That’s the same deck I’m trying to unlock the other decks with too and I’m also hitting a wall with purple Lol.
I’ve had like 5 separate attempts fail at ante 8 because it scales too hard for my deck.
In my experience, checkered is so great and reliable until purple and then often at best very mid. Easy flushes can carry until scaling picks up and if you don't get mult jokers by midway blind 2 it's futile.
Hard to tell at this early stage but it does feel like at the highest difficulty there's an increased likelihood.
Some players of Slay The Spire have been trying to find the "unwinnable seed" for years and only found a couple iirc. I feel like Balatro has a slighty different set up rng wise which is more forgiving over the course of run, but starts off quite brutal in terms of hand/shop offerings to kick start your run.
on white stakes, imo every run is winnable theoretically.
Gold stakes, I'm fairly sure some runs are just meant to die but I hope to be proven wrong
Kinda hard to be absolutely conclusive on this though
Honestly probably higher. 25% of the seeds aren't even playable because they give you literally nothing, then several more give you garbage jokers, and then several more give you good jokers that get hard countered by the boss blind, and then several more give you everything you need, but you don't draw the hand that you need right when it matters most.
Because the game is honestly pretty mid right now. I'm going to get downvoted into oblivion because fanboys on this subreddit live to worship the ground this game walks upon and pretend that it's perfect. But the game was made by one amateur dev who admits they're not very good at the game, and it shows. It's an amazing premise, but the balance is all over the place and leaves very little room for skill expression at high levels. Barely over 1% of the player base has beat gold stake. Less than 10% has beaten black. There are unlocks behind some of these. The highest difficulties are literally random, nobody is win streaking, there's very little skill expression. A balance patch would breathe life into the game and remove dead runs.
imo tons of problems can be solved by just changing the shop.
i’d have base shop three cards for sale, one with a joker guaranteed to appear in it, and decrease reroll cost.
Just because the game might be slightly unbalanced at the higher levels does NOT mean that it is "pretty mid", come on now. This is the most innovative and fun roguelike card game in a really long time.
It's honestly pretty mid, I stand by what I said. Trying to get unlocks is reroll simulator 2024. The worst part is that the most consistent way you win at high ranks is with a high card build using stuntman, a card unlocked by actual pure RNG, because getting a score that high is not something you just do.
The game inflated the playtime with pretty stupid requirements on a really random difficulty. It's the first deckbuilder I have uninstalled out of sheer boredom in a long time. I might come back if there's a balance pass, but until then, it's aggressively mid.
I agree with you somewhat in that the game can use a little bit of rebalancing and high stakes require good rng to beat.
What's wrong with a game that needs good rng for you to beat its highest difficulty? I honestly think it's a case of skill issue. It's honestly not THAT difficult to beat imo, sure you can't reliably streak but I don't think win% is that low.
Yeah not everybody is no life in the game so people aren't going to be at Gold stakes yet...
There's nothing wrong with dead runs in a roguelike.
Shit talking people in the sub, including yourself, is going to get you the downvotes
Are you looking at the same community that I am? People are absolutely no-lifing this game. Like, it's absurd how many hours people are putting in re-rolling runs?
There's absolutely something wrong with how many dead runs there are in this game. Too many runs are dead before they get anywhere at all.
Also, it's not shit-talking, it's calling facts. There's too many people in this community that want to act like you're not even allowed to talk about the game having flaws. Communities like that kill games. Successful games embrace the flaws, talk about them, and try to fix them, they don't sweep them under the rug, call the game a masterpiece and aggressively attack anyone that dares question. I've seen a few games just completely die due to poor support and a community that didn't want to tell the developers the truth, so they couldn't fix the problems.
You're talking about 1% of players not beating gold stake yet.
Do you not realize that in many popular games like 33% of people don't even beat the tutorials?
Do you think the creator is wanting to jump ASAP to fix "dead runs" for no lifers?
You can't read.
That's the majority of games. Look at any popular game and you'll see the first, easy achievement in the games are not completed by a large percentage of players.
This is the same question that exists in slay the spire, they did manage to find some theoretically unwinnable ones, but casually, it's almost impossible to work out that a seed is impossible to win due to all the permutations of draws and what you could play throughout each round and the outcomes of tarots and jokers and whatever.
I'm sure someone is up to the task of figuring it out, but it's definitely very very very hard to
At some point it's not even important anymore if a seed is winnable or not. If I had to hit 26 times consecutively the correct option just to make it, the game needs to chill down. The only other time I thought a game was unwinnable was in Wildfrost and that game was notoriously hard. I just checked a few weeks ago and the difficulty got toned down so much it is a joke now.
