When death is of no consequence, there is no challenge. (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Wednesday, August 13, 2014, 23:48 (3563 days ago) @ Cody Miller

That only levels the playing field for weapon damage and armor defense. Stuff like your weapon's stats/perks, armor perks, that stuff still matters. All acquired randomly, giving an advantage to whoever is luckier.

Yes random loot is bad.

But luck in general for a competitive game is not always bad.

Brood War is a great competitive game, but it had elements of luck. The biggest being in the form of high ground advantage and cover. If you had the high ground or were in cover, your chance to be hit from an attack was reduced to either 75% or 50%. This has created cases where single hero units against all odds, were unable to be hit and took out large amounts of an opposing army.

That's fun to see and watch. It all evens out though, and those situations are outliers. So over the long term, the effects of high ground and cover are predictable.

That's a tricky issue. There are a lot of ways of handling effectiveness-mitigating effects that eliminate the randomness. For instance, high ground could have been handled with mostly similar results by decreasing damage random that rolling dice, and mitigating weapon effectiveness over distance in Halo can be handled by damage reduction or projectiles or other non-random approaches rather than bloom, but every choice has a lot of its own benefits and oddities.

In the case of Brood War, I'm not sure I'd agree the randomness is good in its own right, so much as that implementation has some benefits. In its own right, the performance noise could still be considered an unhealthy side effect, but a worthy tradeoff.

That's likely just semantics, though.

*shrug*