Richard Garfield - "Luck in Games" talk at ITU Copenhagen 

or why they should at first, then decrease it. Depends on the audience the company is trying to capture. Luck brings in more people at first, then according to Richard, you decrease it as the players mature.

Summa Fog of War itself is basically an introduction of luck, since without scouting information the player is actually guessing the moves of his opponent.

Like he said himself, when the skill asked is too high, it became a game of luck. Your example is wrong, because you took two low skilled players which end the game in a game of luck. (In the end, it's just a luck game with : "Is my opponent know how to scout ? Is my opponent know how to counter this build order ?") Against two player who don't know how to scout, the luck part of Sc2 become big. Yeah, there is a little luck in StarCarft 2 (with the fog of ward notably) but in the end sc2 is a skill based game. If you play against a very good player, they aren't strategies which allow you to win easily.

I agree that it's high skilled, most skilled game played at the moment, only to be trumped by the original. But I have been high masters in it, and you can be very mediocre, and lose to people that are not that good quite easily. Play Protoss, a race that's very poorly designed, and just cut probes at 16+16 and copy whatever parting is doing, by doing this you can take games of people who are faaar better than you, not that often, but happens. So his example of "millions of games" isn't entirely correct. It's insanely easy to execute some of the builds from the Protoss race, and a Platinum player can take games of Grand Masters, it's a shame, but it happens, and it has happened lots of times.

There's luck in league of legends classic draft games?

ya rly no waii There's critical hits, and there WAS dodging, but they've removed that.

Ephraim225 Yeah, critical hits are really the only thing I can think of when it comes to luck in lol.

ya rly no waii There is definitely luck, especially in the meta game, because whether or not you get counter picked basically depends on the opponent's knowledge of the game and their champion set, and your opponent is completely outside of your control.

***** Well you are correct, there is probably the same amount of luck in StarCraft as in League of Legends. Both games have pretty similar mechanics, where you have to outplay and outbuild your opponent by countering their play, and the luck element mainly comes in with how well your strategy can be adapted around your opponent's which mostly has to do with the luck of which opponent you get matched against.

He does mention early on that the very existence of other players is a form of luck. The point is that in starcraft it's nearly impossible for a lower-skilled player to "luck out" and win against a highly-skilled one.

For wow, it's kind of an unsolluble problem. WoW lost more and more people BEFORE it began to begin easier. Like Richard say in his video (question part) by making a game more and more skilled, you satisfy the players already in the game, but they'll be less and less new players. And wow is a MMO, it need lots of players for create a large community. Without community, a MMO is dead. Which is why WoW became easier, for permit new players to come. A second thing that put WoW easier is that the players already in it WANTED it. An instance to hard ? Lot of player will cry that it need to be nerfed. A stuff to hard to get ? "QQ ! WoW need too much farming ! Need reduce it !" Travels too long ? Need instant travels ! Etcetc.... So in the end : if Blizzard don't listen to the QQers they'll leave, and the game will need a larger entry for newcomer (so becoming less skill based) and if they listen to them the game will be more easier anyway. Plus, it'll not give to them a too bad review about : "Blizzard never listen to the players" (they get that anyway, every game with a big community get that one day or another, because nobody can fulfill the wishes of thousand of players with different goals)

This big switch I believe was season 3 in the burning crusade, like a massive bomb, huge patch, made all classes super easy. Weren't they at their peak around that time?

He did't say that honers like game with higher luck. He say that Innovaters love to innovate and create new strategies and honers tend more to analyse the game for find the better one. And eventually Innovaters are took over by the honers : while they are new strategies, it's difficult to really analyse the game, because they are always a unknown part in it. But when they aren't any more new ways to play, then the statistics take place. End his last phrase say that in high luck game have more chance to satisfy for a long time Innovater, but over time, the games will often be taken over by honers. So yeah, your thoughs were rights : Honer prefert low luck game, Innovater high luck game.

