Recent gold change in Heroes of Newerth
Heroes of Newerth recently got an update that changed the way you get gold when killing a unit. A developer explains what's wrong with the former approach: “your carry farming a lane and their carry farming a lane could actually mean they get up to 1000 more gold over the course of a game just off pure RNG. Nonsense!” The most popular reply approves: “RNG in videogames are pretty lame, especially when it comes to competitive gaming...”
Instead of simply picking a random integer from a range, the game now adjusts this range depending on how much gold you got in the past. If you are lucky and get some good picks, the game will take it into account to make sure you are less likely to get a high amount again.
To give you an idea of how “unfair” the former, simpler system is, I plotted the total gold earned by 100 players with 300 last hits (an extremely high number that you don't see in most games). Melee creeps give 35–50 gold, but I used 30–50 instead, to make it easier to spot the average (12000). I'm simply using the pseudo-random generator from my environment, so HoN's generator should be at least as good.
As you can see, every single player gets an amount of gold extremely close to 12000, the average. Some of them got 200 gold more or less, which means that it's extremely unlikely to get more than a 400 gold advantage. For some reason, people started freaking out about getting a random amount of gold, without considering that this amount is pretty uniformly distributed. You get some high and low amounts, but nobody gets an advantage, precisely because of the (pseudo) randomness.
Now, two considerations about this change:
- It broke one of the game's items, Alchemist's bones. Luckily, this was fixed pretty quickly.
- Players have been asking for some actual fixes for months. It's unfortunate that the developers chose to spend time on this instead.