Originally Posted by
Tactician
For me, as long as the 'trolls' or whatever they are apply the same for all the teams in the league, then it is ok. If it is about randomness, then there should be no bias; the dices used should be the same for all. The problem will be if one challenging team gets 'trolled' much more than the other challengers. Sure, it can happen if there is randomness involved, but if that happens too frequently in every season or two, then this is unfair.
Suppose that in a league, there are 3 main challengers for the title. All 3 are active teams with strong squads. Then there are 2 semi-active teams and the others are abandoned teams. So, 14 teams: 3 (quality and active), (2 semi-active with some quality here and there), and 9 non-active, abandoned teams with poor quality. According to some people here, what would decide the title would be matches between the 3 (quality and active). This is fair but then why play all the other remaining matches? Why not play only those 6 matches or at most 10 matches (that is including the semi-active teams)? In fact, playing against the remaining teams give you a chance to catch-up in case the random side was not on your side at all in match against one of the challengers for the title. Some things might be in the game for the purpose of simulating real-life situations, just that in real-life you don't have abandoned teams with no training, no manager, and so on. What we have is 26 matches which includes a possibility of unexpected results, including versus weaker opponents (like they occur in real life, but just that in real life there are no abandoned teams with no training and so on). So, as long as this 'trolling' or whatever it is applies with the same chance to all the teams in that league, then there should be no problem.
In the case of knock-out competitions, no. It is not appropriate to 'troll' people in such matches as one 'troll' can cause what would be among the favourites to win this competition to get knock-out at the early stages itself. There should be some randomness, but the effect should not be so much that it overrides completely the hard work of a manager where even a weak team with just a decent formation will beat a strong, active team despite that the strong team has enough in terms quality and tactics to beat a much stronger team than that weak team. There can be bad days, but even on a bad day a top team in the first division will beat a third division team or at most will get a draw, and surely a third division team will not knock-out a top team from 1st division by aggregate score. So maybe some tweaking is needed for how much effect randomness has on match results.