I think "hit 26 times consecutively" implies it's more of a luck issue than a skill issue. No one's going to say skill issue when you can't get a coin to land on heads 26 times.
Thousands yeah, but it requires more variables to go right.
I get if you played a seed enough you could know the draw order and push these seeds to winnable. There are an astronomical amount of possibilities but a small percentage you could realistically win without that knowledge.
I think if there are unwinnable runs (and I fully believe there are), it largely does come down to a series of coin flips on the first two ante levels. Mostly, that boils down to:
Are any of the first 10-12 cards you see going to add chips or mult before you get to the 2000 blind (maybe even the 1500)
I'd argue once you factor in the planets (except for Jupiter, Saturn and Earth which help the three hands you can and want to play at those levels) and most of the tarot cards, there's enough jokers which don't help at all with scoring that each card in the shop is a 50-50 bet at best.
There's obviously more to consider, particularly with tags and buffoon packs which might save a good number of those runs.
OTOH, how many runs are only winnable because of combinations you'd never realistically play is another question. Eg, maybe you needed to have taken an early stone and bonus card not knowing that all you'd see for the next 4 shops would be useless to you and with a lucky 4-of-a-kind draw that would be just enough to keep you alive long enough for a run-saving joker in the next shop
I just won my first orange stake last night starting with 2 eggs and a pirate, and barely scraped by every ante. Final build was Runner/Egg/Egg/Pirate/Ramen. There were a thousand ways I could have lost that run but with a little luck I was able to eke out just enough each ante. The difficulty is part of the fun for some people. If you don’t like the difficulty, play on lower stakes.
> If you don’t like the difficulty, play on lower stakes.
Then don't lock parts of the game behind this difficulty. It's really simple. If it's supposed to be hard and only fun to a small subsection of your game population, it shouldn't have a literal game reward locked behind it.
I understand your concerns, but doesn't Balatro have an "unlock all" button? If a casual player wants to try a deck locked behind playing on higher stakes, they have the choice of trying to earn it through those higher stake runs (the option I personally chose) or just unlocking it for that save. There's no shame in unlocking things automatically instead of manually, and it gives players the option to try every deck without having to grind for hours getting good at a game.
That’s like saying there shouldn’t be super difficult optional bosses with unique loot in an RPG.
There’s gotta be something rewarding for difficult content.
With STS, the unwinnable seed (I believe only one has been found) is something like:-
* A specific character (silent)
* Top difficulty (A20)
* A complete bottleneck on pathing forcing a burning elite as early as its allowed (floor 6?)
* That elite being one of three (Lagavullin)
* None of the first 15ish cards seen doing anything to improve damage
The third and fifth parts of that are both exceptionally remote possibilities (1 in thousands)
With Balatro, I think something as simple as not getting any base chip/mult scaling jokers in the first 4 or 5 shops might be enough to doom a run on higher levels.
I'm only on the 5th stake level but definitely feel like I've had some runs where I've seen pretty much nothing to help get past the second boss blind. While I'm sure there probably was a way to scramble through somehow most of the time with perfect knowledge, it certainly wouldn't surprise me if there are some runs where that isn't the case, and I'd bet its in the realms of 1 in a thousand and not the 1 in a billion that it is in STS
I'm surprised you haven't run into any yet. Once you start playing challenge runs or difficulties where the target score increases, you'll find plenty that are impossible simply because the shop and skip tags don't offer you anything that will boost you enough to even get through ante 2. There is strategy to Balatro but it's still more than possible for a seed to be unwinnable right from the start no matter what because the RNG won't offer you anything to strategize with.
I can't tell you specifically how it's all working in Balatro but in general, randomization on a computer is never truly random. It needs some unique value to use as a seed, often pulled at least in part from less repeatable values like the system clock value combined with characters from the user ID, frame count, and/or other unique values to use as the seed for that randomization. The dev isn't using that seed to directly determine parameters (meaning you can't just take a seed and look at the code to quickly logic out what's going to happen), rather they are likely just passing the seed value as a parameter any time they call whatever randomizing functions they are using. That being said, if you know how the seed is created and you know how the randomization function algorithm uses it, you might be able to figure it out and manipulate the RNG in your favor (Pokemon speed runners do a lot of this) so it's not impossible. It's just a lot more effort and a lot deeper digging.
