It seems that every time I open up a new attempt at the current tournament map, I receive a differently seeded map. Sometimes the enemies are all near the middle. Sometimes they are a bit more distributed around the map in difficult places. It even seems possible to start with an initial score lower than that of the current tournament high score.
This makes me believe that the difficulty of a particular seed has a significant impact on the score received. Under tournament conditions, I think most of this randomness should be removed. Perhaps every player should face the same seed for the given week’s map. Perhaps even the same deck. Thoughts?
If you were going to make the seed a static one, then maybe the best thing would be to also limit the number of attempts made per player. Maybe best of three or something like that.
I disagree; in fact I reached basically the opposite conclusion. Either limit attempts with the random seed (to avoid everyone simply restarting until they get the best possible position), or keep unlimited attempts with a fixed seed.
A fixed seed would also make repeated tournament maps more interesting, as the best strategy can be quite different depending on the starting position.
But what do unlimited attempts with a fixed seed prove? That over the course of 30 attempts you can figure out how to get the highest score? In my opinion, tournaments are for proving skill. That’s why limited attempts on a fixed seed actually make more sense, if it’s a competition to prove skill.