Randomness or RNG (random number generator) is an endless topic of discussion in Splinterlands just as much as in most other (trading) card games out there. We love it when it favors us and we hate it when it doesn't. Obviously, it's always to blame when we loose a game that we were meant to win. In fact, complaining about randomness or "bad luck" is probably the single most important reason for people to come to the game's Discord. There's basically not a single day without at least one major rage about a series of tough luck.
A lot of people want to get rid of randomness as much as possible, others want to at least restrict its effect. The degree of randomness that's ideal for any game is certainly debatable, but in my opinion, randomness is extremely important for any game even close to Splinterlands. So in this article, I'm going to discuss why in fact it's important to maintain a certain level of randomness in the game, explain a bit why we are so bad at understanding chance, and finally give some ideas where randomness could indeed be improved.
So let's get to the controversial topic first. Why is randomness important for a game like Splinterlands? The simple answer is "because it helps worse players to win games". This might sound like a horrible answer and to some, it is. Nevertheless, it is indeed the single most important reason you want to have at least some randomness in your game. If you remove all randomness from a game you basically end up with chess (you know, only with monsters and summoners instead of kings and queens). In chess, there's no randomness at all, the same rules are applied to both players and they each take turns until one player wins or the game ends in a draw. Either way, there's no randomness involved in the outcome of the game, it is completely determined by the decisions both players made.
This may sound cool and like the exact thing you'd want to achieve, but in reality, you really don't want to have that in a game like Splinterlands. Unless you are a chess master or some other kind of genius yourself, your chance of ever beating a chess master are exactly zero. They are not low, slim, tiny, they are non existent. You will not win, no matter what. Having no randomness involved means that the better player (or the people making the better plays for that matter) is always going to win. If you translate that to Splinterlands, it would mean that a select group of people would basically always win their games unless they are facing each other. Now factor in that there are already some people with extremely high win rates and you might begin to understand the issue.
Without randomness, these guys would dominate everything. Every single tournament, every single season in every single league. As odd as it may sound, randomness is what keeps the game interesting. It helps to make the outcome of a match unpredictable, and it is indeed what keeps us coming back for more. Randomness is also what creates these hilarious stories of crazy things happening in a match, how you stole that win that you really shouldn't have gotten in the first place. In short, randomness is a huge factor in keeping the game fresh and enjoyable for us. But then why are we often times so annoyed with chance? Why do so many want to get rid of it altogether?
Frankly, the reason for that is pretty simple - the human brain is just awfully bad at understanding chance. We can grasp the chances of a coin flip, but anything only remotely more complex is already pretty tough to predict correctly for us. We will scream at our screen because a monster missed its stun ability 3 times in a row but we don't even bat an eye if our 2 speed monsters keep hitting 4 speed monsters 10 times in a row. For some reason we believe that the former is highly unlikely (or next to impossible!) while the latter is the expected outcome. But looking at the numbers, the former has a 12.5% chance of happening, while the latter only has a bit more than 10% chance of happening.
Because we are so bad at understanding the chance of something happening, we tend to overestimate the effect of randomness on our losses while we usually underestimate its effect on our wins. In other words, we usually blame RNG when we loose and praise our skill when we win. Nobody is really immune to that effect, either. No matter how much I understand how chance works, I still fall into the trap of getting angry at Splinterlands because I'm having a streak of bad luck and all kinds of unlikely things keep happening. The correct answer to that is to look behind the chance. Instead of blaming the outcome, we need to understand what made this outcome even possible. The better player won't always win in Splinterlands, but in the long run, he'll win a lot more matches than a bad player. Good players will understand how to position their monsters in a way to mitigate the possibility of bad luck as much as possible.
So all is good in the Splinterlands? Well, not exactly. To be clear here, I like the amount of randomness involved in the game and to me it feels good overall. Nevertheless, battles in the game are rather short and so a single instance of bad luck can decide who's going to win or loose. Many high mana Yodin Zaku mirror matches basically come down to whether the opposing Spark Pixies are going to stun your Magnor or if your Spark Pixies manage to stun the opposing Magnor.
I'm not a big fan of these coin toss, high impact abilities. Sadly, there are several of these withing the game, some with higher impact than others. A successful (or failed) stun often decides a game on its own, just as a hit affliction or an untriggered retaliate will. Often times with these abilities, the battle will come down to a single coin toss instead of being made up of many separate probability checks. Some players are asking for some kind of rubber band mechanic to lower the impact of randomness on these abilities. An idea would be to guarantee the ability to trigger if it missed two times in a row. The issue with these kind of solutions is that they don't help with the aforementioned situations. In the Yodin Zaku mirror match, the game will be decided in round one if one Magnor is stunned and the other gets to attack. The rubber band wouldn't have any effect here. So how could a different solution look like?
My proposal would be to change them from being 50:50 to always having an effect but with reduced effectiveness. So instead of Stun preventing the monster from acting 50% of the time it could always make the stunned monster act last during the round. Instead of Affliction preventing all healing 50% of the times, it could be made stackable, reducing healing received by 1 for each stack of affliction. The same could work for Poison. Retaliate could be remade to always trigger but the monster always dealing half its damage and so on. By making these changes, the impact of these abilities would be reduced a bit and most importantly, they'd be made more reliable. Balancing this new design obviously is no easy task either. So instead of replacing the current abilities on existing cards, we could focus on only using the new abilities moving forward.
Either way, it's important to understand that randomness is needed for a game like Splinterlands. While we'll still all get pissed with chance every now and then, it's important to look behind that bad luck and understand how it was even possible to get into that situation in the first place. Moving forward, I hope to see some of the highest impact coin toss abilities be replaced with something more reliable, but other than that, I feel like we are pretty much on track with the way things are right now.
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!