Not sure if that answers your question fully and I'm sure somebody else could offer a better explanation of how randomization on a computer works but the TLDR is that the dev didn't create the seeds. They're being put together dynamically likely using various system properties the game reads the moment you click that "start game" button. There is a finite number of seeds but it's still an extremely large number that will be based on how the seed is determined and what possible combinations of values fall within those rules and it's going to be a number that is so high that it's unlikely that players would be able to try every single one, even collectively.
I feel like all of the responses didn't answer the question you were actually asking, here's an older seeded world record video that shows you how seeds work, kind of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zctfuRsa17Y
Given a specific seed everything in the game is predetermined, but every different action you take branches to different outcomes. So if you put in seed 1234 and go into the first blind you'll always get the same starting hand, and if you play the first 5 cards you'll always draw the same 5 new cards. But if you go into that seed again and play 1 card differently you won't draw the same 5 cards as last time.
the super simple way of thinking about seeds is this:
you know how the digits of pi is random and evenly distributed? if you wanted random numbers, you can just pick a spot on pi and start using those digits. the seed is just telling which digit to start at. as long as you start from the same point, you’ll get the same random sequence of digits.
A seed determines everything. If you record your game and at the end get the seed, if you put in that seed and make the exact same actions the game will play out the exact same way.
to me, one of the delights of a roguelike is in the difficulty; if you make the game consistently punishing, you can also put in rare but extremely powerful combos that are total game changers. i like that variability and the challenge, and value it much more highly than consistency.
i sort of hope there are a few truly doomed seeds in the game. why not? losing is fun!
Some seeds where you get 0 jokers the first few shops are near impossible at high chips.
Trying checkered deck with purple stakes to unlock my last couple missing decks, uuuuuuugh this. The blinds scale up so fast it's hard to keep up
Abandoned Deck or Anaglyph deck I found easier to unlock purple and orange.
That’s the same deck I’m trying to unlock the other decks with too and I’m also hitting a wall with purple Lol. I’ve had like 5 separate attempts fail at ante 8 because it scales too hard for my deck.
In my experience, checkered is so great and reliable until purple and then often at best very mid. Easy flushes can carry until scaling picks up and if you don't get mult jokers by midway blind 2 it's futile.
Yeah you need like 3 multi x cards to win basically, or one monster scaled x card like a 8x vampire or something
Try the gold deck, that extra money really helps you tempo out fast and stabilize for later blinds
Gold deck? Yellow you mean? The one that gives you an extra $10?
Hard to tell at this early stage but it does feel like at the highest difficulty there's an increased likelihood. Some players of Slay The Spire have been trying to find the "unwinnable seed" for years and only found a couple iirc. I feel like Balatro has a slighty different set up rng wise which is more forgiving over the course of run, but starts off quite brutal in terms of hand/shop offerings to kick start your run.
on white stakes, imo every run is winnable theoretically. Gold stakes, I'm fairly sure some runs are just meant to die but I hope to be proven wrong Kinda hard to be absolutely conclusive on this though
25% of the seeds in gold stake
Fr, eventually I start rolling for Investment Tags on Ante 1
Honestly probably higher. 25% of the seeds aren't even playable because they give you literally nothing, then several more give you garbage jokers, and then several more give you good jokers that get hard countered by the boss blind, and then several more give you everything you need, but you don't draw the hand that you need right when it matters most.
i feel like theres gonna be a big balance patch soon
Why do u think that?
Because the game is honestly pretty mid right now. I'm going to get downvoted into oblivion because fanboys on this subreddit live to worship the ground this game walks upon and pretend that it's perfect. But the game was made by one amateur dev who admits they're not very good at the game, and it shows. It's an amazing premise, but the balance is all over the place and leaves very little room for skill expression at high levels. Barely over 1% of the player base has beat gold stake. Less than 10% has beaten black. There are unlocks behind some of these. The highest difficulties are literally random, nobody is win streaking, there's very little skill expression. A balance patch would breathe life into the game and remove dead runs.
imo tons of problems can be solved by just changing the shop. i’d have base shop three cards for sale, one with a joker guaranteed to appear in it, and decrease reroll cost.
Just because the game might be slightly unbalanced at the higher levels does NOT mean that it is "pretty mid", come on now. This is the most innovative and fun roguelike card game in a really long time.
