RNG is bad mmkay

[Deztru]

The thing is though is that is the concept of a random opening hand working as intended. Not trying to debate for the sake of it, but in all honesty that is a core component of how card games work, sometimes you get good hands & other times your hands aren't good. This is why I bring up that players complain about this rng more than any other rng in the game, but I find the complaint somewhat confusing since it should be expected that if you are playing a card game you are rolling dice or flipping a coin to decide if you get a useful hand or a shitty one. It may not be fun at times, but that is a problem with the card game genre as a whole, not just something isolated to Hearthstone based rng.

Huh

I never thought of it that way since the game is fully digital

[Pantalaimon]

Huh

I never thought of it that way since the game is fully digital

Format doesn't matter. It is a digital card game that is modeled after all of the same concepts & presentation of a physical card game.

There is never going to be some magical mulligan system that lets you cherry pick exactly what you want when you start a game, so that you never have to experience the random hand selecting system. If that is what any player wants then card games are not for them. That is a core rng-based component of the genre.

[Irian]

People say blanket "I hate RNG" statements because hearthstone loves implementing it in the worst way. This is just my opinion of it, but when I hear people complain about RNG I mentally separate the "good" RNG and with the bad RNG.

An example of a "good" RNG card type is Discover; Discover incorporates a lot of random but is also very controllable and in fact may be even preferable to a guaranteed effect like a draw in many occasions.
Similarly, I personally like and as much as the playerbase may bitch about it from time to time I think it's generally accepted that cards like Thoughtsteal can lead to some fun interactions. Thoughtsteal is also cleverly designed in that you can easily narrow down potentially what the priest gained and how they could potentially use it.
These are only a couple of examples of many similar card mechanics, but in general the silly ridiculous stuff is at least begrudgingly accepted as long as they aren't meta-defining cards (and even then, many still enjoyed Yogg regardless).

Now, onto the stuff that people hate...
Random number effects are not fun and will never be fun. Crackle being the biggest offender, being 3-6 simply means that both the user of the card and the victim are unhappy. If you overkill something with 4 health and hit it for 6 then you feel like your good luck was wasted. If you hit a 3 then you may very well lose the game on that bad luck and as such your enjoyment plummets. This doesn't even touch on face plays with Crackle, which are worse as they can potentially put out 12 damage is the stars align, leading to some really undeserved from-behind wins that can't really be interacted with.

Similarly, while I mentioned Yogg, I also think Yogg is a good example of the type of RNG that people hate pre-nerf (to a lesser extent now). Games should not be decided by crazy random swing RNG cards. RNG cards are fun when they're able to be gamed in your favor or moderately controlled, or have results with random effects that overall even out in power to a fair number. When the swing becomes too wide and the potential too devastating to recover from (shredders, yogg) it goes from funny when something ridiculous happens to almost frustrating and mentally draining. Blizzard underestimates the power it can have on a player's morale to lose a winning game because your opponent had extreme luck or you had extremely poor luck.

As a whole I think Blizzard is learning too little too late, and in fact many of the strong new cards from gadgetzan are not RNG based but show the infuriating side of cards that are simply too reliable and too safe.

[Notshauna]

SNIP

You hit the nail on the head there, Blizzard being pretty new to the CG world doesn't seem to understand why randomness exists in CGs. It's not that it's impossible to make a game without randomness, rather than randomness adds a degree of variance that allows decks to feel more interesting. That's caused by the natural aspects of making the game a CG with shuffling, so from there on out randomness is something that should be used sparingly.

Magic's solution is through powerful card selection cards like Preordain and Duskwatch Recruiter, the Vancouver Mulligan rule which allows you to look at the top card of your library and either put it on the bottom or top when you mulligan and numerous tutors for every type of card imaginable. But, that doesn't mean that Magic doesn't have RNG, it has coin flips, Cascade (as seen in Bloodbraid Elf) and Chaos Warp. Though, coin flip cards are deliberately unreliable, Cascade's only pseudo-random as it interacts well with deck manipulation like Sensei's Divining Top and deck building (for example building your deck so you only have one card you can hit off of Cascade or only universally strong spells, both strategies are the basis of decks) and Chaos Warp is meant to allow a color without strong non-creature removal to have removal, but at a hefty premium.

Compare and contrast to how Hearthstone does RNG, where it's frequent, doesn't typically interact with deck building and often has ridiculous variance.