[togilvie]

Awesome breakdown. I wrote a blog post in late September - based on some industry rumors - that speculated on whether Candy Crush was "cheating" by varying the random seed to generate monetization or retention events:

http://blog.thinkgaming.com/is-candy-crush-cheating-will-it-...

Based on the "seed" going back and forth at the start/end of games, I'd have to assume that they are doing something with it. Anyway to see if that's happening?

[StavrosK]

They're probably generating the level with the seed. I don't think it's very useful, other than testing on their end (so they can check afterwards what the level was).

By the way, if you liked this, there are more posts in that series: http://www.stavros.io/series/winning/

[togilvie]

Cool - will check out the series.

You could be right, but I think the seed is a lot more interesting. If you simply wanted to generate the level, you could use a random number generator on the device and wouldn't care about logging it.

As you showed by varying colors, the candy distribution determines how likely the player is to win, whether they fall just short of clearing the level, etc. This will have a significant impact on whether they pay to continue, buy boosts, etc.

[nacs]

It is possible they do this.

They may not have done it at launch but as more and more people play and they collect the stats for each seed, I'm sure they can track how easy / difficult each seed is and send the seeds that they wish to do whatever objective they have.

Most of these F2P play games collect and analyze an insane amount of player activity and have sophisticated analytics that they then analyze to make the game more addictive or to increase player spending.

[bcjordan]

You could have a few people collude to collect a number of incoming seeds on the same level and compare for non-random seeming collisions.