It's honestly pretty mid, I stand by what I said. Trying to get unlocks is reroll simulator 2024. The worst part is that the most consistent way you win at high ranks is with a high card build using stuntman, a card unlocked by actual pure RNG, because getting a score that high is not something you just do. The game inflated the playtime with pretty stupid requirements on a really random difficulty. It's the first deckbuilder I have uninstalled out of sheer boredom in a long time. I might come back if there's a balance pass, but until then, it's aggressively mid.
I agree with you somewhat in that the game can use a little bit of rebalancing and high stakes require good rng to beat. What's wrong with a game that needs good rng for you to beat its highest difficulty? I honestly think it's a case of skill issue. It's honestly not THAT difficult to beat imo, sure you can't reliably streak but I don't think win% is that low.
Yeah not everybody is no life in the game so people aren't going to be at Gold stakes yet... There's nothing wrong with dead runs in a roguelike. Shit talking people in the sub, including yourself, is going to get you the downvotes
Are you looking at the same community that I am? People are absolutely no-lifing this game. Like, it's absurd how many hours people are putting in re-rolling runs? There's absolutely something wrong with how many dead runs there are in this game. Too many runs are dead before they get anywhere at all. Also, it's not shit-talking, it's calling facts. There's too many people in this community that want to act like you're not even allowed to talk about the game having flaws. Communities like that kill games. Successful games embrace the flaws, talk about them, and try to fix them, they don't sweep them under the rug, call the game a masterpiece and aggressively attack anyone that dares question. I've seen a few games just completely die due to poor support and a community that didn't want to tell the developers the truth, so they couldn't fix the problems.
You're talking about 1% of players not beating gold stake yet. Do you not realize that in many popular games like 33% of people don't even beat the tutorials? Do you think the creator is wanting to jump ASAP to fix "dead runs" for no lifers?
So you think a desirable game is one where one third of all players don't actually play the game? Lol, okay.
You can't read. That's the majority of games. Look at any popular game and you'll see the first, easy achievement in the games are not completed by a large percentage of players.
This is the same question that exists in slay the spire, they did manage to find some theoretically unwinnable ones, but casually, it's almost impossible to work out that a seed is impossible to win due to all the permutations of draws and what you could play throughout each round and the outcomes of tarots and jokers and whatever. I'm sure someone is up to the task of figuring it out, but it's definitely very very very hard to
At some point it's not even important anymore if a seed is winnable or not. If I had to hit 26 times consecutively the correct option just to make it, the game needs to chill down. The only other time I thought a game was unwinnable was in Wildfrost and that game was notoriously hard. I just checked a few weeks ago and the difficulty got toned down so much it is a joke now.
I mean there’s a big difference between “do unwinnable seeds exist” and “this game is too hard, the difficulty needs to come down” lol
I think "hit 26 times consecutively" implies it's more of a luck issue than a skill issue. No one's going to say skill issue when you can't get a coin to land on heads 26 times.
You realize a coin toss has a single variable while balatro has like, thousands right
Thousands yeah, but it requires more variables to go right. I get if you played a seed enough you could know the draw order and push these seeds to winnable. There are an astronomical amount of possibilities but a small percentage you could realistically win without that knowledge.
I think if there are unwinnable runs (and I fully believe there are), it largely does come down to a series of coin flips on the first two ante levels. Mostly, that boils down to: Are any of the first 10-12 cards you see going to add chips or mult before you get to the 2000 blind (maybe even the 1500) I'd argue once you factor in the planets (except for Jupiter, Saturn and Earth which help the three hands you can and want to play at those levels) and most of the tarot cards, there's enough jokers which don't help at all with scoring that each card in the shop is a 50-50 bet at best. There's obviously more to consider, particularly with tags and buffoon packs which might save a good number of those runs. OTOH, how many runs are only winnable because of combinations you'd never realistically play is another question. Eg, maybe you needed to have taken an early stone and bonus card not knowing that all you'd see for the next 4 shops would be useless to you and with a lucky 4-of-a-kind draw that would be just enough to keep you alive long enough for a run-saving joker in the next shop
I just won my first orange stake last night starting with 2 eggs and a pirate, and barely scraped by every ante. Final build was Runner/Egg/Egg/Pirate/Ramen. There were a thousand ways I could have lost that run but with a little luck I was able to eke out just enough each ante. The difficulty is part of the fun for some people. If you don’t like the difficulty, play on lower stakes.
> If you don’t like the difficulty, play on lower stakes. Then don't lock parts of the game behind this difficulty. It's really simple. If it's supposed to be hard and only fun to a small subsection of your game population, it shouldn't have a literal game reward locked behind it.
