It can be your best friend or your worst enemy, and is often both. How do you feel about RNG in video games - is it essential to maintaining balance, or an indicator of bad or lazy design? What has been the best instance of RNG working in your favour, and what has been the worst RNG grind you've experienced?
Worst: Anything Mario Kart. Best: Never. Yeah, me and RNG don't get along very well. I like to play games a little, but it's often times a little more than annoying when it comes down to it. It's just a nuisance, in my opinion. Maybe it's good occasionally, but I'm not one of those people.
RNG is one of the reasons I don't play Pokémon anymore. It almost never seems to work in my favor, seeing as I used to miss over half of my Fore Blasts and Rock Slides. It makes for an interesting part of a game for sure, but I prefer to win or lose based on skill, not a generator.
Best: Getting the rare item I needed almost right away in Monster Hunter Worse: Spending months with on/off killing the same thing to get another rare item I have kinda a love/hate relationship with RNG, I love when it actually does something even slightly useful and hate it when it just kicks me to the ground by letting everything falls in a NPCs favor or not give me an item I need.
It's like Jirard the Completionist said in one of his FNaF videos regarding the randomness of the movement of the animatronics: "GIVE. ME. A GAME. WHERE I. CAN BEAT. YOU WITH. MY (insert. expletive here.) SKILLS!... CLAP-EMOJI!" Now, RNG can be useful sometimes, and is good at sometimes representing IRL things like mistakes or capitalizing on openings, but I think that games have reached the sophistication level where we don't really need an RNG anymore.
If not for RNG, games would often be the same. Like if you played poker with the deck pre-set in a particular way at the start of every game. It would be precisely the same aside from human intervention every time. I accept it as being a necessary part of playing games, like the equivalent of shuffling the deck. Best: Final Fantasy Dissidia OO when I got one of Lilisette's unique weapon and two of her gold weapon in a single 10+1 draw. Worst: The same game a 10+1 draw (which would cost holycrap USD$25 if I was a type to pay for it instead of just slowly earning it over about three weeks of gameplay) that only gave me weapons I already had fully limit broken, or perhaps spending 250 draw tickets getting Terra's EX weapon. Worth it though, since I got all of Alisee's equips in the process.
The thing that annoys me the most about RNG is that it's lazy, plain and simple, at least when it comes to item drop rates. Rather than find a meaningful way to include something in their game, through a long quest chain or whatever else, someone decides to make it a ridiculously low drop rate. One of the few positives of Monster Hunter: World is that it introduced a way to get stupidly rare items by exchanging tickets at the Elder Melder, but prior to that...well, if you wanted the rarest item a monster could drop, you had to be prepared for 1-5% item drop rates, with no way to increase the chance the way there was for other items you could get from them. When fully upgrading your armour is generally a good idea for G-rank - unless you have the skills of someone like CantaPerMe, which the average gamer will not have - and armour pieces require at least one of these drops apiece, it becomes a severe hindrance. Or it can go the other way entirely, you can get everything you need in a few fights, and be stupidly overpowered for the rest of the game. RNG destroys the concept of balance in the name of preserving it, and it's just plain bad. There is no skill involved; it's pure luck, and luck can mean you could theoretically be doing something for the rest of your life and never do it. It's not fun. It has never been fun. I recognise the necessity of leaving some things up to chance, but I will NEVER accept RNG shortcuts. Rewards should be earned, not given or withheld at the whim of random numbers. My best RNG recently was pulling KOS-MOS in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as my second rare blade...and that was easily my best, because that game was generally awful and she sped it up dramatically so I didn't have to spend more time than necessary grinding. My worst...I have lots of these. Hundreds of hours put into Monster Hunter titles farming for the 1% item drops - Atal Ka and Rathian in particular - and farming crowns in World rank pretty high up there. Although Fire Emblem Echoes was an exercise in RNG in and of itself with its stupid hit rates...the number of times I had an 80% hit rate and still missed, only to get trashed the next turn, was infuriating.
RNG seems like a staple of many games that I play. I've recently returned to MapleStory and getting strong in the game involves heavy RNG -- you'll need to cube, or re-roll, stats on equipment and hope you'll get the ideal stat. For my case as a mage, I usually roll stats like intelligence, boss damage, magic attack, and a few others depending on the gear. It can take months if not years to roll ideal stats on a piece of equipment. Guess some people enjoy that since it makes finally accomplishing what you want that much more satisfying, but geez is it exhausting when you spend tons of time and effort only to get nothing. Same with the phone apps I play. I'm quite into rhythm/tap games like Love Live! and BanG Dream, but rolling good cards requires some heavy luck and RNG. ):
It honestly depends on what game I'm playing. If it's something like...oh...getting the good/bad endings in Mega Man X5 for example then it's stupid and it doesn't need to exist. I don't want to leave everything up to chance, even when I get every little thing to maximize my odds to get the good ending. If I have the tools I need to get the good ending then I should get it. Oh, and I hate the fact that you can get to the final levels early if you get lucky enough. So the game can be completed within less than an hour. However, sometimes RNG makes the game, like Pokémon. Yeah, there are sometimes I might despise it, but I can't really get mad at it because it's been there since the very beginning (Even though I still hate that one time I was battling someone and two of my Pokémon got frozen back to back. After that I forfeited because there was no way I was winning).
