Exploiting "seed mode"

[EuroGamez]

Today I noticed a player is missleading others into playing 2-player games where they then chose a seed that gives them an insurmountable advantage. gettign some of the best cards while their opponets gets unplayable cards. It's clear that the oponents are not understanding what "seed" mode means for their chances to win.

Not sure how to report this other than writing here. Keeping their name away for now according to the forum policy. Given the cards I'd say their oponent is probabaly less than 5% to win even if they are much higher rated. Feels like a solution would be to only allow Seed Mode for friendly games. Or display some very explicit warning before the game.

[grnt]

I agree that seed mode should only be for friendly settings, with points on the line it can realistically only be used to create unfair situations.

[EuroGamez]

The player abusing this has now reached Expert rank playing nothing but 2-playerseed mode givng themself the most broken cards int he game while giving opponets absolutely worhtless cards. Every game they win is a consession by the opponent. This can't be how the game is intended and is just abusing the fact that some players don't know what seed mode even means. Ridiculous to allow this, to me it's just blatant cheating.

[Jellby]

Well... this can be easily fixed by the developer: Seed mode should only be available in training mode. You can create a bug report if it's not already there.

[xaxaQ]

+1 Seed mode should only be allowed to be played in friendly mode.

[RicardoRix]

Apart from the obvious.^^

Isn't it a bug: Shouldn't the player seats be random? So there would only be a 50% chance the player in question gets the good cards.

[alexwjb]

Well... this can be easily fixed by the developer: Seed mode should only be available in training mode. You can create a bug report if it's not already there.

Great point and I've now done this, will be deployed in next release

[EuroGamez]

Well, all that remains now is for the cheaty player to lose all their ELO and achievements =)

[MasN]

While it is unfortunate that seed mode has been exploited in such a way, I think this points to an underlying issue behind the game.

I've looked at the games history of the player in question and it appears that they are not a very good player - unable to break even 200 rating until they started playing games in seed mode.
However, after playing games in seed mode, they are able to easily beat >500 rated players, even getting the Berserker achievement.

Why is the game so unbalanced that despite such a large skill difference, they are able to win merely by having "good cards"? Why are there "good cards" in the first place, and even if we accept that no game can be perfectly balance, the difference in power level between the good and bad cards need not be so big.

I think it's time for a rebalance! Thanks to the good work of Lumin, we know what the good cards, and we can easily change the top and bottom cards to make them more balanced, simply by making minor adjustments to the cost and effects.

Some people may say that the result will not be perfect and may have some unintended effects, but I say we surely can do better than the status quo.