I forgot about this possibility and I like it, but it has to be implemented in an extremely frustrating way to avoid exploits. Let me walk you through it and why that’s the case.
For it to work, your device has to tell the server every move you make before it commits the move. That means if you swap two gems or cast an ability, you have to watch the spinny “busy” icon until the server has been told what the move is and responded “yes, I’ve saved that move.” That feels like we’d probably see delays of 4-5 seconds per move. Maybe that’s a small price to pay, I’m not really going to argue on that or express an opinion.
If we don’t do that, and moves are committed later or local state is saved and synced on reconnect, then a whole mess of exploits open up.
The easiest is to cut your internet connection before making a move. Then you make your move and watch the results. If you like them, you “reconnect”. If you don’t, you quit the game and restart. The game only knows it was waiting on your move, and allows you to make it again. Score!
So a counter to that is, “Well if you’re disconnected, what if the game saves the move you made and sends that as soon as you reconnect?” Well, especially on PC and Android, it’s not smart to trust a client’s local state. Tools can be made to edit it. Even if it’s encrypted, it only takes one person to make a tool that helps many cheaters. There are also other nasty cases like, “Well, what if a bug causes a crash that corrupts the local move state such that the server can’t interpret it?” If the response is “let the player make another move” we’re back to the last case.
Cheaters are persistent.
So the only fail-proof way to do it I can see is the game would have to commit a move to the server AND get a response before showing you the results of that move. That way a cheater has no way to get information about a move without committing the move (ignoring the tools that already exist to assist cheaters.)
So that’s the cost, in addition to all the dev work it’d entail: are players willing to put up with a multiple-second delay per move in GW? We also have to deal with other shrapnel, the most obvious being, “Well, even if the RNG seed is the same, other sources of entropy on the system will have advanced their states and “luck” won’t be the same after a disconnect”. Plus there’s the fact that most parties in this conversation already believe the game is rigged to force player losses.
I think it’s a lot of work that wouldn’t make even a fraction of the playerbase happier.
