Doom's RNG

[Galactus]

Basically, should the RNG be removed from Doom to add a more competitive feeling to the game. Something based purely on luck really has no place inside of competition, so in my opinion it should be removed. Made this poll to see what the general public thinks about this. Do know that I'm mostly focusing on competitive doom with this poll and not so much on Survival or Co-op, since in those gamemodes rng doesn't really matter.

Edit: I'm not saying this should be hardcoded into Zandronum, but I do wonder why the various mods that have this fix were never applied.

[ZZYZX]

Where's the option "no and author should learn to play Doom"?

[Razgriz]

Unfortunately only the 1% of the community (aka competitive tryhards) cares about the removal of RNG from doom. If you want to think about it some more, think about all the constant damage mods that came out and did absolutely nothing but age terribly. The Devs wont work on something like this when they have more important things to do, but you can always ask Watermelon to make something (good luck rip wbuild).

[Dark-Assassin]

I believe there's a mod for that

[Galactus]

Unfortunately only the 1% of the community (aka competitive tryhards) cares about the removal of RNG from doom. If you want to think about it some more, think about all the constant damage mods that came out and did absolutely nothing but age terribly. The Devs wont work on something like this when they have more important things to do, but you can always ask Watermelon to make something (good luck rip wbuild).

I'm not expecting the Dev's to make this a set thing for Zandronum, but I do wonder why the various mods that had this never were accepted.

I believe there's a mod for that

Yeah, there is just nobody uses it.

[Ru5tK1ng]

Where's the option "no and author should learn to play Doom"?

Implying you're in any position to take the moral high ground.

It's been a while since this type of topic has popped up, but I came to a conclusion regarding the RNG long ago. As much as many players like to complain about the RNG screwing them over and how it should be changed, most of them (not all) don't really care about RNG. It's mostly used as an excuse for playing poorly in the same vain as blaming shit spawns or server instability. Proof of this? Simple. There have been about a handful of 'no random damage' wads and patches made throughout the years, (Bob made one, Monstrovich made one, Watermelon technically made 2, The Frenchies did as well and about 2 other people made their own and uploaded them to BE), and while people played them, the interest didn't stick around and everyone reverted back to playing with good old RNG.

noRNG is just a gimmick and if anything, more improved RNG would probably be better (no more plasma doing 5 dmg). Even though I've *cough* done something like that, at the end of the day yesRNG is what players are going to play with.

[ZZYZX]

Where's the option "no and author should learn to play Doom"?

Implying you're in any position to take the moral high ground.

Well at least I'm perfectly ok with RNG helping me hit supershotgun shots across the whole shoot.wad while my tryhard enemy (like Nati or Danzoa) can't.
And I know that if someone tried to reproduce this effect with norng they'd have to make supershotgun have really tight spread, otherwise it'd become way shittier than it currently is.

By the way, speaking of Danzoa, that's the guy who has the most legit reason to create a thread like this, as according to his regular complaints random fucks him up really hard ;D (weapons miss, weapons hit when they shouldn't, weapons do 0 damage, etc)
But he doesn't.

[Ru5tK1ng]

He doesn't/can't because he's banned. Though he probably doesn't really care and he even said in a server: 'stop trying to change the game.'

[Tenchu]

If there are mods out there that already do this, why is it even worth making a topic about and discussing? What benefits would having this coded into Zandronum directly have over simply hosting a mod that does it?

[Galactus]

If there are mods out there that already do this, why is it even worth making a topic about and discussing? What benefits would having this coded into Zandronum directly have over simply hosting a mod that does it?

Edit: I'm not saying this should be hardcoded into Zandronum, but I do wonder why the various mods that have this fix were never applied.

[Combinebobnt]

did u lose a scrim

[Mobius]

did u lose a scrim

He probably lost a duel and when he went to bother Watermelon about R's history with RNG he finally told him to fuck off... to his face.

[ARGENTVM]

Where's the option "no and author should learn to play Doom"?

noRNG is just a gimmick and if anything, more improved RNG would probably be better (no more plasma doing 5 dmg). Even though I've *cough* done something like that, at the end of the day yesRNG is what players are going to play with.

Pretty much this. Grandpa Doom came and went, though it didn't go without pissing people off (Bob mainly). As Rust said, probably best to play around with RNG rather than eliminate it all together.

[Doomkid]

"Should Damage RNG be removed?"

no

[JKist3]

While removing random damage is an interesting idea, I think it really stems from misplaced frustration. Usually it’s either used as a scapegoat for losing or as a poorly thought out hope for improving the competitive playing experience. The first thing to note is that weapon damage is not the entirety of doom’s randomness. You also have random weapon spreads and random spawns, both of which factor just as much into the randomness of a game as the damage. So, even if you remove the random damage, you will still get quite a bit of variance in individual situations. Secondly, while any one game event can be quite random, over the course of an entire game, things usually average out. It’s interesting to take a look at quake, doom’s most similar game. Quake has constant damage weapons, but higher variance in game outcomes. This is because in quake, the outcome of any one game usually hinges on a few key situations, often instances where one single fight determines control of the game for the next few minutes at minimum. There may only be 3 or less of these a game. Furthermore, luck on the initial spawns can give one player massive control and the unlucky guy may only have one or two real opportunities to save the game. In doom on the other hand, because you can’t lock down map control in the same way as quake, the outcome of a game hinges on many many events, each of which have only a small weight towards the final result. This leads to lower game outcome variances even though each individual outcome has more randomness involved.

Think about it like this. Suppose you have a coin and you flip it 100 times and count the number of heads. A single coin flip has huge randomness, but after 100 flips, the number of heads you end up with does not vary THAT much. A single doom game is similar to this.

In terms of providing a better competitive experience I think efforts are much better spent elsewhere, namely fixing bugs and adding netcode features that relate to competitive modes. If certain improvements are made here I think you’ll see much better games.

[Zakken]

If I were to choose between RNG and no RNG in any competitive scenario, I'd definitely go with no RNG. But there are two main arguments against removing RNG:

• You'd be tampering with the game's vanilla functionality. Some wouldn't like the change purely because it's not Doom anymore, but a modded variation of it. Even back in Skulltag times, when the only available RNG was the newschool ZDoom's RNG, competitive players disliked it because it effectively reduced damage from weapons like the SSG, even though the RNG itself was more sophisticated than Vanilla Doom RNG.
• Realistically, it wouldn't change much in the way of game results if at all. Be it duel, team deathmatch, or CTF, competitive Doom is actually still very consistent in terms of dominant players/teams despite all of the random mechanics. JKist's post right above talks about this point really well, also props to him for saving this thread from "ur just asking this because ur bad xd" shitposting.

So, just as you might've guessed, no-random mods never took off due to lack of interest, and it's not like players aren't interested in a better competitive experience -- such a mechanic simply does not make enough of a difference to them to warrant having such a mod loaded in every competitive gamemode server, let alone coded into the port, especially in comparison to great netcode advancements made over the past few years that have achieved so much more for the scene.

[AlexMax]

Randomness and competitiveness are not mutually exclusive.

[DTDsphere]

Play Quake Live instead, it's miles better than Doom for competitive modes. Doom is better for single player/co-op.

[Empyre]

Play Quake Live instead, it's miles better than Doom for competitive modes. Doom is better for single player/co-op.

I agree. Doom is one of the best games ever for single-player or coop (or survival or invasion), but it is ill-suited for competitive game-play. I love ctf, but not in Doom.

[Combinebobnt]

I gotta make a wad that literally removes ALL random. I know how to do it I think. Then the world (like 10 players left in the compet scene) can decide if they want random or not...