Smogon Forums

An untimely crit or 10% proc is way more impactful when you aren't already way ahead in the game or able to compensate in some other manner. I'd also argue luck is more important the stronger the two players are overall as you don't have games that get decided by bad team autoloses in bad mu or big choke gifts the game more than any crit could.

I do understand the point you were trying to make in the skill of risk management, however. I also don't have any opinion on the actual topic of the thread in question. This message is rather pointless, honestly.

420 character limit lol, sorry for the spam

Theoretically without any form of luck the outcome would always be the stronger player beats the weaker player? Then obviously when a slightly weaker player has a close to 40% chance of winning that's all down to luck, and is bigger than the weaker players 10% chance of winning or whatever. But then consider chess, weaker players still beat stronger ones sometimes.

So I think its kinda hard to say when it matters more. But the point I really wanted to make is that luck creates variety, and without variety then every game will become a coinflip. unless your opponent is very bad.

Ah, I disagree with this too. It's kinda semantics but if you consider team matchup / in-battle rps as not luck then there is plenty of variance in those factors that can contribute to a potential upset. There's also the outside of game variance like if a player has been having a difficult time focusing for xyz reason or finds themselves struggling more with the pressure of the situation that the game is played in.

Luck does absolutely create variety. I'd argue, however, that luck based variety is unnecessary and undesirable in a game that has sufficient depth to player interaction (series of nuanced rps). I don't think chess is an apt comparison to pokemon as chess is not a game built upon rps.

rps in chess comes from our inability to fully anticipate branching paths of play to their conclusion as opposed to the "true rps" in pokemon which comes decisions made simultaneously when there is no strictly correct answer. Fighting games are a better example, imo, of a rps game where skill discrepancy translates the most accurately to results.