"Good and bad RNG: an analysis about random movesets, why they are frustrating and not healthy for the game"

#PokemonGO: You're a level 25 player and you just found an Oddish nest. No cluster spawns but still better than nothing, and you're really sick of all these Vaporeons in the gyms. So you go to the nest, spend a couple afternoons walking around for those juicy candies, find a decent Oddish to evolve, 80% IV and level 21, and finally press the evolve button.A Vileplume with Acid and Moonblast. You uninstall Pokemon Go and download Hello Kitty Online.Doing all of this you played mainly against 3 sources of RNG: level of Pokemon found, IV of pokemon found, and final moveset.Level of Pokemon found: ideally you want to evolve an high level Pokemon, so you don't have to use candies and stardust to power it up. But you can settle for something even a few level lower, you'll just need to farm a little more candies.IV of Pokemon found: ideally you want to evolve a 100% IV Pokemon to maximize its potential. But you can settle for a 70-80%, it's not a big deal. After all the difference between a perfect Pokemon and a 0% IV one is only around 10% of its combat performance (DPS and CP), so with a 70% IV you're losing just a few percentage points in effectiveness compared to a 100% one.Final Moveset: ideally you want the best moveset possible, in this case you really want Solar Beam as your charge attack. But you get Moonblast, a fairy type attack on a grass/poison pokemon that you wanted to use to fight water Pokemons. You're back to square one.The first two RNG sources, level and IV, are good RNG: they're not incredibly important, you can set for something not perfect without losing much, and above all it's not frustrating. If you catch a pokemon with better IV or lvl you're istantly rewarded, if not you don't lose anything.On the contrary, moveset is just bad RNG: it's really important, it can make a 30-40% dps difference between the best and the worst case scenario, settling for something not ideal is not always possible, and it's just frustrating from every point of view. If you're not lucky you feel like you wasted hours doing nothing, and if you're lucky you have more of a "thank the gods" moment than feel rewarded.In conclusion, I think that completely random and unchangeable movesets are not healthy for the game. They can be extremely frustrating (Twister Gyarados?) and put a player in front of a such an annoying situation to make him simply ragequit and leave the game. I just hope Niantic is looking into this problem to find a solution. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2dDS3yv