Ok, thanks for clarifying for me

Good reason to learn English ^^

It's not that newbs have big egos it's that Newb often don't know how to lose. When you know how to lose, know how to learn of your mistakes, luck games aren't really appealing : what have you to learn in a coin toss game ? I have to have better luck next time ? Not really satisfying.. That's why they try to have more high skill based game. And the more the gap between the loser and the winner is high, the more it's hard to accept the lose. (so the more your bad, the more you'll like game with low skill gap)

Makes sense

I think he was a good speaker, he got his points across. I think MTG has some issues with their game. . .

This is not a good example of him. Watch his video from The Magic Cruise.

Is your first sentence genuine? I think he is interested in how randomness can be implemented in games to improve the experience and introduce variety. What is a good experience is of course subjective. Playing a game competitively can be fun for many reasons, for me part of the fun is (seemingly) beating the odds and compensating for bad runs. Some will say their defeats were because of luck (and some certainly are), but they may be neglecting a few key decisions which weren't optimal or how well their opponent mitigated their own bad runs. At 5:39 he talks about what people usually mean when they say luck, which is overt randomness (dice, hidden moves, physical and mental limitations). He goes further and defines randomness as uncertainty in outcome. If a game result is varied, luck (randomness) is involved. I want to address the footbal analogy. I think your getting closer to philosophical arguments of freewill/determinism so I won't enter that arena. Football is a physical game, so to win you'd chose actions which maximize your condition. However, the players decisions for their conditioning are not known. It's not knowing how the players will care for themselves in addition to knowing exactly what their opponents will do which introduces uncertainty. You refer to hindsight, Garfield refers to the opposite.

L Taylor "physical and mental limitations" That has nothing to do with luck though. It does not matter the reason you are not as capable as your opponent during a competition, only that you are not as capable. If you believe there is some unfair advantage (unfair and unlucky are also different things) you shouldn't have initiated the competition or agreed to it in the first place. "However, the players decisions for their conditioning are not known. It's not knowing how the players will care for themselves in addition to knowing exactly what their opponents will do which introduces uncertainty." Absence of knowledge is not evidence of absence. Simply because you didn't know all factors involved in a competition doesn't mean you COULDN'T have known and/or planned for the different outcomes because of that. Ever heard of chaos theory? Even certain actions such as flipping a coin aren't necessarily "luck" which is another reason why "luck" factors in games are so bad. In real life games of chance there is some deterministic factors involved from the players, which is why there are many rules to try and prevent the lowering or increase of certain odds for the player (counting cards, loaded die, rolling die in a certain way, marking cards). There is nothing like this in videogames. There are set algorithms where it might APPEAR to be random outcome, but it is not. The algorithm has already DETERMINED what the outcome will be, therefore luck elements are even worse in games because it creates the ILLUSION of chance when in reality the players fate has already been chosen. The only way to make it as random as possible is to base the RNG on nuclear particle decay, as thats the only known measurable thing we know about that appears to be completely random. Sorry, but I refuse to subject my fate in winning or losing to what number is next in line in a computers processing banks.

bulbinking You are not making any sense. So you dislike both luck and skill factors in games? Because if an algorithm has already chosen a Number for you in a game then it shouldn't be any problem for you since that doesn't involve the element of luck but only appears to do so. After all your First statement was your disapproval of adding luck elements to a game and detest Garfield for the same reason. If both of what you said is true then you basically dislike every single game that has ever been created.

Dark6Blood9 I don't think you understood me because of poor reading comprehension.

bulbinking Chess does have luck in it, because you may not happen to know the one opening or set of moves that an opponent uses to beat you. That doesn't mean that they are better than chess than you, it just means that they happened to be the lucky player who was able to counter you. If I played 100 games of chess, and win 99 but lose 1 because that player used an unorthodox strategy, but they lose 99 out of a hundred otherwise, does that mean that player is better than me? No. He just got lucky. He literally explains this in the video nearly exactly how I just stated it.