STATUS

It depends ... If the battles happen too often, are repetitive, dull/boring (melee attack only/one turn kills), unnecessarily easy or hard, or, can't be run away from, then count me in! Otherwise my range of reactions can vary from liking to tolerating.

I don't loathe random battles, so long as they're not too frequent. In fact, random battles are good in a way that you ought to fight those battles, thus giving you the advantage to train and level up sub-consciously. For touch encounters, though, you will tend to want to avoid them because you can see them. But not that I hate touch battles :)

It's just you.

author=Marrend
What if it's a touch encounter where the things that you fight are somewhat randomized?

Like in DQIX? I really liked that system. A great balance between the advantages of random battles and touch battles.

Nope, most gamers can't stand them. When I started on design work for VSA, I surveyed gamers casual and hardcore to figure out what it was that they liked and disliked about RPGs and far and away, the most common response was that they hated random encounters and that's what turned them off from trying new RPGs.

author=Sailerius
Nope, most gamers can't stand them. When I started on design work for VSA, I surveyed gamers casual and hardcore to figure out what it was that they liked and disliked about RPGs and far and away, the most common response was that they hated random encounters and that's what turned them off from trying new RPGs.

Even though I don't play many RPGs (because Dota2 or fighting games consumes almost all my time when I can play games), I still think that random encounters can work some time. My argument for this is this; how does it make sense that your character(s) can predict when and where every battle takes place, especially when walking in "dangerous areas"?

Edit: Minor changes and spelling
And I'm sure you are going to disagree here, but there are some instances in VS1 (and not just in the original version) that I would count as random encounters.

author=Sailerius

I still think that random encounters can work some time.

Like quick-time events, they don't add anything to a game and there's a large segment of the gaming population that will flat out turn away any game that includes them.

I agree with you on quick-time events, but not on random encounters. I'm currently working on a post for my university blog where I talk about what video games can learn from board and card games when it comes to randomness (and it's about randomness in general, just not about random encounters). Just finished the PvP/Competitive part of the post, will start working on the PvE part (and polish everything) as soon as I get the time.

that's a really dumb question based in a really dumb false equivalency hth