The thoughts I have on the subject are limited to a discussion about video game design (applicable here) by Justin Ma, where people inherently do not like when the perceived output-randomness (randomness that happens after a decision) as creating negative outcomes, but they do like output-randomness as creating positive outcomes. It's why we have a culture of raking bunkers, and people are livid from ending up in a divot in the middle of the fairway. For better or worse, most people just don't like seemingly random distinctions as giving them a negative outcome.
I am a bit hostile to this psychological quirk of humans, but I see no reason to push back against the data these game designers have. People will be inherently hostile to this sort of bad-luck-for-better-shot design pattern, so I think it's best to avoid it in the first place. The research has also effectively made me abandon my thoughts that we should have smaller, but unraked bunkers to save on money, as it would probably just infuriate players. I wish we had one or two courses that had design patterns like this so we could experience them for ourselves, but I could see how the inherent hostility people had to them would make them non-viable.
The first paragraph I selected above is one of the most ridiculous observations I've read about human nature, and your response to it is one of the most depressing.
How can you have randomly "positive" outcomes while excising randomly "negative" ones?
I copied the quote below from a web site for you. Unfortunately, I think you are right, that many designers and many clients have this need to be liked:
The need to be liked by others is a deep-seated psychological vulnerability. It’s often driven by low self-esteem and a fear of rejection.
Tom Doak,
I think you may be having a bit of a harsh reaction to it. When I first read it just seemed to be a denser re-write of Max Behr, which is an impressive feat in itself considering Behr's style.
The word "game" here is doing most of the heavy lifting, too, in that here it means "simulated conflict."
I dabble a bit in wargame design (there are at least a dozen "WargameClubAtlas" type webpages out there and these types of discussions (and criticisms) are real and oft debated). If we were to design a wargame for say, Normandy, the first decision to make in the design is "Should the Axis forces have a chance at repelling the invasion?"
The second question is how many players are in the game? If two are playing opposed, the Axis player - if it is deemed that the Germans SHOULD have a chance at repelling the invasion - must have at least a chance of using skill within the game system to do so.
If the game is solitaire, you either make the player play the Germans or you design the system to "play" the Germans in response to the player.
You excise the random negative outcomes by how you frame the game. We know, historically, that the Germans did NOT repel the invasion. But there was a non-zero chance they could. Coincidentally, almost 80 years of research on the matter has lead historians to believe that the non-zero chance of repelling the invasion was a lot closer to zero than you'd think. In any well-regarded Normandy
simulation, the Allies are landing. In an well-regarded Normandy
game, the Allies have to
try to succeed. But the Axis player shouldn't feel completely tied down by the system, either, and giving the Axis player a few random positive outcomes within the game does well to give them the feel of a chance, especially in a solitaire setting. In any game, a random positive for one side is going to be seen as a randon negative for the other. But you can excise the feeling of randomness by forcing the player to use skill to take advantage of the random outcome.
And that last statement is doing the heavy lifting in my response here. A bad, random bounce happens (think hitting a cart path or sprinkler head) and the result is less than ideal. Is it less than ideal in that the cart path was alongside OB stakes or water so the game has interjected too much and the player can no longer use skill to recover from the bad bounce?
Or is it less than ideal because now you're significantly farther away from the target than you would have been had the random element not been present? If so, I think we can both agree that as long as the player can get a club on the ball there is a non-zero chance of excising any bad out come.
So, in other words, this is a long winded way of a answering your question by saying:
Get better.