RNG elements in competitive gaming isn’t necessarily a problem, rather it’s how they affect gameplay and variance that matters.
On the positive side, Faust of GG:XX fame has a series of item tosses that are randomly determined. Different items have different effects and lead to different set ups and responses from the item user. This sort of thing is both interesting and adds depth to the character/game.
On the more negative side, you have random damage in ST. Though I agree with eltrouble that it usually at worst just leads to WTF moments, really there isn’t much of a case to be made that random damage adds depth to the game. I have a hunch it probably raises variance to a degree, but don’t have any data to support that assumption.
Getting out of the fighting game world, the most obvious examples are in card games, both CCG/TCGs and traditional games like Poker. I don’t think you’d find many people arguing that Poker has limited competitive merit, even though it obviously has far greater variance than many other competitive games. If anything, I would argue that the variance added to Poker through RNG elements adds depth to betting strategies.
So no, RNG isn’t an inherently bad thing in the realm of competitive gaming. It’s just how it’s applied.
At Arcade UFO we had a 2v2 random number generator tournament, Fubarduck was paired with Sin who is insanely great at 3rd Strike, (Sin ended up winning the tournament, which lead to the long still going on saga of the second versus city which STILL after 9 months doesnt have 3rd Strike in it) and a guy chewed out Trevor for it. So they never did that again.
There are various forms of randomness in games fighting games. I’m against most of them that affect gameplay.
Against:
- variable input windows
- variable damage
- variable stun
- variable stage speed
- variable frame skip
- variable hit animations that can affect combos
Depends on implementation:
- variable objects (eg. GG Faust, UMvC3 Phoenix Wright)
Needs good RNG (or better implementations in general):
- Random char/stage select button (SFIV’s RNG seeding is broken)
- RNG from a selected pool (eg. so you can select a random stage besides that horrid white stage in KOFXIII)
Don’t care about:
- variable character/stage order vs CPU
Even though variable damage doesn’t have that big of an impact on FGs, it’s better to just go for the simpler implementation IMO. Variable stage speed is just awful. It usually has to do with hard/software limitations but they need to design and develop against that. Variable input windows are the spawn of Satan.
I’m also against things that might not be truly random or even pseudo-random, but has no direct link to whatever needs to be determined. eg. the outcome of a same-frame grab that is determined by how many times a player mashed jab before the round starts or something silly like that.
Another thing I’m not a huge fan of are quirks that occur during rounding errors. eg. In SSFIV some 3f moves can punish moves that are -2f because of rounding issues after the super freeze. Capcom games usually have problems with super-freeze calculations. They should just make it so that the super-freeze completely freezes the game rather than just slowing it down.