly dropping Atma, or World of Warcraft‘s wildly random loot combined with a bonus roll system (which doesn’t really fix bad luck), or sometimes just the randomness of your partners in a League of Legend match. So what’s the most annoying bit of randomness that you’ve experienced in online gaming? Elusive drops? Unreliable percent chances? Or something else?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
Upgrading items with more badluck than anything else and losing so much gold.
Or trying to get a precurser weapon out of the mystic forge (gw2) I lost .. gosh .. don’t know … much gold such tragedy (not) wow.
Llokki This is one of those quests that worked out fine for the first three days when everyone in the game was running it, then became impossible forever after that. And given the recent companion changes making HK-51 no longer even a unique companion, it’s really high time that the mechanics of this were cleaned up to make them more solo friendly and less of a huge annoyance.
Anarchy Online was famous for items that dropped at idiotically low rates, from campable open-world mobs on 6 or 8 or 12 hour respawn timers. Since the respawn timer ran from the last kill, it was possible for one person to lock down the one or handful of mobs that would drop the item by killing them, then logging off and setting an alarm to pop back on at the exact time of the respawn. Since the spawn location would just be empty, it was impossible to tell if the mob had just been killed, was killed four hours ago, or was just about to respawn. So the only way to catch up was to sit there for up to the entire spawn timer; and then 99% of the time, as soon as the thing appeared, the camper would log on with his 220 and one-shot it.
Good times.
Koolthulu I’m still holding out for the day when we get an MMO with this – as long as the crafting isn’t random and the ingame marketplace isn’t dominated by power traders artificially inflating prices on everything.
Guild Wars 2. Mystic Forge. Worst. Game. Mechanic. Ever.
Robert80 CistaCista Lol the flame comes into your inventory as a random drop when you are collecting coals, it then grows and starts consuming everything :)
How the devs thought that I would think this random disaster would be “challenging gameplay” is beyond me. The game has some very interesting gameplay in fact, but also too much of this nonsense.
Veldan Not that I disagree with the hindrance that can be random godstones procs, but considering how gear is omnipotent in Aion, PvP is rarely about skill, anyway.
Creeper Ichor.
Tsiya Kaloth Gevah
Blizz’s response to that has always been akin to the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. “Yes it’s a hoof, but it’s broken!” /bleah
Finding the goddamn rares in RIFT.