Save-scumming should be punished

[Eo!]

I'm loving Endless Mode. It's pretty fun and a great way to practice all the various aspects of the game.

However, there is a competitive nature to it (leaderboards), and something I've noticed is that it would be very easy to save-scum to get higher scores. Basically, you can quit out of the game (either through menus or just by Alt+F4) and come back to re-attempt any encounter, and your score will continue to rise. If things aren't going your way in a particular encounter, all you need to do is kill the game before the encounter finishes and you get a second (or third, or whatever) shot. It seems like a really cheesy way to cheat the system, but it works.

Save-scumming like this should be punished, and I don't think it would be terribly difficult to implement. Simply serialize a flag to disk when an encounter starts and delete the flag when the encounter finishes. If the game starts up and sees that the flag is set, it can react to that in some way or another (maybe give the player an un-removable curse, or reduce a random equipment to its lowest possible durability, or a random pain card; these are just suggestions).

Implementing it this way would allow the player to safely exit the game between encounters, which is fine, but would discourage exiting the game mid encounter and discourage save-scumming. Now, I know what you're saying: "what if the game crashes or soft-lock?" Well, yes, this does happen on some very rare occasions (and I haven't seen it happen in literally months at this point), so that's not a terribly big concern IMHO; the game is at a pretty stable point right now. Also, the implementation of storing the mid-encounter flag would need to be clever enough to discourage clever users from simply bypassing the system, which is obviously easier said than done.

That's all. Hope something like this is implemented sooner or later!

[Lee]

We've toyed with the concept a few times internally, but the risk that we'd be punishing innocent players falling victim to mid-combat crashing is too great. Before we added leaderboards it wasn't a big deal - people were only cheating themselves out of an honest win. We'll take a look at the data we've got and see if it's rampant enough to need addressing.

[Halser, the]

I admit I've save scummed a few times to get some of the more troublesome shards(Joust was especially tricky) , but I think it's absolutely fair to deny a spot on the leaderboards for anyone that does this.
As for cheating players out of an honest spot in case of a crash, I think it's just something people have to deal with. The few bugs I've encountered in the game were mostly visual or interface stuff, only one crash in 58 hours. Most games with a 'ranked' mode will penalize players if they happen to lose internet connection during a match, and, although it sucks when it happens, it tends to be rare enough that it doesn't amtter in the end.

[Sastron]

While cheating will always be there, I agree that the current system makes it too easy.

[Ratt]

You could just silently disqualify that run for the public leaderboards.

[Uilas]

If you are going to try and punish people for save scumming I think a curse or some other in-game penalty like mentioned in the OP is a much better idea than disqualifying from the leaderboard. Most games where you might lose your progress for the leaderboard from a legit crash/issue you might lose an hour or two of work, but in endless mode you could lose a run that you spent like 20-30 hours playing which would be a lot more frustrating.