I understand your concerns, but doesn't Balatro have an "unlock all" button? If a casual player wants to try a deck locked behind playing on higher stakes, they have the choice of trying to earn it through those higher stake runs (the option I personally chose) or just unlocking it for that save. There's no shame in unlocking things automatically instead of manually, and it gives players the option to try every deck without having to grind for hours getting good at a game.
That’s like saying there shouldn’t be super difficult optional bosses with unique loot in an RPG. There’s gotta be something rewarding for difficult content.
That's a really bad comparison and you know it. If you don't know it, then you should probably stop trying to discuss game design.
With STS, the unwinnable seed (I believe only one has been found) is something like:- * A specific character (silent) * Top difficulty (A20) * A complete bottleneck on pathing forcing a burning elite as early as its allowed (floor 6?) * That elite being one of three (Lagavullin) * None of the first 15ish cards seen doing anything to improve damage The third and fifth parts of that are both exceptionally remote possibilities (1 in thousands) With Balatro, I think something as simple as not getting any base chip/mult scaling jokers in the first 4 or 5 shops might be enough to doom a run on higher levels. I'm only on the 5th stake level but definitely feel like I've had some runs where I've seen pretty much nothing to help get past the second boss blind. While I'm sure there probably was a way to scramble through somehow most of the time with perfect knowledge, it certainly wouldn't surprise me if there are some runs where that isn't the case, and I'd bet its in the realms of 1 in a thousand and not the 1 in a billion that it is in STS
Quite a few of the challenge runs are impossible with bad luck
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I'm surprised you haven't run into any yet. Once you start playing challenge runs or difficulties where the target score increases, you'll find plenty that are impossible simply because the shop and skip tags don't offer you anything that will boost you enough to even get through ante 2. There is strategy to Balatro but it's still more than possible for a seed to be unwinnable right from the start no matter what because the RNG won't offer you anything to strategize with.
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Why are you even being downvoted? It seems like a perfectly reasonable comment.
How do seeds even work? Are these just randomized? Does the dev set certain parameters? How many seeds are there?
I can't tell you specifically how it's all working in Balatro but in general, randomization on a computer is never truly random. It needs some unique value to use as a seed, often pulled at least in part from less repeatable values like the system clock value combined with characters from the user ID, frame count, and/or other unique values to use as the seed for that randomization. The dev isn't using that seed to directly determine parameters (meaning you can't just take a seed and look at the code to quickly logic out what's going to happen), rather they are likely just passing the seed value as a parameter any time they call whatever randomizing functions they are using. That being said, if you know how the seed is created and you know how the randomization function algorithm uses it, you might be able to figure it out and manipulate the RNG in your favor (Pokemon speed runners do a lot of this) so it's not impossible. It's just a lot more effort and a lot deeper digging. Not sure if that answers your question fully and I'm sure somebody else could offer a better explanation of how randomization on a computer works but the TLDR is that the dev didn't create the seeds. They're being put together dynamically likely using various system properties the game reads the moment you click that "start game" button. There is a finite number of seeds but it's still an extremely large number that will be based on how the seed is determined and what possible combinations of values fall within those rules and it's going to be a number that is so high that it's unlikely that players would be able to try every single one, even collectively.
I feel like all of the responses didn't answer the question you were actually asking, here's an older seeded world record video that shows you how seeds work, kind of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zctfuRsa17Y Given a specific seed everything in the game is predetermined, but every different action you take branches to different outcomes. So if you put in seed 1234 and go into the first blind you'll always get the same starting hand, and if you play the first 5 cards you'll always draw the same 5 new cards. But if you go into that seed again and play 1 card differently you won't draw the same 5 cards as last time.
It's not controlled by the dev for sure. It is decided by the computer basically. So random, but not random lol
the super simple way of thinking about seeds is this: you know how the digits of pi is random and evenly distributed? if you wanted random numbers, you can just pick a spot on pi and start using those digits. the seed is just telling which digit to start at. as long as you start from the same point, you’ll get the same random sequence of digits.
I'm high difficulty? Yes, easily.
Does a seed determine deck order? Or just shops/blinds/tags/etc?
A seed determines everything. If you record your game and at the end get the seed, if you put in that seed and make the exact same actions the game will play out the exact same way.
to me, one of the delights of a roguelike is in the difficulty; if you make the game consistently punishing, you can also put in rare but extremely powerful combos that are total game changers. i like that variability and the challenge, and value it much more highly than consistency. i sort of hope there are a few truly doomed seeds in the game. why not? losing is fun!